American Jurisprudence on Marriage

In this week’s Discussion Board you will be using legal encyclopedias. Remember that legal encyclopedias are a type of secondary source that give you a basic overview of a legal topic. For example if a client came into your office with a legal issue you had no background in, you could search a legal encyclopedia to gain a basic understanding of the issue.

This week you will practice using Westlaw to find an American Jurisprudence article. American Jurisprudence can be found on both Westlaw and LexisNexis. You can search for topics in American Jurisprudence in a couple of ways:

·               Search the table of contents of American Jurisprudence.

·               Select American Jurisprudence as your database and do a search for your topic.

(Basic Directions for Westlaw: Log into Westlaw via the Academic Tools tab in this unit. Select the “Law” tab up at the top of the page. On the main law page, scroll down until you see American Jurisprudence. You can now simply click on the table of contents and it will take you to the table of contents. You can expand a topic by clicking on the (+) next to a topic.)

For this week’s discussion please use the first letter of your last name to select a legal topic. Once you select a legal topic, such as adoption, read an article on the topic. Give a summary of the key points from the article and the full Bluebook citation.

After using American Jurisprudence, how do you think it could help you as a researcher?