"Laws are inherited like diseases." -- Goethe.
"If mankind had continued to be the slave of precedent we should still be living in caves and subsisting on shellfish and wild berries." -- Philip Snowden.
Not only is the law complicated, it is also arranged on paper in a complicated way. Often confusing even to many lawyers, the ways that statutes, regulations and cases are codified for research purposes can be quite a puzzle. Law students spend much of their entire first year in law school learning how to look things up. Indeed, the essence of being a lawyer is not know the law but is knowing where and how to look up the law and then how to apply it once you find it.
Go to a law library sometime, such as one at a major law school, at your state's supreme court or at your county courthouse; you will see almost endless rows of thick books that all look the same. This will give you the basic information for navigating through many of those thick books.
The most basic principle to remember in legal research is that everything is codified in groups. The key is to knowing what statutes and cases go into what groups. It is also important to remember that all those law books are published by privately-owned legal publishing companies. Some companies have monopolies on the publication of certain things, which is why all the cases from the federal courts below the U.S. Supreme Court are published by West Publishing Company. However, many areas of law are not monopolized by one company; thus, there are three different companies that put out bound volumes of the cases from the U.S. Supreme Court. At the end of this chapter will be a list of all the major codifications of laws that the average layperson may need to know.
Throughout any search you may make in a law library, do not be afraid to ask for help from the library staff. That is what they are there for, and most will be happy to explain to you where to look up certain types of information.
Whenever you look up statutes and regulations, you will notice a newsprint pamphlet inserted in a flap at the back of almost every book you open. This is known as the "pocket part," and it is a supplement to what is in the main part of the book. Law books are big and expensive, and they cannot be replaced every time a law is amended or a new case comes out. What is done is that pocket parts are issued every year (or even more often) that update what is in the bound volume. If a statute is amended, the new text of the statute will be in the pocket part. Many codes of statutes also have what are called "annotations" which are lists and short synopses of cases that have interpreted that statute; these annotations will be found in the text after the statute.
Thus, if you look up a statute like the Clean Air Act in the bound book, make sure you check in the pocket part under the same title and section number to see if that statute has been amended since the date of when the bound volume was published. Even if a statute has not been changed, there may be in the annotations additional cases that interpret it, and those will be listed in the pocket part.
Statutes, the actual laws passed by Congress and the state legislatures, go in "codes." All of the federal statutes passed by Congress are in what is called the "United States Code" (U.S.C.). Every law library will have the U.S.C. or what is called the "United States Code Annotated" (U.S.C.A.), which is West Publishing Company's version of the U.S.C. The "U.S.C.S." is Lawyer's Cooperative Publishing's version of the U.S.C. (Recently, the parent company of Lawyer's Cooperative bought out West Publishing, and so, some books once published by one company may now be published by the other. Also, to get around Justice Department objections to the merger, Lawyers Cooperative had to agree to sell off some codes to other companies. Which ones this will be was not known at the time this was written, but you need not worry about that, as who publishes the codes is not important in how to use them.) The statutes in both are exactly the same, but the West and Lawyer's Cooperative versions add a good set of case annotations.
The U.S.C. is arranged by titles and sections; the Endangered Species Act, for instance, is cited as 16 U.S.C. §§ 1531 to 1544, because the ESA is codified in Title 16 of the United States Code at sections 1531 through 1544. The titles are arranged by subject matter. Many conservation statutes are in Title 16; water statutes are in Title 33; public health and welfare statutes such as those involving hazardous waste are in Title 42, and public lands statutes are in Title 43.
Only federal statutes will be in the U.S.C. State statutes will be in separate codes for each separate state, and every state arranges its code in a different manner. Luckily, state codes are much shorter than the U.S.C., and you should have less trouble learning your way around your own state's code of laws.
Cases are set out in other sets of books called "reporters," because those sets of books were once named after the person who was the reporter of decisions for each court way back in the early 1800s before there was any standardization. Cases in reporters are the published opinions of judges, and they provide the recorded version of legal case precedent.
