Legal resources and tips for EPQ students
Writing your EPQ on a legal topic and need some help? The Squire Law Library’s Legal Research Librarian, Kate Faulkner, outlines some hints, tips and tricks for finding trustworthy sources for legal information on the internet for students working on their extended project qualification. Freely Available. Trustworthy.
Resources
Court cases
Not all cases are reported in law reports. Newspapers report what is ‘scandalous’ or local but are not particularly authoritative. There is a difference between transcripts, law reports, and newspaper reports.
Transcripts from higher courts are reported by the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII)
The Supreme Court’s decided cases section is also a great resource. I recommend that you read the press summary first as it’s shorter and easier to understand.
Legislation
The UK’s Government website for legislation is the best source to use.
Look for notes at the top about how up-to-date each piece of legislation is as they are frequently amended.
Blogs and Podcasts
Again, stick to authoritative sources: barristers, law firm websites, academics — take it all with a pinch of salt and get a balance of perspectives and sources.
Examples include:
Public Law for Everyone (by the Faculty of Law’s Professor Mark Elliott):
The IPKat (for IP Law)
The blog of The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales
A good subject listing of blogs is a available from Chambers Student
Libraries
Don’t overlook your public library! Find the central (biggest) library for your area. Find the reference librarians who are there to help. You will be able to access their catalogue of books and journals on the internet.
You can also get copies of articles or books from other libraries through the Inter-Library Loan scheme — for Cambridgeshire Public Libraries the cost is a minimum of £8, with an approximate six-week turnaround for a book. It’s a quicker process for a journal article. (£4.50 Peterborough libraries, £5.70 Herts)
Copyright
Remember, you should only photocopy/scan/take photos of one chapter of a book, one article from an issue of a journal, one case report from a law report volume or up to 5% for private study or research.
Useful sites
News sites: the Guardian, the BBC
Use Google Scholar rather than the main Google search to look for resources.
The UK Parliament site is an excellent source of government policy papers and consultations
Inner Temple Library’s portal, Access to Law
Inter-government organisations: United Nations, Council of Europe, European Union, African Union
Inner Temple’s Learn for Free portal
Secrets to research
Learning to read a case is a bit of an art form, it’s definitely not something I felt really confident with until well into my studies. For me, the key thing is trying to have some background knowledge before I start actually reading in any depth; a brief idea of the important facts, the outcome of the case, and a general idea of the principle are all really helpful. Once you have that, you can read the detail much more efficiently by identifying the parts that are most relevant to you — nobody really has time to read hundreds of pages of irrelevant facts and discussion! — C.H, a current Cambridge Law student
It’s fine to start your search with Google, Wikipedia and Twitter to get a feel for the topic, but don’t quote from them. The point is to follow up references and footnotes, to get to the source — that should lead you on to better (more authoritative) content.
Question your search terms and keywords. Remember research is a repetitive process which you refine as you learn more.
When you find something useful you need to see what subject terms/keywords/tags they have used, to see how it has been classified and categorised. This is particularly important for legal subjects as the words used in the media are often not the same as those used to categorise crimes/offences. Then repeat the searches using those terms.
Don’t embark on something if there are no resources available to you — that’s called doing a PhD!
Read abstracts for journal articles and book reviews — you can often get the crux of the argument and you’ll be able to gather whether it is worth trying to get the full article/book. (see Inter-Library loans in the Libraries box)
Alerts
At the beginning of your project set up in alerts in products like Google so if anything new happens you will get alerted.
Set up more than one alert and experiment with your keywords.
Advice on Google’s pages can help you with setting up alerts.
Subscribe to the Inner Temple’s ‘Current Awareness’ site.
Citation and Referencing
Make a note of everything you read (title, author, page number, where you got it from). With an extended project like this you don’t realise how it will all mash together in your brain and what you will end up citing — until the end!
You can write it all in a book/document, use fancy software like Zotero or Pocket or write it on your photocopies but keep a note somewhere. It is also essential practice to avoid accidentally plagiarising someone else.
You can learn more about the Squire Law Library, which shares the David Williams Building with the Faculty of Law on their website: https://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/
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