Legal Research

Legal research and legal statistics are invaluable tools to understanding the legal system and the world that we live in. Legal research is known as the process of finding and analyzing data and information that is vital to assist and support legal decision-making. Though the specifics of the process involved in legal research differs from person to person, law firm to law firm, and country to country, the basic steps remain the same. First the individual carrying out the legal research will locate primary law sources, such as regulations or previous cases that is relative to the information he/she is trying to collect. After the primary sources have been identified and reviewed secondary sources will be consulted, such as law reviews and legal dictionaries and encyclopedias. Secondary sources will help to provide some background information on the topic that the individual is researching. After the secondary sources have been consulted the individual carrying out the legal research may choose to seek other supporting information in outside sources. Websites such as Westlaw.com assists in legal research by providing easy access to public records so that it is more convenient to track down people and their contacts as well as patent history information. Though convenient for legal research, these websites and computer programs often cost money. The Internet law library provides valuable information for individuals who are doing legal research and provides access to the findings of other individuals’ research.

The topic that is most often associated with legal statistics is that of immigration. Immigration occurs when people move from their place of birth into a new habitat. An example of this includes when thousands of Irish immigrated to the United States during the Great Potato Famine between 1845 and 1852. People from Mexico illegally immigrate to the United States on a daily basis in search of a better life for themselves and their family. North America has over 4.1 million immigrants, while Britain has the largest number of immigrants, with 70.6 million people immigrating into Britain in 2005. Legal statistics often goes hand in hand with crime statistics. These statistics are very important when researching background information for legal cases. After conducting a lot of research the legal statistics on child abuse shows that in 2007 approximately 794,000 children were victims of neglect and abuse. The highest rate of abuse occurred in the victims with ages ranging from birth to one year. Girls made up more than half of the child victims. About one half of the victims were white. These statistics provide an interesting, but scary image of child abuse in the United States. Legal statistics provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation shows that in 2008 13,690 law enforcement agencies had collected data related to hate crime. 2,145 of these agencies reported a total of 7,783 hate crimes. The legal statistics show that of these hate crimes 1.3% were racially motivated, 19.5% were caused by religious bias, 11.5% were based on ethnicity bias and 16.7% were because of the victims sexual orientation. This information becomes important for lawyers and law students as background information when working on cases that involves similar information or motives.