In the past several years, a robust dialogue has opened up in law schools and law practice surrounding the influence of “black box” search algorithms on legal research. But the challenge for legal research instructors has been not only to understand the technologies and their critiques, but also to incorporate this new knowledge into their lesson plans.
In this session, we will introduce methods that have worked for us. Attendees of this session should have an interest in, or experience with, teaching legal research in any environment and a basic understanding of search concepts. We will first briefly review scholarship and discussion on legal search algorithms on legal research platforms. Then, for the rest of the session, we will present our proposals for how to instruct law students and attorneys to most effectively use search as a part of their research. Finally, attendees will also help demonstrate these concepts through a mock classroom session and exercise.
Why should you listen to us? Alexa is a legal research and writing professor and a coauthor of The Complete Legal Writer, which will be out in its second edition in June 2020. Aaron is a law librarian and an advanced legal research professor and a coauthor of Principles of Legal Research 3d, due out in August 2020. As colleagues who have taught first-year and upper-level legal research and who have recently written textbooks on legal research that incorporate information about how to understand the features of the legal search process, we both bring different perspectives to the problem with the same goal in mind: how to best equip our students to successfully use the types of legal research tools they will encounter in practice.
