Legal Research

Finding Statutes on Westlaw

By Diane Murley

Trying to find statutes in a full-text database can be frustrating, but Westlaw and LexisNexis have a number of tools to help you find what you need. Today I will show you some of Westlaw’s tools. Tomorrow I will cover LexisNexis.

Westlaw fields

• Use the caption field (CA) to search just the section number and heading.
• Use the prelim field (PR) to search the headings that precede the caption.

For example, if I wanted to find all sections of the Internal Revenue Code that deal with deductions or credits, I could search the USCA for:

pr(”internal revenue code”) and pr,ca(deduction or credit)

The substantive-doc field (SD) includes the citation, prelim, caption, text, and credit fields (everything but annotations and other references added by West).

Th SD field can be used to retrieve only those sections where your search terms appear in the statutory language. It is also great if you only want to print the statutory sections, not all the pages of annotations.

You can find more tips by clicking on the information icon to the right of a database name and then “Searching and Fields” at the top of the next screen.

Westlaw also has other search options for statutory databases, including Table of Contents, Statutes Index, and Popular Name Table. You can access these options by clicking on the link in the upper right corner of the search screen.

Full post as published by Ross-Blakley Law Library Blog on February 04, 2008 (boomark / email).