How Laws Are Made: LexisNexis Academic

The LexisNexis Academic (LNA) service is a smaller set of the LexisNexis Research Service used by attorneys. It contains federal and state statutes, court opinions, and law review articles. LexisNexis Academic is available through GALILEO. You can login to GALILEO with your UGA MyID or with a password.

Knowledge Center - training resources

Our contract with LexisNexis prohibits us from issuing individual LexisNexis accounts to non-law students. Review the policy.

Federal statute or regulation - Do you have a citation to a statute or regulation? See Citations tab for more information

• Go directly to the U.S. Code or CFR. You can also keyword search within the resources.
  • United States Code Service 
    • ​The USCS is an annotated code. In addtion to the text of the statutes, it is supplemented with notes of decisions, law review articles, form books, and administrative regulations. 
  • Code of Federal Regulations
• Use the Table of Contents feature to browse

Federal court opinion - Do you have a citation to a court opinion or the names of the parties?

• Use the search widget on the LexisNexis Academic homepage

1. Click on "Look up a Legal Case" to expand the box
2. Type in the citation or party names
3. Click Go

Shepardizing™ is a verb meaning to check the status of an opinion, statute, or regulation. As lawyers say, "Is it still good law?" The Shepard's Citations Service provides a comprehensive citation and treatment history for a wide variety of legal documents, unfortunately only court opinions are covered in LexisNexis Academic. 

• Shepard's® Citations is accessed under "Search by Content Type" 
• View the LNA Guide to Shepard's Citations for instructions on using Shepard's.

When you Shepardize® a court opinion, LNA provides a report showing every subsequent opinion where the initial opinion has been referenced and indicates how the case was treated by the later court.

 Most importantly, is the case "good law." If the case has been overruled, generally it may no longer be cited as a legal precedent.

 Shepard's can be very useful in expanding your research to find more recent opinions and law review articles.

Despite the importance of primary sources most legal researchers start their research project with secondary sources. Remember that secondary sources are resources that describe, discuss, or analyze the primary sources. The secondary sources help the researcher find the most relevant or appropriate primary authority, they aid in explaining or interpreting primary authorities. For example, treatises, law review articles, American Law Reports annotations, Restatements of the Law, and looseleaf services are types of secondary authority. Basically everything that is not primary is secondary.

Before accessing any database to start your research take a couple minutes to do two things.

1. Identify the significant facts. The TARP Rule is a useful technique to analyze your facts.

• T- Thing or subject matter
• A - cause of Action or ground of defense
• R - Relief sought
• P - Persons or parties involves

2. Think about the question you are trying to answer. What do you need to know? You also need to think about various terms and phrases relevant to the subject. There are often many ways to express the same or similar ideas, for example:

• Employment - “public employee” "government employee" "supervisor" "workplace"
• Environment - "clean water" "air pollution" "endangered species"
• First amendment - “free speech" "limitation on speech" "freedom of religion"
• Murder - "manslaughter" "homicide"
• Car - "automobile" "truck"
• Child - "minor" "juvenile"

Try to be as specific as possible. Legal dictionaries and legal encyclopedias are the best place to start.

Dictionary - A legal dictionary is a good place to start as the law is filled with complex terminology and unique definitions for common terms. LNA has two legal dictionaries, you can search individually or combined

• Ballentine's Law Dictionary
• Modern Dictionary for the Legal Profession
• Legal Reference Search 
  • Select "Advanced Options"
  • Select one or both dictionaries, uncheck any other titles
  • Click "Apply"
  • Note that under the red search box "Source" indicated the specific title you are searching.

 Encyclopedia - A legal encyclopedia can provide a good overview of an area of law and explain unfamiliar concepts.  

• American Jurisprudence 2d (AmJur) (browse and keyword search)
• Legal Reference Search 
  • Select "Advanced Options"
  • Click on American Jurisprudence 2nd

Law Review/Journal Articles - Law review articles are particularly good for new topics and in-depth examination of narrow topics. Be sure to look at the cases and statutes cited in law review articles.

• Law Reviews Search
  • Under "Advanced Options" > try to limit by Area of Law and Date
  • Use the Title segment; law review articles have very descriptive titles and a search term in the title mean the article is likely to be more relevant.
• Other Databases/Indexes
  • LegalTrac
    • Indexes the content of over 1400 legal titles; full text access is available but not for all journals

 Have you identified a relevant statute? If so access an annotated code.

Annotated Code - An annotated code is a set of statutes supplemented with references to research resources. This includes notes of decisions, law review articles, form books, and administrative regulations. 

• U.S. Code Service (USCS) (browse and keyword search)
• Individual state codes (browse and keyword search)
  • Go to "State Statutes and Regulations"
  • Select "Advanced Options"
  • Select the check box for "Statutory Code"
  • Then click on the name of the specific state
• To search multiple states
  • Go to "State Statutes and Regulations"
  • Select "Advanced Options"
  • Select the check box for "Statutory Code"
  • Select the check boxes for the particular states
  • Click "Apply"
  • Note that under the red search box "Source" indicates the specific states you are searching.
• Look for the Table of Contents for statutory material. If you retrieved a specific statute it can often be helpful to see what statutes come before and after.
• Get in the habit of checking the currency of any legal material. It's particularly important with codes and regulations because they are frequently changed.  Know how the publication is updated and what is the date of the last update.

Court Opinions - see separate tab under LexisNexis Academic tab

Treatise - A treatise is a scholarly treatment of an area of law, it may be one or multiple volumes depending upon the broadness or narrowness of the topic. Treatises are very popular with attorneys and they will buy treatises relevant to their practice. Treatises published by LexisNexis are not part of the LNA subscription. 

• Check GAVEL, the Law Library's online catalog
  • Look for titles that are updated or recent editions
  • Use the subject headings for relevant titles to expand the search