Date of Award

12-1-2003

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Educational Leadership

Abstract

Educators and citizens in North Dakota often need to research North Dakota law. They need to research primary authority materials (e.g., the North Dakota Constitution, the North Dakota Supreme Court opinions, the North Dakota Century Code, the North Dakota Administrative Code). Educators and citizens also need to utilize secondary authority materials that help them locate, update, explain or interpret the law (e.g., digests, citators, law reviews or treatises). There is no guide for North Dakota legal research materials that serves to help the educator or citizen in these research efforts.

The following methodology was used to produce a guide for North Dakota legal research. Legal research guides for the contiguous states (Minnesota, Montana, and South Dakota) and selected legal research monographs were reviewed. A rubric was applied to examine the following features in both the guides and the monographs: treatment of primary and secondary authority materials, treatment of finding tools and citators, and treatment of guide-specific or monograph-specific features (e.g., organizational structure of guide). In addition, selected education law monographs and periodicals were reviewed to discover which areas or topics of education law (e.g., student records, rights of the disabled) most commonly appear in the monographs and periodicals. Where applicable, those topics were included as illustrations in the guide, with North Dakota-specific examples utilized. Selected legal research periodicals were also reviewed in order to ascertain recent scholarship about effective legal research. Online legal research via the Internet was conducted in order to provide illustrations of online accessibility to legal materials.

This study developed a guide to North Dakota legal materials. Further, the guide included North Dakota K-12 through higher education legal illustrations. The goal was to help the educator and citizen more effectively and efficiently utilize North Dakota legal resources.

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