> “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers,” as the writer Neil Gaiman once said. “A librarian can bring you back the right one.”
I only did one year of law school, but taking this piece of advice (swap in Lexis/WestLaw/Bloomberg for Google) was a massive win. The librarians at the law library were so knowledgeable, and there was no rule against them using prior experience with the exact question to help the student out. They could also understand why you wanted a particular source.
Example: "I'm looking for the most binding precedent for random set of issues, as well as the 10 most recent cases that discuss the issue at hand. Also, are there any other sources or cases you know of that would be particularly relevant to the issues I mentioned?"
Lexis: Can probably find most binding precedent if you're good at navigating/filtering. Can definitely get you the 10 most recent cases, but you'll have to read them all to judge how useful they are . Can definitely get you other sources, but you'll have to do a general search and read through pretty much everything to filter. This will probably take at least a day just to collect everything and filter it to what's useful.
Law librarian: Might know the right precedent off the top of their head. If not, is an expert in Lexis and can find it much faster than you. Same for recent relevant cases. For other sources, not going to be able to get you a comprehensive list, but likely immediately knows of 5-10 places that are highly likely to be relevant. This will probably take 2 hours, max.
The tip literally came from the professor who assigned the legal writing projects, so I didn't really feel like I was cheating. The reason she gave the tip was because she was a practicing attorney who claimed to regularly consult law librarians for help researching a case.
Learning is so much more efficient and effective when helpful experts are available to consult. When students are taught 1:1 by expert tutors their typical performance is literally 2 standard deviations better than students taught in a class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
Ideally, if we could afford it, this would be how everything is learned; students would progress several times faster than they currently do.
This is one of the reasons that computer programming is such a joy to learn about. Have something you’re stuck on? Go ask on IRC (or stack overflow or a mailing list or whatever) and get an answer from an expert right away, instead of hunting around blindly for a few days.
When we build communities of people who all “cheat” together by helping each-other learn things fast, critiquing each-others’ work, riffing on each-others’ ideas, etc., everyone gets to the cutting edge much faster, and the whole field marches forward.
I only did one year of law school, but taking this piece of advice (swap in Lexis/WestLaw/Bloomberg for Google) was a massive win. The librarians at the law library were so knowledgeable, and there was no rule against them using prior experience with the exact question to help the student out. They could also understand why you wanted a particular source.
Example: "I'm looking for the most binding precedent for random set of issues, as well as the 10 most recent cases that discuss the issue at hand. Also, are there any other sources or cases you know of that would be particularly relevant to the issues I mentioned?"
Lexis: Can probably find most binding precedent if you're good at navigating/filtering. Can definitely get you the 10 most recent cases, but you'll have to read them all to judge how useful they are . Can definitely get you other sources, but you'll have to do a general search and read through pretty much everything to filter. This will probably take at least a day just to collect everything and filter it to what's useful.
Law librarian: Might know the right precedent off the top of their head. If not, is an expert in Lexis and can find it much faster than you. Same for recent relevant cases. For other sources, not going to be able to get you a comprehensive list, but likely immediately knows of 5-10 places that are highly likely to be relevant. This will probably take 2 hours, max.