In legal practice, “law new” refers to the idea of using strategies that haven’t been part of standard legal work in the past. These are often designed to benefit clients in novel ways, using non-traditional methods and embracing technology. But there’s another aspect of “law new” that is harder to pin down. It’s the idea of working with different types of clients, a trend that is growing rapidly.
Law new is a term that’s hard to define, and that may be the point. It can encompass everything from working with underserved communities to coming up with new ways of helping clients in a particular industry. And it also includes companies, startups and law firm subsidiaries that augment traditional legal services with a wide variety of new offerings.
These new legal practices can offer a way for firms to diversify their work, increase revenue and improve efficiency in ways that may not fit the traditional lawyer mold. And while they are only a small part of the overall legal landscape right now, they’re likely to grow in importance over time.
This primer on legal reasoning is geared to students and upper-level undergraduates, but it’s an original exposition of basic legal concepts that scholars and lawyers will find stimulating. It examines a range of topics, including rules, precedent, authority and analogical reasoning, and is intended to be used as both a textbook and a reference tool.
This new edition of the CALI textbook offers a fresh approach to teaching legal research. The authors have taken into account recent developments in legal information resources and the increased use of multimedia materials in research. Emphasis is placed on the kinds of sources that are most useful for students—sites that provide full text, citations and commentary written by or for lawyers, as well as sites with general legal information.
The Law Library of Congress is the world’s largest law library. Its collections contain the complete record of American and foreign law and hold an important collection of materials from countries with constitutional systems similar to that of the United States. This guide, originally published in 1992 by the Center for Advanced Legal Studies (CALI), has been fully updated to reflect changes in the sources of legal information available on the Internet and to incorporate additional Web-based resources.
These websites include federal and state laws, court decisions, regulations, treaties, statutes, and judicial opinions, as well as commentary from legal writers who write for other legal professionals and lay persons. This list is not exhaustive and inclusion in this guide does not constitute endorsement by the Law Library of Congress.