The research guide or "pathfinder" is an introduction to doing research in a particular field of American law of your own choosing. It should focus on all relevant sources, including not only cases and statutes but also administrative regulations, leading treatises, bibliographies, legal encyclopedias, periodicals (including legal newsletters and looseleafs), specialized databases, and search terms and strategies for computer-assisted legal research. The guide should enable the reader to zero in quickly on the most important and authoritative resources in the field and to understand any specialized vocabulary, research techniques, and updating tools in your subject area. While pointing to specific useful sources is essential, you should also focus on explaining your methodology for finding the sources. The pathfinder should be a guide to useful existing sources, but should also emphasize how to find and use other sources, including future publications.

The pathfinder should be designed to guide a legal researcher to the materials he or she would need to do research in a specific subject area (e.g., open adoptions), or a specific jurisdiction (e.g., Connecticut product liability law), or in a particular statute (e.g., bulk transfers under the U.C.C.), or in some other area of law. The pathfinder topic can certainly be related to your Substantial, S.A.W., or other course paper, but it should not be too narrow. Because your pathfinder should be written to help the next researcher in your subject area, a simple recounting of the particular research you have undertaken for a paper is not sufficient. And since the pedagogical purpose of the guide is to demonstrate your mastery of a variety of resources, a topic in which there is only periodical literature or only online information will be too restrictive. You should assume that your reader is an attorney (or law librarian) who may not be familiar with your chosen topic. Consequently, you may assume your reader already knows the basic concepts of legal research (e.g., what a key number is, how the U.S.Code is organized); what he or she does not know is how to use the sources to research your particular topic.

A research guide is a critical evaluation of the available resources in an area, not simply an annotated bibliography of books, law review articles, etc. It should:

• Outline the major features of the law. (Is there a major statute governing the field? Are there landmark cases with which researchers should be familiar? Is this a field dominated by administrative regulations? Give the citations for those items and briefly explain them.)

• Analyze and critically compare the major secondary sources. (What are the strengths and weaknesses of these materials? Are there authorities that are particularly respected by the courts? Are there any "classic" articles or treatises? What about specialized journals, newsletters, or looseleaf services? Have any bibliographies been published for this jurisdiction or subject area? Are there important online databases, and what are their relative merits and disadvantages? What nonlegal resources are relevant? (E.g.: A pathfinder on gender discrimination might include indexes or online databases that cover women's studies, generally, especially if they yield relevant materials not found in legal indexes or databases.)

• Describe an appropriate research strategy. (Where is the best place to start? Where would the novice go for general background? How would you prioritize sources so that, for example, a researcher would know which of the twenty books available on your topic should be consulted first and why (e.g., excellent index, extensive bibliography, special expertise of author), or why it is better to use a topical database instead of a jurisdictional database for a particular task? How would you compare and analyze the appropriateness of using online (including the Internet), CD-ROM, or print sources in this area of law? What subject headings, key-words, and/or sample searches worked best? Are there relevant West topics and key numbers that yield good results? Are there particularly useful Internet searches? Do WIN or Freestyle searches work better than terms and connectors or word searches? (By "work best," we mean to refer not only to the number of "hits" resulting from a search, but also the number of relevant sources the search produced.)

You are free to organize your research guide as you think best, but we suggest you consider including at least the following:

1. A table of contents with page numbers indicated for particular sections and topics.

2. A brief introduction to the subject area, which might give some historical background about the jurisdiction, organization, or subject, or explain why a research guide is necessary for this topic and what pitfalls or difficulties this subject presents to a researcher. This section would normally include suggestions for background reading.

3. A scope note explaining what the guide will cover and what is not included.

4. A consistent form of citation (conforming to the Blue Book), which also gives total number of pages for books and inclusive pagination for articles. Dates of coverage andfrequency of supplementation of sources should always be noted.

5. WIN/Freestyle and Boolean/terms and connectors sample searches.

6. A summary section which ties together your recommen-dations as to strategy and sources.

Criteria for grading include: How well is the guide organized, how thorough is the coverage of resources, and how creative/effective are the search strategies? The number of items included is less important than the methods of explaining how and why a researcher would use them to best advantage in researching your particular topic. Analysis of the disadvantages of sources and approaches, and discussion of gaps in the literature will also be given weight. Despite similar warnings in the past, a few students still focus on the results of their research (i.e., what the law is on their topics) and neglect the methodology they used to find the results. This pathfinder is a guide to research procedures, not a catalog of research results.

As soon as possible, please make an appointment with any one of the instructors to discuss your pathfinder topic. All topics must be submitted by February 17. Such early selection will make your subsequent work and classes more fruitful.