Most state trial courts never publish their opinions or decisions; in most states, only the opinions of their higher appellate courts are published. In the federal courts, most opinions from every level are published, but there are some opinions that are never published. Unpublished opinions hold little, if any, value as precedent.
For federal court cases, there are three basic levels of courts, and each level has its own reporter. The federal trial courts are called "district courts," and their reporter is called "Federal Supplement" (abbreviated as "F. Supp."). Like all reporters, the Federal Supplement is arranged in a generally chronological order. As not all courts get their opinions finalized at the same speed, they do not get published in the reporter in exactly chronological order, but they are roughly in such order. Thus, a case in volume 300 of the Federal Supplement will have occurred years before a case in volume 600. Some district court cases that involve interpretation of certain federal rules, such as the Rules of Civil Procedure, are sometimes published in a set of reporters called the Federal Rules Decisions ("F.R.D.").
The next level of federal courts are the "circuit courts of appeal," and the circuit courts have appellate jurisdiction over the district courts. They are the next higher court to which appeals from the decisions of district courts are taken. The reporter for the circuit courts is the "Federal" ("F.") reporter.
The last level of federal courts is the Supreme Court of the United States, which, of course, has authority over all of the other lower federal courts. There are three reporters for Supreme Court cases; they are, in order of general usage and acceptance, the "United States" reporter ("U.S."), the "Supreme Court" reporter ("S.Ct."), and the "Lawyer's Edition" reporter ("L.Ed."). All three reporters will give you the cases with citations to the U.S. reporter's page numbers included.
Reporters are bound in numbered volumes and are cited by their volume number. Cases are cited by a complicated set of rules that are basically dictated by the law reviews from the law schools at Harvard, Columbia, Yale and Pennsylvania, but here is the quick explanation of a case citation such that you should be able to find the cases you need. A case will be cited by: (1) its name in a standard format, (2) the volume number and name of the reporter it is in, (3) the page number in that volume of the reporter where the case begins, (4) the standard abbreviation for the court involved (not always used for certain courts), and (5) the year that the opinion was decided and released. The name of the case is usually made up of the first named plaintiff versus the first named defendant. Thus, the United States Supreme Court's biggest case on garbage is cited as City of Philadelphia v. New Jersey, 437 U.S. 617 (1978). This means that Philadelphia's big case against New Jersey over New Jersey's ban against out-of-state garbage is found in volume 437 of the United States reporter, at page 617, and the opinion was released in 1978. As only U.S. Supreme Court cases are found in this reporter, there is no need to tell you in the citation what court the case was decided by. Sometimes, courts will cite a U.S. Supreme Court case only by its U.S. reporter citation; sometimes, courts use all three, as there is not set rule on how to cite them. A fuller cite of that case which included all three reporters would be City of Philadelphia v. New Jersey, 437 U.S. 617, 98 S. Ct. 2531, 57 L. Ed. 2d 475 (1978).
Now, let's look at a federal circuit court case, State of Alabama v. United States Environmental Protection Agency, 871 F.2d 1548 (11th Cir. 1989). This is a case over hazardous waste that Alabama filed against the EPA, and it is found in volume 871 of the Federal Reporter, Second Series. Reporters are often divided into series as well; all this means is that the volume numbers got too high, and the publisher of the reporter started a new series so that they could start the volume numbers back at 1. Thus, volume 100 of the F. 2d came many years after volume 100 F. of the same reporter. After all, only so many numbers can fit on the spine of a book. The case here starts at page 1548, and it was decided by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 1989. There are 12 circuits, plus a special federal circuit, that oversee the various local district courts. As an example, the Eleventh Circuit consists of Alabama, Georgia and Florida.
State cases can be published in regional reporters which group together the cases from several states and in separate state reporters. This varies from state to state, as some states do not want to have a state reporter, some want to have both, and some big states like California and New York have both and a third local reporter as well. As an example from a state that uses only the regional reporter, the first big case from the Supreme Court of Alabama on garbage is Ex parte Lauderdale County, 565 So. 2d 623 (Ala. 1990). This citation means that Lauderdale County was the petitioning party (in some cases the case name will only have the name of one party after the words "ex parte" or "in re" meaning that this is a type of case where one party must ask for permission to appeal before the court will agree to look at the case; this does not matter in how you look up such cases). The case is found in volume 565 of the Southern Reporter, Second Series at page 623, and the "Ala." citation identifies the court as the Supreme Court of Alabama, and the year was 1990.
