The following is a guest post by Shameema Rahman, Legal Reference Specialist in our Public Services Division. Shameema is no stranger to In Custodia Legis. Her previous posts include: World Digital Library and the Qatar Foundation; Classes Offered by the Law Library of Congress; and Researching an Unfamiliar Country’s Law.
This spring several of the staff in the Law Library Reading Room began to update the quick guides to legal research, which can be found on our website. I had created the Guide to Secondary Legal Resources in 2006 and I thought now would be a good time to direct our readers to this and other guides as well as to provide some brief information about various secondary legal resources.
Legal resources are divided into two broad categories: primary and secondary sources. Primary legal resources are statements of the law from a court in the form of an opinion or a law passed by Congress or a state legislature. Secondary legal resources provide an analysis or commen