Statute: A law passed by a legislative body. Examples are law . Trevor paid $2,500 interest on the bonds on July 1, 2014. If you authored a book and then authorized a certain publisher to print it, you then would consider that publisher's printing of your book to be the official version and any other printing by another publisher to be unauthorized and thus considered unofficial. - Primary authority is a law written by one of the three branches of the U.S. government. google_ad_width = 728;
(U.S.C.) Finding tools are those books that help the researcher to find a particular law contained in a primary or secondary source. Many, but certainly not all, appellate decisions are reported (published). Primary Sources of Law. Learning to use them makes conducting research much easier. Some samples of finding tools are digests, citators, encyclopedias, phrase books, indexes, some loose-leaf services, annotated, Chapter 2 - The Law Library and Legal Research. For additional information about California courts and court reporters, visit the Library's California Case Materials Checklist. May consist of common law decisions as well as judicial decisions interpreting statutes, regulations, constitutions etc. Anything the court would not use in reaching its decision is: non-authority 2. They are printed in chronological order. There are over 100,000 individual Key Numbers. Do not cite to an unofficial source unless the official source is unavailable. 2. An example is. Topic & Key Number System: A proprietary system developedby West Publishing (now ThomsonReuters)to identify related cases on a similar issue. Each headnotein cases published by West will be assigned a corresponding topic and key number. Court of Federal Claims & Court of Appeals Decisions. This finding tool is available in both print and electronic resources. Master - Master. Secondary authority is not considered a law itself, but it summarizes, explains, or discusses a law. What is the pattern always followed for every citation? Appellate Briefs: Written argument submitted to the appellate court in support of a position on appeal (not the same as a case brief). Secondary authority is located in legal encyclopedias, jurisprudences, and Amerian Law Reports (ALR), among others. The unofficial sets often extend beyond a single jurisdictional boundary and will report the case for an entire geographical area rather than for a single state. Statutory Annotations: In statutory research, the term is used to refer to brief summaries of court decisions interpreting and applying statutes as well as summaries of secondary materials referencing the statutory section. For example, the. Their transcripts create an easily accessible public record of the House's work.Until stenography machines came into use in the 20th century, official reporters took handwritten notes in shorthand . ), which is the official reporter; (2) West's California Reporter (Cal. Coverage: 1987 - 2012. When conducting case law research, researchers will primarily focus on locating opinions rendered by the Georgia Supreme Court and the Georgia Court of Appeals. 48-8-89 to accept a smaller percentage of the local option sales and use tax proceeds distributed to all qualified municipalities in the county than the percentage the absent municipality's population is of the total population of all such qualified municipalities. Any other set of books that reports these same statutes would be considered unofficial. 2d, etc.). American Check to see if the cases cited in the cited case are still good law. These summaries are written by Westlaw editors and assigned a topic and subtopic. If you are trying a case before the Texas Supreme Court, does the Court have to abide by a previous Texas Supreme Court decision? The picture below provides a visual representation of the Georgia Court System. When the same case can be found in more than one reporter, a doctrine that requires a court to follow the law established by a previous decision, unless good cause exists to change it. A) reports B) reporters c) both . 2d), published by Lexis. In Australia and New Zealand (see below), official reports are called authorised reportsunofficial reports are referred to as unauthorised reports. Georgia Supreme Court and Georgia Court of Appeals and selected for publication will be binding authority in Georgia. Litigator: A lawyer who prepares cases for trial as by conducting discovery and pretrial motions, trying cases and handling appeals; a trial lawyer.