This LibTour on Restatements of the Law, which you can download here, was written by Keith Ann Stiverson. Keith Ann is Director of the Law Library and Senior Lecturer at Chicago-Kent College of Law. LibTour Poster: Print the PDF handout and post it close to your library’s collection. Students can scan the QR code to hear the audio file instantly on their smart phones. Want to customize? LibTours are licensed under Creative Commons. Find out how else you can use LibTours? Transcript: Restatements of the Law are published by the American Law Institute (better known as ALI), a prestigious group of legal scholars and experts whose goal is to “restate” the common law rules that have developed in a particular area of law. The ALI was founded in the early 1920s after a report was published indicating that developing case law was too complex and uncertain. The goal of the ALI founders was to clarify and simplify the law so as to assure agreement on fundamental principles of our common law system. The Restatements are essentially summaries of case law, judge-made doctrines that gradually develop over time. They are well regarded because they are drafted by experts who prepare a tentative draft that is then reviewed by a group of advisers who are also experts. A single restatement project can take 20 years or more to complete. This careful process ensures that members of the bench, bar, and the legal academy have reviewed and criticized the final product, so you can see why a restatement is often considered even more influential than a treatise when you are citing authority. Note that restatements are not primary authority in any jurisdiction unless the state supreme court adopts restatement language in whole or in part. Share

This LibTour on Federal Digests, which you can download here, was written by Sara Gras. Sara is an intern at Brooklyn Law School Library. LibTour Poster: Print the PDF handout and post it close to your library’s collection. Students can scan the QR code to hear the audio file instantly on their smart phones. Want to customize? LibTours are licensed under Creative Commons. Find out how else you can use LibTours? Transcript: This LibTour Covers Federal Digests. As the body of American case law began growing in the 19th century, it became difficult for practitioners to locate cases on particular topics of law. John B. West, the founder of West publishing and Westlaw, developed a classification system to respond to this problem called the West American Digest system. The American Digest System divides the law into major topic categories which are further divided into more specific subcategories – each subcategory is assigned a number.  The number assigned to the subcategory is called a KeyNumber – as in the KEY to your research. When a case is published, an attorney editor identifies each point of law contained in the case. These headnotes are assigned a KeyNumber which corresponds to a legal issue discussed in the case.  All of the cases related to any KeyNumber are listed and briefly described in a research tool called a “digest.”  In other words, a digest serves as an index of published case law from individual state courts, specialty courts like the Bankruptcy Courts, and the Federal Courts. You are currently looking at the West Federal Practice Digest. You’ll notice that the Digest is organized alphabetically. Let’s assume you would like to locate RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) cases in New York federal courts. The first step would be to locate the volume of the digest that contains this issue. As it happens, there are three digest volumes devoted to this topic – 82, 82A, and 82B. If you open Volume 82 and find the beginning of the section on Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, you will notice a general outline of the subtopics contained within the section, along with the applicable KeyNumbers. Looking at this outline is your second step. It can be very helpful in narrowing down the focus of your research since it breaks each legal topic down granularly. For example, you may determine that you are specifically interested in those cases that involve conspiracy, which the outline indicates is KeyNumber 15. The next step is to go to the section of the volume where 15 is located and find the cases in the courts you are interested in – you’ll note they are organized alphabetically by state. You will find there are a number of cases in the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York that contain this issue. The final step is to always also check the pocket part in the back of the volume to see if any new opinions have been added since the publication of the bound volume. It is possible to utilize the Federal Digests to locate cases online when using Westlaw either by searching for a particular KeyNumber in a database, clicking a KeyNumber when reading a case, or utilizing the KeyNumber tools located at the top of the Westlaw screen. Share

This LibTour on AM JUR Trials, which you can download here, was written by Darla Jackson. Darla is the Associate Director of the Law Library at Oklahoma City University School of Law. LibTour Poster: Print the PDF handout and post it close to your library’s collection. Students can scan the QR code to hear the audio file instantly on their smart phones. Want to customize? LibTours are licensed under Creative Commons. Find out how else you can use LibTours? Transcript: This CALI LibTour covers AM JUR Trials. Published by West, a Thomson Reuters business, American Jurisprudence Trials (commonly referred to as AM JUR Trials) has traditionally been a treatise on trial practice.  West has expanded the treatise to include other dispute resolution forums, such as mediation and arbitration.  So for example, in Volume 118, you’ll find an article discussing mediation and arbitration of family law disputes. The multi-volume set was initially published in 1964 and now contains 119 volumes.  