California Surveyors Forums

Several people have asked me about court research and getting around that aspect of practice. You can retrieve cases for free at Lexis-Nexis.

http://www.lexisnexis.com/clients/CACourts/

The attached might also be of value.

Good luck.

Thanks Mr. P!

Thanks for this. The court decisions are an area I am admittedly weak on. I intend to read your article.

I use lexis all the time. Google Scholar works pretty well, click on case law and the advance search allows one to search cases all over the country or restrict the search just to California.

Thanks, Michael, you continue to be an asset to the profession.

I encourage every Land Surveyor to use your local Public Law Library. It really isn't as daunting as it sounds.

The Sacramento County Public Law Library offers very good classes on how to do legal research. The materials are very well organized and indexed.

Sacramento's also has a full subscription service you can use which has a lot of material way beyond what you can get online for free. They have a lot of good Treatises and Legal Encyclopedias to get you started and most of that material is also on their service.

What I do is use the free service that Pallamary linked to get an idea of which cases I want then I go to the library and look them up on their online service (in Sacramento it is West Law). The advantage of the full online service is the cases are Key Cited (West) or Shephardized (Lexus) which means they give you other cases that cited them and whether the case is still good law or not. I print them to PDF on a thumb drive which they let you do then you can read them later on your computer or iPad or print them out at home (cheaper).

Legal Encyclopedias are a set of volumes which has short articles which pretty much cover the entire law and they have case cites in there. There is American Jurisprudence (AmJur) and California Jurisprudence (CalJur-specific to California). Then there are Treatises which is a set of volumes (usually in binders so they can be updated) on a specific area of Law such as Real Property. Miller Starr Regalia California Real Estate is a well known one.

There is also the Witkin Summary of California Law.

All of these materials are readily available, useful and not just for Attorneys. I suggest going into the stacks and look at the shelves upon shelves of Case Reports. I would love to pick up an old set just to have them. Sometimes the diagrams are better in the older printed books than the scan the online service has (very low resolution).

Also in class they will give you a lot of good tips on how to best use the free services at home such as the free service provided by the California Courts (Pallamary's link) and Google Scholar (mentioned by Dane).

What cases remain good law is a very important point. For example some cases may no longer be good since the Blevins ruling, for example... I have seen at least one attorney made to look very foolish for citing a case that had been over turned by a later ruling and this happened in a very public situation.