There are also things called "advance sheets." These are either loose leaf or notebook-type copies of recently released case opinions. It takes some time, some months or even a year, before a case gets put into a bound volume of a reporter. If you need that case during that time, it will be in the advance sheets or in newsprint supplements for federal cases. Most law libraries will have copies of U.S. Supreme Court opinions within a week or two of when they were issued, sometimes sooner; it sometimes takes longer to get advance sheets of the other various state and federal case opinions. Advance sheets are usually filed right at the end of the bound volumes of a reporter so that they are easy to find.
West Publishing long ago developed what they call a "key number" system, whereby a point of law in a case is assigned to a certain topic and subject. Sometimes key numbers are also generically called "head notes," but the West system uses little key symbols. What the system does is try to standardize points made in cases into predefined legal subjects. Thus, if a court rules that a certain type of evidence is need to get summary judgment, West's editors will assign that point into a category such as Civil Procedure, Summary Judgment, Evidence Required. That category will have a specific number, such as Civil Procedure 668.2(3). Then, you can look in books called "digests" under Civil procedure 668.2(3) and find every other case in that state, that region or the whole nation that made the same point of law. For more information on the key number system and its unique quirks, read § 3-2 in your text Legal Research.
Another research aide is the "Shepard's Citations." These are books that give the citation to every case that ever cited a particular case. For example, if you looked up the Philadelphia v. New Jersey case in Shepard's by its citation, 437 U.S. 617, you would find hundreds of other citations of later cases that cited that one. Shepard's is useful for finding out if a later court disagreed with a case you are looking at or if that case has been overruled or reversed by a higher court later. Section 3-3 in Legal Research gives details on Shepard's.
There are also commercial computer databases that you can sign into by modem and search for statutes, cases, law review articles, EPA administrative hearing results, and a host of other things. The main two are Westlaw and Lexis. Both are very expensive, with very limited basic service for solo practitioner lawyers running a minimal of $100 per month. Full service on these things can cost up to $4.00 per minute. That's right, per minute. If you have enough spare money to sign on to one of these services, you are in good shape indeed.
Various legal publishing companies also publish those huge expanses of reporters, codes and digests in CD-ROM format. Again, depending on what database you purchase, these can cost from $600 to $3,000 each. No you know one of the reasons lawyers charge so much; they have to pay for all these expensive books and computer legal libraries. A few, smaller publishers have CD-ROM products that cost under $200, such as a disk with the Supreme Court's decisions on it, but the cases will not be in any of the reporter formats.
Far better for the regular person are the legal research resources now available on the Internet for free. Although not in "official" format and often lacking cases from more than five years ago, these Internet resources can be very valuable, especially for the price. Browse through these sites. With them, you can get the full text of the Code of Federal Regulations, the U.S.C., Supreme Court cases for the last few years, and circuit court cases for the last couple of years, and much more. More and more legal research tools are being added to the Web all the time, and the Internet will only become a more powerful legal research tool for the individual. If you are not online yet, the legal research available is alone worth the cost of signing up with an Internet service provider. If you have enough interest to learn about the law, then you need the research capabilities of the Internet.
A quick explanation like this is not enough, and only hands-on experience will allow you to get familiar enough with these systems of codification so that you can find what you need. Beyond the codes and reporters are a whole mess of other types of books that attempt to aid in legal research by grouping certain types of cases together or by collecting scholarly articles about certain types of cases together. These are beyond what most people will need to know about, and I only what to let you know that the sources of research are nearly boundless.
