Statutory Law

Statutory law is any law enacted by a legislature and includes constitutions. It is also called enacted law. Statutory law is sometime contrasted with written opinions issued by the courts, called judge-made law (or common law). Statutory law can fill a void left by the common law, supplement the common law, or replace the common law.

Even though statutes are intended to be available to the public, locating the appropriate statutory law can be surprisingly difficult. There are several sources for locating statutory law; which of these sources you use will depend on the nature of the client's problem.

If the client's problem involves the application of a new law or a recent amendment of an old law, your legal research should begin with the most recent version of the statute. In most states, the earliest version of an effective statute is the slip law. The slip law is the version of the law presented to the executive branch of government. In the federal system, each slip law is assigned a unique number known as a public law number. In most states, the slip law number is simply the number the bill was given as it made its way through the legislature. Federal public laws are printed in the United States Code Service. State slip laws are generally available through legislative printing offices.

There are bound volumes of slip laws called session laws; compilations of slip laws in the order they were passed by the legislature. Each volume of session laws represents the work of one session of the legislature and will cover a myriad of topics. Many compilations of session laws use underlines and strikethroughs to show the additions and deletions in amended statutes. Session laws are the basis for the publication of official statutory codes.

Because session laws are not organized in a topical fashion, using them for research is difficult. To make locating statutes easier, the session laws are organized, or codified, for publication. A codified statute is assigned a number that follows a topical organization. While each state uses a different topical organization, the structure of most state codes follow a variation of the title (topic), chapter (sub-topic), and individual statute hierarchy.

The government publishes official statutory codes. Typically, these official codes contain only the text of the statutes and the history of the statute as reflected in the session laws. In the event of a discrepancy between the official code and any other version of the statute, the official code controls. The official statutory code of the federal government is the United States Code.

Because official codes provide only statutory information, legal researchers have the option of referring to an unofficial code. These unofficial codes are published by private legal publishers and usually contain additional information not found in the official code. For example, West Publishing offers the United States Code Annotated as an alternative to the United States Code. The U.S.C.A. contains annotations that include summaries of court opinions that have addressed the statute; historical notes about the text of each statutes, including important statements about the purpose of the statutes or an amendment; and references to secondary sources. Annotated codes are updated frequently by the publication of pocket parts that include the most recent references to the statute.

Administrative Regulations

Administrative regulations are forms of law promulgated by administrative agencies. If the legislature has enabled the agency to make rules addressing a specific topic, the pronouncements of the agency have the force of law. Administrative law is found in two places: the statutes enacted by the legislature and the rules and regulations of the agency itself. The legal researcher must consult both sources.

There are two main statutes that govern the effect of an administrative rule or regulation. Most states and the federal government have an Administrative Procedures Act. This statute applies to all administrative agencies and sets forth the process the agency must follow in promulgating new rules and regulations. For each individual agency there is a specific statute defining the purpose and authority of the agency. This is known as the enabling legislation.

Some agencies require little in the way of specific rules and regulations to do their work. Other agencies have extensive sets of rules and regulations covering many topics within their authority. In all cases, these rules and regulations are usually found in an administrative code that contains all the rules and regulations of the agencies created in that jurisdiction. In the federal government, this administrative code is called the Code of Federal Regulations. It contains administrative regulations from the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, and many others. The rules are organized according to the statutory title that created the agency. For example, the enabling legislation for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is contained in Title 29 of the United States Code, so all OSHA rules are found in Volume 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations. State compilations have many different forms of organization.

Case Law

Case law is the record of the opinions of judges in deciding cases. Each jurisdiction has its own set of case law. The decisions of trial-level courts are seldom reported because they are not binding on any other court. Nevertheless, trial court opinions are sometimes useful where no other authority exists. For this reason, the federal court system and some state court systems make certain that written trial court opinions are available in electronic format. Use caution when referring to these decisions, however, as they are the least permanent of all court decisions.

The vast majority of reported decisions are written opinions from the appellate courts of the jurisdiction. Most states have one or two levels of appellate court — a state supreme court and an intermediate appellate court. In some states, such as New York and California, there are additional appellate levels. Each court has a specific abbreviation that identifies the court's position in the judicial hierarchy. These abbreviations are part of the citation to the opinion.