The first six volumes, entitled Practice Strategy Controls, cover matters common to all types of trial practice.  The remaining volumes, entitled Model Trials, contain articles detailing the handling of specific types of issues, including criminal, personal injury, and business transactions.   Articles provide guidance on all phases of litigation and dispute resolution, including client interviews, discovery, pleadings, motions, witness examinations, review, and appeals.  The articles feature checklists, model pleadings, discovery and motion forms, sample litigation aids, sample witness examinations and cross-examinations, and sample opening statements, and final arguments. AM JUR TRIALS is updated by annual pocket supplements.   The set is accompanied by a separate annual multi-volume softcover index, which is occasionally supplemented with an update pamphlet.   The first volume of the index also contains a Quick Access Guide listing articles by volume and topic.  Index entries are arranged alphabetically by topic; and for volumes 1-76 are pinpointed to volume and page.  Entries for volumes published after volume 76 are pinpointed to the article and section. Articles in AM JUR TRIALS, unlike the entries in American Jurisprudence Second and other related sets, are not prepared by the editorial staff of the publisher.  Rather, an experienced lawyer authors each article.  Thus, using AM JUR Trials is an excellent means of obtaining practice advice from experienced lawyers in the trial bar. Let’s use AM JUR Trials to find some guidance on a criminal trial issue in the following scenario.  You are serving as the appointed pro bono counsel for an individual charged with rape.  You normally are involved in civil litigation and would like to obtain some general guidance on handling this type of prosecution.  More specifically, you are interested in learning about DNA evidence in a rape prosecution.   Using the List of Articles by Topic provided by the Quick Access Guide in the first volume of the 2010-2011 Edition of the General Index, you find an article entitled “Handling the Defense in a Rape Prosecution” is located in Volume 18 at page 341.  Before you review the article, you want to see if the article addresses DNA evidence.  You locate the term “Rape” in the General Index, but do not find a reference to DNA evidence under the term rape.  Nonetheless you turn to the article and find useful information, including some cross-examination questions for the complaining witness.  Then, you turn to the 2010 pocket supplement in the back of the volume and find that the article has been updated and despite its omission from the index, Section 50.5 in the update addresses DNA evidence in rape prosecutions. AM JUR Trials is also available on Westlaw and WestlawNext.   On WestlawNext , the system suggest the resource if you type in “American Juris”;  and AM JUR Trials is also available by following the links for secondary sources on the homepage [...]

This CALI LibTour on Law Journals, also called Law Reviews, was written by Melanie Oberlin. Melanie is the Instructional Services Librarian at the George Mason University School of Law. You can download the audio file here. LibTour Poster: Librarians and legal writing professors:  Download the pre-made, letter-sized poster. Print the PDF and post it close to your library’s collection. Students can scan the QR code to hear the audio file instantly on their smart phones. Want to customize? LibTours are licensed under Creative Commons. Find out how else you can use LibTours? Transcript: This CALI LibTour covers law journals, which are also called law reviews. These are scholarly journals with articles about the law. Each law journal publishes a few issues per year. New issues are paperback. Some libraries bind a year’s worth together in hardback. Often, the new, paperback issues are located in one place, and the bound volumes are located elsewhere in the library. If you look at the front cover of a paperback issue, you see the title of the journal, the volume number, issue number, and date. You see a list of the Articles, Notes, and Comments. Articles are written by professionals – usually law professors, but sometimes practicing judges or attorneys. Notes and Comments are written by students. Each article covers a very specific point of law. The specificity is what makes law journal articles a unique secondary source. Remember that secondary sources are writings about the law. The law itself is called a primary source, or primary authority. Law journal articles are similar to treatises – another secondary source – because they are written by an author who knows a lot about the subject, and they include extensive footnotes to primary authority and other secondary authority. If a law journal article is written by a well-known scholar, is published in a well-regarded journal, or includes excellent analysis, it may be cited in legal documents. You might use a law journal article to understand a point of law or help craft an argument for a memo or a brief. For example, let’s say that in your Civil Procedure class you learned about pleadings standards, and your professor mentioned Twombly and Iqbal, two Supreme Court decisions about pleadings. You might find law review articles to help you understand these decisions. Each article will provide a brief history about pleading standards, analyze the two decisions in detail, give examples of how the decisions will affect specific cases, and, finally, raise questions about the usefulness of the decisions or suggest how lower courts should apply them. To find law journal articles, you could search the “law reviews and journals” database on Westlaw or Lexis. Or, you could use an index to legal periodicals to help you find citations to articles. Law journal articles are available in print, and online at Westlaw, Lexis, HeinOnLine, and at the journal’s website. Hopefully, you will find a helpful article that was written recently. You don’t update articles using KeyCite or Shepard’s like you do for cases. Instead, if an article is old or seems out-of-date, you simply look for a newer article on the same subject. Share

