Civil Rights Law Research Guide

This book guides students through a five-step process of constructing their legal research papers, from topic selection to finishing the final product. Maintaining an example-based approach, it includes sample excerpts to illustrate concepts throughout the text, and there is a second annotated full-length paper. Up-to-date information about legal research and organizational tools is included as are "bright ideas" for student writers, and even more cross-referencing.

This book fills an important niche in legal-writing literature by teaching law students how to write scholarly papers for seminars, law reviews and law-review competitions. It helps novices and even more experienced scholars to write papers with a minimum of anxiety. Employing a process theory of writing, the text first describes the enterprise of scholarly writing, and then discusses techniques for brainstorming, researching, drafting, and revising for substance and style. There are also chapters on footnote practice, plagiarism, law review editing, and publication. Appendices provide a sample law-review competition paper, answers to in-text exercises, and sample syllabi for scholarly writing courses.

Topics include law review articles and student notes, seminar term papers, how to shift from research to writing, cite-checking others work, publishing, and publicizing written works. Includes examples drawn from successful student notes, coupled with detailed explanations of what makes the examples effective, and how they could have been made still more effective. It also elaborates further on how one can research a topic more comprehensively than many students do, both by finding a broader range of examples and applications, and by investigating the key cases more deeply.

Chapter 1 describes the parts of a long formal paper. Chapters 2-5 introduce the mechanics of writing style, from abbreviations to quotations. Chapters 6 and 7 show how to prepare and refer to tables and illustrations. The section on documentation, chapters 8-12, describes two of the most commonly used systems of citation; these chapters provide many examples including guidance on how to cite electronic documents. Chapter 13, on manuscript preparation, shows how to take advantage of word processing software to present the elements of a paper clearly and effectively. Chapter 14 offers more than two dozen sample pages illustrating ways of formatting some of the complex features found in many research papers.