About this Guide
This guide is designed to support JCU students undertaking legal studies and contribute to developing legal research skills.
Legal Research Skills: An Australian Law Guide is organised into four parts:
- Part 1: Research Skills introduces the concept of legal research, identifies the key sources of legal information, and the importance of researching strategically.
- Part 2: Case Law provides an introduction on how to locate cases by citation or topic, and judge a case’s reliability.
- Part 3: Legislation helps students learn about the parliamentary process, how to find legislation and the materials used for statutory interpretation.
- Part 4: Secondary Sources focuses on the role of secondary sources in legal research.
The 2023 edition of this guide primarily includes examples from the Queensland, Victorian and Commonwealth jurisdictions but it is envisioned that this resource will be updated regularly and expanded to include examples from all other Australian jurisdictions in the future.
Attribution
This guide is an an adaptation of Legal Research Skills: An Australian Law Guide (2023 Edition) which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 International Licence.
Acknowledgements
This previous version of this guide is acknowledged as the result of a generous-spirited open collaborative effort between current and former law librarians from:
- The University of Queensland
- James Cook University
- The University of Southern Queensland
- Charles Darwin University
- Southern Cross University
- Queensland University of Technology
- Deakin University.