This LibTour on Legal Periodicals & Books was written by Margaret Krause, Reference Librarian, Georgetown Law Library. You can download the audio file here. LibTour Poster: Librarians and legal writing professors:  Download the pre-made, letter-sized LibTour poster. Print the PDF, and post it close to your library’s collection. Students can scan the QR code to hear the audio file instantly on their smart phones. What Else Can I Do With This?: We offer LibTour materials to you under this Creative Commons license. It means those of you at schools and libraries – including law firm and public libraries – can use LibTour about however you want. Just give credit to CALI and don’t turn around and sell our work. But, change it around completely, post it on your own site, work it into your library tours, paste all the QR codes onto one handout…whatever you want. Just have fun, be creative, share and let us know what you’re doing with them! Transcript: This CALI LibTour is an introduction to Legal Periodicals & Books, an index of law review articles and legal books written in the United States,­ Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. As an undergrad, you might have used the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, or WilsonWeb database, to find scholarly journal articles written on a particular subject. For legal literature, the H.W. Wilson Company produces the Legal Periodicals & Books annual indices to assist researchers in locating relevant articles by specific legal subjects. Legal Periodicals & Books has been published since 1908, when it was originally titled the Index to Legal Periodicals & Books, or ILP. At that time it indexed just 39 legal publications. Today, articles from over 700 law journals are indexed by author, subject, and jurisdiction. Law review articles are indexed by broad subject areas, such as ethics, judicial independence, and self-incrimination. Researchers can quickly locate articles on a particular subject, by using this controlled vocabulary. Today, many researchers use this set of indices as an online database, called Legal Periodicals & Books, which indexes legal articles & books back to 1981. For historical research, the database of Legal Periodicals Retro will offer subject & author access to the articles written from 1908 to 1981. Just so you know how this set works, let’s try to locate articles written on the legal questions surrounding detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Let’s start our research in Volume 43, which covers September 2003 to August 2004. By simply looking up Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, which we find on page 742, we can identify a few articles written on this topic. For example, the first article is published in volume 21 of the Berkeley Journal of International Law on pages 662 to 682. You’ll also notice on this page, the subject “Guardian and Ward”. Since this is primarily a legal issue legislated at the state level, you will see that the index has sub-headings by state, so you can identify an article on California laws related to guardian and ward.  One other valuable feature of Legal Periodicals & Books is that it includes a Table of Cases and a Table of Statutes. In this volume 43, if you turn to page 1829, you’ll see what I mean. This is helpful if you want to locate law review articles written about a specific case, or a specific statute, such as the Clean Air Act. To quickly identify relevant legal literature on a specific topic, make use of the Legal Periodicals & Books in print, or online on Lexis, Westlaw and WilsonWeb. Share

This LibTour on United States Code Annotated (USCA) and United States Code Service (USCS) was written by Sara Sampson, Head of Reference at Georgetown University Law Library. You can download the audio file here. LibTour Poster: Librarians and legal writing professors:  Download the pre-made, letter-sized LibTour poster. Print the PDF, and post it close to your library’s collection. Students can scan the QR code to hear the audio file instantly on their smart phones. What Else Can I Do With This?: We offer LibTour materials to you under this Creative Commons license. It means those of you at schools and libraries – including law firm and public libraries – can use LibTour about however you want. Just give credit to CALI and don’t turn around and sell our work. But, change it around completely, post it on your own site, work it into your library tours, paste all the QR codes onto one handout…whatever you want. Just have fun, be creative, share and let us know what you’re doing with them! Transcript: This LibTour covers the United Stat­es Code Annotated (referred to as USCA) and United States Code Service (often called “USCS”).  Remember that all versions of the United States Code contain statutes, which are laws passed by Congress.  A code is arranged by subject.  So, laws on similar topics are together.  If the official US Code is nearby, you’ll notice right away that it is a much smaller set of books than either the USCA or USCS.  That is because both are annotated with references to sources to help you understand and apply the statute.  USCA is published by the company that owns Westlaw, USCS is published by the company that owns Lexis.  They both reprint the text of the law and have the same kinds of extra content (called “annotations”).  For almost all types of research, you will use only one set: either the USCA or the USCS. As you look at the code books, notice that the books are labeled with topics.  