The U.S. is a common law country.

That means that the law of the land is an evolving body of doctrine determined by judges.

This judge made law comes from the cases that they decide.

The law grows and evolves and old principles are adapted to new situations.

Primary sources are legal materials that are legally binding, not merely analytical or descriptive.

Published court cases are primary authority.

Another type of primary source is statutory law.

The interplay between statutes and cases can be confusing.

Some areas of law are determined wholly by case law

Some wholly by statute

And some a mix of the two

Statutes have become more important in the criminal law in recent years; Procedural law is still dominated by case law.

Agencies are given power to make rules by congress—such as the FCCs power to regulate the air waves.

These regulations have the force of law, and are thus a primary source of the law.

Agencies also have a "quasi-judicial" authority to hear cases involving those rules.

A fundamental principle of our legal system is stare decisis—the doctrine that precedent should be followed.

The concept is based on the principle of fairness—people in similar circumstances should be treated the same way by the law.

You can predict how you will be treated in a particular case by how another was treated in the past under similar circumstances.

An important function of appellate courts in both state and federal systems is to establish rules of conduct for society—the creation of case law.

A lower court in a jurisdiction is BOUND to follow a rule of law announced by a higher court in that jurisdiction in a similar case.

A case decided by a high court that deals with the issue at hand is called a "case in point."

A case in point must have material facts very similar to the issue at hand.

We also must check to see if the case in point has been overruled or modified by the courts.

Only decisions from the same jurisdiction are binding on a lower court.

These binding decisions of the higher court in the same jurisdictions are called mandatory authority—the lower court has no choice but to follow the rule set forth by the higher court.

Decisions from other jurisdictions are not binding and need not be followed.

Cases decided by courts in other jurisdictions sill may be useful to the court in determining how it will rule on a particular issue.

This sort of guidance is known as persuasive authority—the court may be persuaded to follow it, but it may also decide to go with a completely different rule.

Statutes are an important source of law; research on any legal issue should consider statutory provisions.

Statutes rarely stand alone as authority.

It has often been necessary for the courts to interpret, clarify, and explain statutory language while resolving legal controversies.

Good legal research must include judicial opinions which have interpreted and applied the statute

It is the courts interpretation of that statute that is binding law under the doctrine of stare decisis.

Chronological Publication—both case law and statutory law are published chronologically; That is, they are published in the order they were made.

Statutes as passed by a legislative body are published in chronological order and are called session laws.

To make legal research possible, we need a way to search these chronologically organized materials by subject.

Statutes make subject access easy: Most statutes are rearranged by subject and indexed—these are usually called codes.

Cases remain arranged chronologically and we have to have special finding tools to use them.

The primary sources are often published both officially and commercially.

The edition published by the government is the official version of an opinion or statute—this is the one that must be cited in legal documents.

Commercial books are more popular for two reasons:

"case law" refers to the written opinions of appellate courts on specific issued raised in legal disputes.

Only a tiny fraction of court cases result in such opinions.

The trial court is the first level of any court system.

Every jurisdiction has a trail court of general jurisdiction at which most disputes, both civil and criminal, are initially tried.

Trial courts are finders of fact: Unless there is a procedural problem with the fact finding process (a legal problem with the way information was arrived at), there is no appeal of matters of fact—only matters of law.

A trail judge’s ruling on an issue of law can be appealed to a higher court.

The next court level in most jurisdictions is an intermediate appellate court.

An appellate court usually consists of three or more judges, who vote on the legal issue at hand after careful consideration and debate.

When an appellate court decides a case, one of the judges usually writes an opinion summarizing the question, station the determination (holding) of the court, and setting for the reasoning behind the decision.

We usually mean this type of written determination when refer to "cases" in the context of legal research.

If the losing parties in an appeal continue to believe that their opinion is legally correct, then the decision of that court can frequently be appealed to a still higher court.

The highest court in a jurisdiction is known as the court of last resort—there is no appeal beyond this court.

On the federal level and most states, this court is called the Supreme Court.

This courts rulings are binding on all other courts in that jurisdiction.

Not all appellate decisions make it into the books—the decisions are selective.

Virtually all decisions, however, of the courts of last resort are published, both state and federal.

Often the case is a refusal to hear the case—very few types of cases get an automatic review by the Supreme Court of the United States.

When the SC of the US refuses to hear a case, its action is known as "denying a petition for writ of certiorari." This is commonly abbreviated to "cert. denied."

If the high court refuses to hear a case, it has the same effect of endorsing the lower courts ruling.

Under the doctrine of precedence, the holding in a case will govern other cases in the same jurisdiction when the facts and issues are substantially similar to those of the case that generated the rule of law.

The holding (ratio decidendi) can usually be summed up in a single sentence. Everything else in the courts opinion is dicta.

Legal latin for "said by the way."

The importance of the distinction between holding and dictum is that only the holding is binding law.

It would be unfair to use obiter dicta opinions as law because it was not argued in adversarial proceedings.

Only issues argued before the court—the holding—should have the force of law.

Dicta can be VERY strong persuasive authority.