Okay so I have A Lot of questions, I find my characters get into all sorts of legal troubles in various stories. But my ask isn't about a specific legal inquiry, rather, is there some better way for me to do research in legal areas other than just googling [city]+[potential law broken]? I'd love to ask you personally for advice, but like I said, A Lot of questions, and I don't want to overwhelm you.
I actually do really want to do a master post on research, but I just haven’t had the wherewithall. I want to give you a couple of tips, though.
Firstly, law libraries are awesome. Some of them have their contents online! Librarians can help you figure out where to look to find the information you need. They’re great!
Also, the internet really, really, really is useful. There are tonnes of websites that have lots of information which is created by government agencies specifically for lay people to read and understand.
I also recommend that you listen to my podcast episode on legal research. It’s episode 9.
I agree that googling the city and the law is useless. There are a couple of reasons for that:
Chances are, laws don’t differ by city. Unless you’re talking about municipal bylaws, most laws are enacted either by the state/province, or the federal government. For example, in Canada the Criminal Code is a federal code, and is the same throughout the country. Googling the city adds nothing to the search.
Googling the crime itself wouldn’t really tell you much other than what it is.
So you need to get more clear on what it is you want to know.
In doing research, particularly for this blog, I have found that the more specific the question you put into Google, the better the results. It’s actually possible to google entire sentences, and oddly helpful! For example, for a recent ask, I literally typed into Google “What happens to life insurance money if the beneficiary is dead” and got the answer instantly.
If typing general information sentences into Google isn’t doing it for you and you need to get deep into the nitty-gritty legal stuff, you should be looking for websites that collate the legislation and case law. For Canada, you can use http://www.canlii.org. There are likely similar websites in different countries. Sometimes they are behind a paywall, but CanLii is free.
Websites like CanLii use boolean search strings to search the cases and legislation for what you’re looking for. For example, if you want to read cases on surrogate parents, you can just type that phrase in and see what happens. You can and should use modifiers like AND, OR, and quotations to help refine your searches.
You can also do something called “noting up” with legislation. If you know the particular section of a piece of legislation that deals with what you’re looking for - for example, the person has committed treason and you want to know more about the kinds of cases that have been decided where people committed treason to get a better sense of what sort of evidence was used, what kinds of sentences were handed down, etc., you would do the following:
Figure out what section of the Canadian Criminal Code deals with treason. (It’s s. 46)
Look up that section in CanLii.
Click the little link next to the section, or if it’s not there, click the “note up” tab at the top and enter the section number you want.
You will get a list of cases where that section of that piece of legislation was considered, and can read for days!
Keep in mind that just because a case mentioned a particular term or section of legislation, doesn’t mean it’ll be helpful to answer your question! Sometimes the case only mentions it to say it doesn’t apply, but it still shows up in the list.