These are the Titles of the code.  For example, all of the Title 18 books are Crimes and Criminal Procedure. Say that you want to find the federal statutory law on the crime of murder.  You can use the index.  The index books are usually shelved at the end of the USCA or USCS set.  First, you’ll need to think of a few key words to describe what you’re looking for.  Let’s try the most obvious one first: Murder.  There will be several index books, find the one that contains entries for the letter “M” and scan through the pages until you find the entry on “murder.”  Then look for a reference that defines murder.  You should find a reference to 18 section 1111 under either “generally,” “definitions,” or “defined.” Next, find the book labeled Title 18 that contains the range that includes 1111.  Then scan the pages until you find section 1111. Once you’ve found the section, look at the table of contents for Chapter 51- Homicide.  If you’re using USCA, you may need to flip back a page.  Skim through the short table of contents to see the code’s structure.  Notice how similar crimes (like manslaughter) are nearby.  Special types of murder are also listed here.  This is why you should get into the habit of browsing the other code sections around your section.  You can easily do this online too. Look at section A of the statute.  It defines the crime of murder.  The text of the code is followed by the history.  This shows how the law has changed.  Next, are references to more potentially relevant code sections.  Then you’ll see references to other sources (like encyclopedias and articles) that will help you understand and interpret the statute.  Finally, you see the “notes of decision” or “Interpretive Notes and Decisions.”  This is the most helpful part of the annotated code.  These are summaries of cases that deal with this code section.  It’s not every case.  Rather it’s a representative sample of the types of cases that exist. As with most print legal materi[...]

This LibTour on West’s Digests, which you can download here, was written by Nan Balliot and Rebecca Lucca. Nan is the Readers Services Librarian and Rebecca is the Cataloging Asistant at Roger Williams University School of Law. LibTour Poster: Librarians and legal writing professors:  Download the pre-made, letter-sized LibTour poster. Print the PDF, and post it close to your library’s collection. Students can scan the QR code to hear the audio file instantly on their smart phones. What Else Can I Do With This?: We offer LibTour materials to you under this Creative Commons license. It means those of you at schools and libraries – including law firm and public libraries – can use LibTour about however you want. Just give credit to CALI and don’t turn around and sell our work. But, change it around completely, post it on your own site, work it into your library tours, paste all the QR codes onto one handout…whatever you want. Just have fun, be creative, share and let us know what you’re doing with them! Transcript: West Thomson/Reuters publishes regional reporters for state cases and federal case reporters, as well as case reporters for California and New York.   State appellate court opinions are published in the regional case reporters.  One regional case reporter is the Pacific Reporter.   Cases from the federal district courts and the Circuit Courts of Appeals are published in federal case reporters.  Federal case reporters include the Federal Supplement and the Federal Reporter.  U.S. Supreme Court cases are published in the Supreme Court Reporter. The digests are a useful way for you to find citations to state and federal court opinions that are published in case reporters.  There are digests for the federal case reporters, digests for four of the seven regional case reporters, and a digest for each state with the exception of Delaware, Nevada and Utah.  Using a digest is one of the best ways to find cases on an issue of law in your jurisdiction as it ensures a comprehensive  search. To understand a digest, you first need to understand a headnote.  Editors at West read court opinions and write the headnotes for each opinion.  The text of a headnote is from the text of the Court’s opinion.  The headnotes to a case are then assigned broad topics and key numbers.  Each key number represents a particular aspect of the topic.  The headnotes precede the text of the Court’s opinion as published in the case reporter.  A digest is a multivolume set containing the headnotes published in a corresponding case reporter by topic.  There are 414 digest topics and numerous key numbers for each topic.  Each number represents a specialized subject within the topic.  The topics and the key numbers are the same for each published digest.  Periodically, a topic and its key numbers are changed.  The changes are published in the digest volume containing the topic in a Key Number translation table. Let’s use a digest to find a case in the following scenario.  You are working as an Assistant District Attorney in Alaska.  Anchorage police have arrested John Doe while he was breaking into an unoccupied fishing vessel in the harbor.  You must determine whether an unoccupied fishing vessel is considered to be a “dwelling” according to the Alaska burglary statute. Alaska appellate court cases are published in the West’s Pacific Reporter because there is no case reporter that publishes just Alaska case law.  The headnotes from the Alaska appellate court cases are published in the West’s Pacific Digest.  Go to the Pacific Digest on the shelves in your library.  You must use the descriptive word index to the Pacific Digest to find a relevant topic and key number.  Using Volume 55, Descriptive Word Index A to CI, find the subject heading Burglary.  Look for the subtopic Building; under Building, you will find Character of and Elements and requisites.   You will see the word Burg and the [...]