Essentially, for most people, the codes and reporters will be all that you need to look up the law on a particular environmental subject. However, there is one last set of books that the environmentalist needs to know about. This is the "Code of Federal Regulations" ("C.F.R."), which is the codification of all regulations from federal agencies. Most law libraries should have the C.F.R. as well. Most states do not have a set code of regulations, but each agency does keep sets of its own regulations and should be able to provide you with a copy of their regulations on demand. There is also something known as the "Federal Register" ("F.R.") which is the federal government's big announcement medium to give notice about upcoming actions; basically, things that the federal government is thinking about doing or regulations that it is planning to adopt are announced in the federal register. The F.R. is massive, and most libraries do not have it, because it is quite considerable in size, and unless there is a big local need for continual updating on what the federal government is doing, there is no need to have it. But the F.R. is available on the Web, as are the introduced and pending bills before Congress.
Below is a quick list for where to find certain things:
Thing What it is in
federal district court cases Federal Supplement reporter
federal circuit court cases Federal reporter
U.S. Supreme Court cases United States reporter, Supreme Court reporter, Lawyers Edition reporter
federal statutes United States Code
federal regulations Code of Federal Regulations
state cases regional reporters and/or state reporters
state statutes individual state codes
For those wishing to learn the subject of legal research in more depth, I recommend the book Finding the Law: A Workbook on Legal Research for Laypersons, by Professor Al Coco and published by Government Institutes, Inc. This book gives much more detail than I can here, and if you need to do a great deal of legal research, it is worth getting. The address is: Government Industries, Inc., 4 Research Place, Suite 200, Rockville, Maryland 20850.
If you would like to have your own copy of the full text of many of the more important and most-often used federal environmental laws, West Publishing Company puts out a very fat softcover book that contains the text of such statutes as the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, and about 55 others. This book is reissued every year with any changes in the laws. The book is Federal Environmental Laws 199x (the date changes with each new version) and is just $ 36.50 postpaid, and it will save you lots of research time in a library if what you need are the basic texts of the federal laws. For future editions, the address is West Publishing Company, 610 Opperman Drive, P.O. Box 64833, St. Paul, Minnesota 55164-9752. Although that book has most of the health laws regarding the environment, it lacks many major land laws such as the Wilderness Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. If you want your own copy of natural resource and land statutes such as those, write for Natural Resources Statutes put out by Government Institutes at the above address.
However, many of these statutes are also available on the Internet, and this CD-ROM disk has some of them and points you to the sites that have more of them. Although reading on a computer screen is not the same as flipping through the books, the current versions of all the statutes are available to you through the Internet.
One last, very important thing: being able to look up and research legal statutes and cases to some degree DOES NOT substitute for competent legal advice. Although having the text of laws and key cases relevant to your environmental problem can be helpful, it does not enable you to go forth and take full legal action on your own or to make a number of other important legal decisions. No matter how good you get at researching the law, unless you are a lawyer who knows all the ins and outs of legal research and the implications and meanings of everything that you find, you should not make final legal decisions based upon your own legal research. Such research by you should be for informational purposes, for preparing for the administrative things where a lawyer is not needed, and for doing some of the basic groundwork for any lawyer you may hire. Basing your litigation decisions on a case you found could be disastrous if you did not find out that that case was reversed or overruled just last month or that a new statute modifying the law which that case was based upon just came out.
Legal research is complicated, and if you want to inform yourself so that when your lawyer starts talking about the citizen suit provision in the Clean Water Act you will know what he is talking about, then fine. If you want to learn about environmental statutes so that you can lobby Congress and your legislature for improvements in those laws, good. If you want to get more than just a cursory knowledge of our environmental laws so that you can recognize environmental law problems, excellent. But remember, recognizing an environmental law problem is much different from knowing how to solve it through litigation. Having you know the basics of environmental laws and how to find them is good, because otherwise, only the lawyers, the politicians and the industry lobbyists will know what is going on in the realm of environmental law. However, if you need legal help or action, no amount of knowledge on your part will be able to substitute for good legal representation by a lawyer. Without any knowledge of the environmental law system, you and the Earth will be crushed by those who manipulate the system to their advantage. You need to be knowledgeable in the basics of environmental law in order to cause changes for the better, but when it comes time for the actual making of change through litigation, let a lawyer handle that for you.