The opinions of each appellate court are published in bound volumes known as reporters. Some states have an official reporter that includes only the opinions for that state. In other states, the opinions published by West Publishing serve as the official reporter. West, the largest legal publisher in the world, publishes appellate cases for all states and the federal court system according to a regional system. For example, the Northwestern Reporter contains opinions of the appellate courts in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. Specific opinions are referenced by the volume of the reporter, the abbreviation for the reporter, and the page number — the case of Hagerty v. Hagerty, 281 N.W.2d 386 (Minn. 1979) is found in volume 281 of the Northwestern Reporter on page 386. The Minnesota Supreme Court decided it in 1979. Similar reporters are available for the federal system.

Legal Encyclopedias

Legal encyclopedias are summaries of general legal principles.

The publishers of legal encyclopedias organize the law by topics and provide an outline of the law on that topic with references to major case opinions and statutes explaining the topic.

The major legal encyclopedias are American Jurisprudence (Am. Jur.) and Corpus Juris Secundum (C.J.S.). Both of these encyclopedias are national in scope. Some legal publishers also offer state-specific legal encyclopedias that summarize legal principles in that state. Legal encyclopedias provide an overview of the law that is often a necessary starting point for legal research.

Treatises

Some of the pre-eminent legal scholars in the last century concentrated their legal studies in a specific area of the law. Their writings about that area of the law have been compiled into a treatise. A treatise is a combination of a summary of the law and commentary on the law. A legal treatise often summarizes a rule of law and describes the application of that rule of law in various jurisdictions. Treatises may also include a historical perspective on the development of the law and commentary stating the commentator's view of the rule of law. Treatises are often useful for providing the legal researcher with an in-depth understanding of a specific legal principle.

Digests

When an appellate court decides a case, its opinion might address several legal principles. For example, an appeal from a criminal conviction can raise issues of interpretation of a statute, admissibility of character evidence, and the constitutionality of a confession. Not all of these issues are relevant to the legal researcher, so the publishers of legal digests provide indexes that reference the opinion under each topic discussed by the court. These indexes are organized by legal topic and include short summaries of the portion of the opinion that discusses each topic. The compilation of these indexes and summaries is called a digest.

A digest allows the legal researcher to locate topical case law quickly and easily. The most popular digest system is published by West and utilizes an index system developed by West called the key number system. Under this system, specific areas of the law are divided into topics (key numbers) and subtopics. The summaries contained in the West digest system also appear as headnotes, or topical summaries. Because the headnotes are not a part of the official court opinion, they are not primary law, but are an indispensable aid in locating primary law on a specific topic.

Restatements

Many areas of the law have deep historical roots. The law in these areas has expanded and developed over the years, sometimes resulting in confusion about the current state of the law. To help the legal researcher understand the legal principles that govern a specific area of the law, committees made of legal scholars, judges, and lawyers have prepared restatements of some areas of the law. These restatements summarize the rules of law and provide detailed explanations showing the application of the law to facts. Restatements also provide explanations about the historical development and policies behind specific legal principles. Restatements are considered so accurate that specific portions of some restatements have been adopted as rules of law in many jurisdictions. The publishers of the restatements include these references in separate volumes. There are restatements of the law of torts, product liability, contracts, property, judgments, and agency.

Annotations

Annotations are information about the interpretation of statutes. All federal and state statutes are available in an annotated version. The annotated version is rarely the official version of the statute, but annotated versions are commonly cited when it is necessary to refer to the language of a particular statute.

An annotation is supplemental information about the statute. Typical annotations contain the history of the statute, including the date of first enactment, dates and substance of any amendments, and the effective date of any changes to the statute. This information is important if the language of the statute has changed in a way that affects the client's legal problem. Annotations also include related statutes, references to law review articles or other commentary concerning the statute, and an index to various topics the courts have addressed in interpreting the statute.

The topical index to a court opinion interpreting a statute uses the same information contained in case headnotes. The summaries of court opinions referring to a specific statute are listed immediately after the statute in an annotated volume. These references are useful when the legal researcher is attempting to determine whether the courts have applied the statutory language to a factual situation similar to the client's.