This LibTour on study aids commonly found in the law library, which you can download here, was written by Nicole Paccione Dyszlewski, a Reference Librarian at Roger Williams University School of Law. LibTour Poster: Librarians and legal writing professors:  Download the pre-made, letter-sized LibTour poster. Print the PDF, and post it close to your library’s collection. Students can scan the QR code to hear the audio file instantly on their smart phones. What Else Can I Do With This?: We offer LibTour materials to you under this Creative Commons license. It means those of you at schools and libraries – including law firm and public libraries – can use LibTour about however you want. Just give credit to CALI and don’t turn around and sell our work. But, change it around completely, post it on your own site, work it into your library tours, paste all the QR codes onto one handout…whatever you want. Just have fun, be creative, share and let us know what you’re doing with them! Transcript: This CALI LibTour covers your library’s reference section. The Reference Section, sometimes referred to as the Ready Reference Section, is a collection of print resources complied by the library for the purposes of general and legal reference. It is not one collection of books by one publisher and it is not standardized across libraries. Each library’s reference section will look a little bit different and have different resources, but for the most part, they serve the same purpose and have similar materials. The Reference section exists to help patrons quickly access basic information. This information can be basic legal or non-legal information. The material is collected in one place to provide a broad range of resources to help a student, researcher, attorney or librarian find factual information quickly and consistently. You usually can’t borrow resources in the reference section, so that this information is available to all patrons when it is needed. While the material in the reference section is compiled by each different library, there are many similarities across reference collections. Legal reference sections often include a collection of dictionaries and thesauri. Chief among these are legal dictionaries and thesauri which explain legal words and phrases, such as Black’s Law Dictionary. Besides dictionaries and thesauri, another type of resource available in many reference sections is legal research and writing material. Legal research and writing material assists patrons with simple grammar, proper citation of legal authorities, and legal research instruction. An example of a legal research and writing resource is The Bluebook. Another commonly available resource in the reference section is business and medical reference material. In addition, some reference sections include resources on job searching and legal career opportunities. An example of an employment-related resource is the NALP Directory of Legal Employers. Finally, many reference sections have legal and non-legal directories. These resources provide information about members of the bench and bar, judicial systems, and government entities. An example of a directory is the Federal Regulatory Directory. In addition, the reference section usually contains resources about Supreme Court history and important judicial decisions, such as the Supreme Court Compendium. Overall, while the contents of reference sections may vary slightly, the purpose of the reference section remains the same across all law libraries: to collect print materials of primary importance to patrons and provide accessibility to those materials. Share

This LibTour on study aids commonly found in the law library, which you can download here, was written by Nan Balliot. Nan is the Readers Services Librarian at Roger Williams University School of Law. LibTour Poster: Librarians and legal writing professors:  Download the pre-made, letter-sized LibTour poster. Print the PDF, and post it close to your library’s collection. Students can scan the QR code to hear the audio file instantly on their smart phones. What Else Can I Do With This?: We offer LibTour materials to you under this Creative Commons license. It means those of you at schools and libraries – including law firm and public libraries – can use LibTour about however you want. Just give credit to CALI and don’t turn around and sell our work. But, change it around completely, post it on your own site, work it into your library tours, paste all the QR codes onto one handout…whatever you want. Just have fun, be creative, share and let us know what you’re doing with them! Transcript: This CALI LibTour covers study aids available through your library. To supplement your casebook and in-class notes, you might want to use a hornbook, nutshell or other study aid. A study aid is a secondary source that explains the legal concepts in a particular area of law. There are study aids on numerous legal subjects. These study aids are generally authored by law professors. A hornbook is a single volume devoted to one area of law. A hornbook contains references to cases, statutes, and secondary sources such as law review articles and American Law Reports annotations. Unlike a hornbook, a nutshell provides a basic overview of the legal concepts in a particular area of law with few references to cases, statutes, and secondary sources. Hornbooks and nutshells are published by West/Thomson Reuters.  