FINDING THE LAW

PART I

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 A Sample Legal Problem
• A friend who is a shopkeeper has recently
received requests from his young customers
to sell cigarettes in loose manner as the price
for packed cigarettes has gone up drastically.
He is concerned that the police may take
action if he does so, yet he does not want to
lose his young customers by turning down
their request.

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 In considering this problem, 2
questions may be posed:
1. Why might the sale of loose
cigarettes be a matter for law in
the first place?
2. How can you find out if he would
be breaking the law?

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Finding the answers to the legal aspects of
the problem is not a simple task!
• If the answers to those questions can be
found in a single book, there won’t be any
need for lawyers!
• So, a fundamental legal skill must be the

ability to FIND the law

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 Learning Outcomes of this Topic:
At the end of this topic, you should be able to:
(1) Identify the difference between PRIMARY
and SECONDARY sources of legal information;
(2) Develop a competent approach to locating,
accessing & searching print and electronic
sources;
(3) Identify the hierarchy of law reports;
(4) Develop strategies to ascertain the authority
and validity of retrieved materials
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Let’s return to the shopkeeper’s
problem
How do we go about finding the law
on this particular issue?

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We probably can guess that the
answer to her problem lies
somewhere
in existing LEGISLATION, or in CASE
LAW or maybe the combination of
the two!

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 There is a vast amount of that
primary material to be searched
Law is above all a library-based
subject

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 WHAT are the SOURCES of law?

• Legislation
PRIMARY • Case law

• Legal Encyclopedias
SECONDARY
• Textbooks &
(Literary) Journals

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 In practice, the simplest way to
begin researching a problem is to
find a book about it

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 Hence we usually resort to
LITERARY/SECONDARY Sources
to find out the actual
PRIMARY Sources

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 Literary/Secondary Sources

• Halsbury’s Laws of
Legal Malaysia
Encyclopedias
• Mallal’s Digest

• Varieties of
Books and textbooks,casebooks
Journals
• Wide variety of forms

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 Legal Encyclopedias

• Designed to provide a reasonably

complete statement of the law in
a concise form
• Many are subject-specific

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Books and Journals

Books Journals
Academic General
texts Law Quarterly Review
Law Review

Specialised
Practitioner
Journal of Business Law
texts Child & Family Law
Quarterly

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FINDING SECONDARY SOURCES

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 FINDING SECONDARY SOURCES
• Usually, general and basic references are given
in the course outline
• But, students are expected to read widely
than just the required and/or the
recommended texts, particularly when
preparing for assignments!

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 How to go about doing this?
• A Library catalogue – usually in electronic
forms. You can search by keywords (title or
subject-based) and by author –
but this is a fairly crude way of getting started
on certain topics as its highly unlikely you will
find references on ‘tobacco control’ this way!

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 So what do you do?
• Look up for journal articles and proceedings of
conferences. They are useful resources because
they may:
(1) Contain recent developments, which may not be
in textbooks just yet;
(2) Identify different opinions about the purpose
and/or effects of a particular legal principle; and
(3) Contain empirical research about the way law
works in the ‘real world’
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 Searching for journal articles now is best
done through electronic resources:
Malaysian materials:
(a) LexisNexis
(b) CLJ Online (Current Law Journal)
Others:
(a) HeinOnline – US-based database + some UK &
Australian materials
(b) JSTOR – large & multi-disciplinary but not quite
up-to-date
(c) LexisNexis
(d) Westlaw (not subscribed)
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 How AUTHORITATIVE are
literary/SECONDARY Sources?
• These sources do not really contain the LAW;
rather they contain the author’s interpretation
of it.
• This is reflected in the way the courts have
used them – rather unusual to see journal
articles cited as being influential on the court
decision but in rare occasions, the courts’
attitude have relaxed.

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 Examples:
(1) In Morris v Beardmore [1981] AC 446, Lord
Edmund-Davies quoted with approval a
casenote by Geoffrey Samuel in (1980) 96 LQR
12.
(2) In R v Shivpuri [1987] AC 1, the House of Lords
acknowledged the influence of the late
Professor Glanville Williams’s criticism (in
[1986]CLJ 33) of their earlier decision on the law
of attempts in Anderton v Ryan [1985] AC 567

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 A useful reference

Index to Legal Citations and

Abbreviations
- In red , in 3rd Edition and by Sweet & Maxwell

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In the next lecture, we shall look
at techniques on
Finding CASES AND FINDING and
UPDATING LEGISLATION (THE
PRIMARY SOURCES itself!)

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