In general, when starting your legal research, it's good to start with secondary resources and then proceed to the primary resources.
Throughout your law degree at Charles Sturt University, you'll use the IRAC method when structuring your answers to legal problems.
The infographic below shows where the Library resources (primary & secondary) fit into the IRAC method. Using secondary resources in the Rules and relevant law stage will help you when writing your assessment tasks, you'll be better equipped to explain the relevant law with supporting materials.
The IRAC Method provides a structure to help you answer legal problems.
Use your legal research skills when completing step R.
Find recommended resources and search tools in the Law Library Guide.
List the facts you know.
Identify the issues or legal principles you need to discuss.
Aim to phrase them as a question e.g. What are the elements of the tort of negligence?
Use secondary sources to gather background information and identify the relevant law.
Update the law by checking case citators and legislation amendments.
State the relevant law in relation to the legal issues.
Apply the relevant law to your legal problem/scenario.
Work through each legal issue in turn.
Arrive at a considered conclusion.
State what you think is the most appropriate outcome for your legal scenario.
Before you start your legal research, it is useful to plan a search strategy. You should
If you are completing a legal scenario, you need to research the legal issues, not the facts of the case. Make sure you select keywords and phrases that are relevant to the legal issues.
The law is often concerned with rights and liabilities of the parties, so a good approach is to frame the issues in the terms of possible rights and liabilities.
Write down the key concepts from your topic and have a go at brainstorming as many alternative keywords and phrases as possible.
Thinking about your topic in this way forces you to describe your topic in "other words", which will provide you with some useful keyword alternatives as well as help you to cement your understanding of the topic.
You can use search operators and other punctuation to get more specific search results when searching in legal databases.
|
Use AND to retrieve results that contain both of your search terms |
negligence AND trespass |
|
Use OR to retrieve results that contain either of your search terms |
mental state OR mens rea |
|
Use NOT to exclude irrelevant results |
mediation NOT arbitration |
| Use quotation marks to search for a phrase | "duty of care" |
| Use truncation to search for related words that have the same word stem. | aborig* = aboriginal, aborigine, aborigines |
| Wildcards replace a single character in a word. | wom?n = women, woman |
| Grouping keywords together allows you to conduct many searches at once. |
(juvenile OR youth) AND detention Searches for: juvenile AND detention youth AND detention |
Charles Sturt University acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands on which its campuses are located, paying respect to Elders, both past and present, and extend that respect to all First Nations Peoples.
Charles Sturt University is an Australian University, TEQSA Provider Identification: PRV12018. CRICOS Provider: 00005F.