Check Westlaw/WestlawNext for electronic availability of a particular hornbook or nutshell. LexisNexis publishes the “Understanding …” series and Aspen publishes the Examples and Explanations series of study aids. The Examples and Explanations series of study aids has hypotheticals along with explanations to the hypotheticals. Foundation Press, an independent affiliate of West/Thomson Reuters, also publishes the Concepts and Insights series on various areas of the law. The “Mastering …” series is published by Carolina Academic Press. There are other study aids by other publishers. Mentioned in this audio tour are the major publishers of study aids. Generally, study aids have a table of contents in the beginning of the book and an index of subjects in the back of the book. References from the index may be to a section rather than a page. A study aid may have a list of cases cited in the book and, depending on the topic, a list of statutory sources that may include citations to the United States Code or to a uniform or model act such as the Uniform Commercial Code. Publishers will update the study aid by publishing a new edition. Study aids are shelved with books on the same subject by Library of Congress call number. Current editions of a study aid may be shelved on Reserve with earlier editions being shelved in open stacks or all editions of a study aid may be shelved together in the open stacks. To locate available study aids in a library’s collection, use that library’s online catalog or ask a librarian for assistance. In addition to the print study aids, CALI (Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction) provides electronic access to over 850 interactive lessons on numerous legal subjects. Lessons are authored by law school professors and law librarians. When signing up to access the lessons at the CALI website (www.cali.org), you will need to obtain your law school’s authorization code.  You can search for a lesson by topic, author, casebook or subject outline. Share

This LibTour on uniform laws and model acts, which you can download here, was written by Darla Jackson. Darla is the Associate Director of the Law Library at Oklahoma City University School of Law. LibTour Poster: Librarians and legal writing professors:  Download the pre-made, letter-sized LibTour poster. Print the PDF, and post it close to your library’s collection. Students can scan the QR code to hear the audio file instantly on their smart phones. What Else Can I Do With This?: We offer LibTour materials to you under this Creative Commons license. It means those of you at schools and libraries – including law firm and public libraries – can use LibTour about however you want. Just give credit to CALI and don’t turn around and sell our work. But, change it around completely, post it on your own site, work it into your library tours, paste all the QR codes onto one handout…whatever you want. Just have fun, be creative, share and let us know what you’re doing with them! Transcript: You are trying to interpret a state statute.  The language of the statute seems ambiguous and no courts in your jurisdiction have interpreted the statute. There is no helpful legislative history.  If the statute is based on a uniform or model law, you may find assistance in interpreting in the statute by reviewing the intent of the drafters of the uniform law, the changes made to the text before adoption, and the interpretation of courts in other states that have adopted the uniform or model law.  This CALI LibTour covers the Uniform Laws Annotated (ULA), a multi-volume resource which will assist you in locating not only the text of the uniform or model law but also commentary of the drafters as well as annotations of cases interpreting the language of the uniform or model law. The organization primarily responsible for drafting uniform laws is the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL).  The NCCUSL is comprised of state appointed commissioners. State legislatures are encouraged to adopt uniform acts exactly as written by the NCCUSL to promote uniformity among the states.  While the NCCUSL has also drafted some model acts, many model acts, including the Model Penal Code, are developed by the American Law Institute (ALI). The ALI, an organization comprised of prominent judges, law professors, and attorneys, is also well known as the group responsible for the Restatements of the Law.  Perhaps the most notable example of a uniform law, the Uniform Commercial Code, was drafted as a joint project of NCCUSL and ALI.  The American Bar Association (ABA) has also been responsible for drafting several and model acts and uniform laws.  For example the Model Business Corporation Act was prepared by the ABA’s Business Law Section.  In contrast to uniform laws, model acts are intended as guidelines, which states may adapt to best address the unique circumstances in that state. Uniform laws and model laws/acts are compiled in the annotated set, the Uniform Laws Annotated, Master Edition. This set, currently composed of fifteen volumes has a green cover.  Volumes 1-5 of the set contain information related to the Uniform Commercial Code; volumes 6-6A contain business and nonprofit organization laws; volumes 7-7C address business and financial laws; volumes 8-8C include estate, probate and related laws; volumes 9-9C contain laws related to matrimony, family and health; volumes 10-11A include laws related to criminal law, criminal procedure and sentencing; and volumes 12-15A contain laws related to civil procedure, evidence, and remedies.  The topics addressed in that volume, as well as some of the uniform and model laws contained in that volume, appear on the spine of each volume.  Additionally, each volume contains an alphabetical index for uniform or model acts contained in the volume. Preceding most laws, the ULA sets forth: – a table of jurisdictions where the act h[...]