International Commercial Law 

Although you may contact any of the reference librarians, your professor's liaison is more familiar with the topics he/she is currently researching.

This research guide is to assist students with research in the areas of International Commercial Law, International Trade, International Commercial Arbitration, and Foreign Domestic Commercial Law. 

Understand clearly the scope of your project

• What are you researching?
• How much time/money can you devote to this project?

Make sure you know the basics

• What, when, where, who, why, how

Articulate the legal question

• Jurisdiction (personal, geographical, subject matter)
• Civil or criminal
• Substantive or procedural
• Who are the parties?
• What relief is being sought?
• Do you need statutes, case law, regulations, or administrative decisions?
• Do you need international treaties, agreements, contracts, pacts?
• Do you need secondary materials, such as journal articles, law reviews, encyclopedias, hornbooks, treatises, overviews, summaries, etc?

Search Terms

• Develop your research vocabulary
• Use keywords and terms of art from indexes, digests, library catalogs, online databases
• Ask the person who gave you the assignment
• Use a legal dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, treatises
• Ask a librarian

Strategies

• Secondary sources discuss, analyze and explain the law; provide an overview of an area of law; help to gain familiarity with terms of art and issues; lead to primary law (statutes, cases, rules and regulations)
• Some types of secondary sources are dictionaries, encyclopedias, hornbooks, treatises, law review articles, ALRs, etc.

One Good Case Method

• Ask the person who gave you the assignment
• Use a good secondary source - they highlight important cases
• Use annotated statutes that list cases under Notes of Decisions
• Use Shepard's (LexisNexis) and KeyCite (Westlaw) to find other cases that have cited one good case
• Use West Digest System: relevant topic and key number from one good case can be used to find more cases with the same topic and key number; use digest in print or online
• This strategy can be applied to various scenarios - sometimes it can be a leading author, book, article, or other material on the subject that can help you get started