Legal Research for Beginners

• Laws or Legislation is written by Congress which is made up of the Senate & the House of Representatives.
• Each and every state has both a Senate & House of Representatives (except Nebraska - they have a single house system).  And they can write their own laws as well. 
• These enacted laws or  legislation are referred to as statutes.
• At the Federal level, all of the statutes are aggregated into The US Code which is divided into 54 different topic areas called Titles that organize statutes by subjects, eg. Title 12 - Banks and Banking, Title 15 Commerce and Trade.
• Each state has its own code as well such as the Florida Statutes.
• Codes are updated annually with pocket parts in back of the book or seamlessly online.

So where can you find the US code and state statutes?

Current Statutes are available from Free government websites as unannotated code - this is a term you will hear often along with annotated code.
The unannotated code is just the statute itself, just the primary source with no commentary or editorial enhancement such as you would get if you went to a secondary source.

Here's a screenshot of the US Code on the house.gov website.  You can see the Titles listed which you can browse through as well as drill down into which I have here to find the section of code which deals with National Preparedness within the Domestic Security Title.

Here are a couple screenshots of the South Carolina statutes which as you can see are organized the same way as the US Code.  And you can browse through the different titles to find the section of Title 12 on Taxation that deals with estate tax.  However as you can see at the top of the screenshot on the right, this is the Unannotated code, the primary source.

There are two very large legal research platforms in the field which both offer their own versions of Annotated codes and they are

Westlaw and Lexis.

Annotated Codes  include the text and the history of the statute, as well as references to other relevant primary sources such as statutes and regulations, summaries of court opinions that discuss and refer to that statute, links to secondary sources if applicable, and importantly they provide flags indicating any negative treatment of the statute or its repeal. These are called citators and they offer this built in citator service as a part of their platform.  So at a glance you can look up a statute, find all sorts of other relevant laws and regulations and court cases that refer to it as well as see right away whether it has been "superceded" or replaced by another law.

Here's a screenshot of the Westlaw Edge interface.  Westlaw Edge is a leading legal research platform that uses AI tools to provide cases, statutes, practice materials, secondary sources and more to researchers.

And here is that National preparedness statute that we looked at earlier in the Unannotated version.

Right away here you can click in to the "Currentness" link and see that it is still current, it hasn't been repealed or superceded by another law.

And here is the SC estate tax statute which you can see is also currrent but I'll also point out to you here the menu at the top which links to the history of the statute as well as a list of citing references.  

If we click in there we get this next screenshot which consists of the secondary sources, cases, and trial court documents which are all related to this statute.

And here's a screenshot of the other major legal research platform called Lexis Advance which also provides cases, statutes, practice materials, secondary sources and more to researchers.

And here are those same statutes in the annotated versions displaying the current status of the statute at the very top, very similar to the Westlaw interface.

Except in Lexis Advance, in order to see the citing references here you must select "Shepardize this document".