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COPYRIGHT 2007 Alert Publications, Inc.
This spring, I was given the chance to refocus my position in the University of Montana Law School Library. Our library director has also been the law school's associate dean for the past seven years, ever since I was hired. In fact, his becoming associate dean and moving to the front office part time is why my position was created. This spring he announced that in the fall he will return to the library full time. For me, this will mean that I will be able to relinquish some of my acquisitions and administrative duties, and focus more on reference and teaching.
It is exciting and rare when circumstances arise that offers you both the opportunity to develop something new and the time to do it. When my opportunity came along, I was able to start solidifying some ideas that had been floating around in my head about specialized legal research (SLR) courses. The result was a proposal to the curriculum committee for three new specialized legal research courses: Indian Law Research, Environmental Law Research, and International and Foreign Law Research. The committee and faculty approved all three courses, and I will begin teaching Environmental Law Research in January 2008.
I should probably wait and write this article next summer when I can present an account of how I developed the courses, what worked, and what didn't. (1) However, the topic seems to be timely now--the most recent edition of the RIPS (2) Law Librarian (Spring 2007) is dedicated to the topic of specialized legal research. I have no doubt it will be an important topic next year too; however, I can share something different with you now, while my thoughts about specialized legal research and the process of developing curriculum proposals are still fresh. Next year, I'll tell you my horror stories--and, I hope, stories of my successes as well.
One initial caveat: because I am in an academic law library, I am approaching specialized legal research from the point of view of teaching research skills and sources. I suspect that many of you reading this will be more interested in actually conducting specialized legal research, and to that end I have provided a bibliography of sources both for those teaching and those practicing specialized legal research.
SLR Defined
Specialized legal research is utilizing the sources of law and research techniques that are necessary to finding all the mandatory and persuasive authority in a particular field of law. Researchers must know the sources of law in a particular field, how to access those sources, and how to use them. Increasingly, this requires researchers to be familiar with a...
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