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Pritzker Legal Research Center


Immigration Law Clinic

What's In This Guide?

Welcome to the LibGuide for the Immigration Law Clinic!  This guide provides links to many of the resources available for conducting research in this area.  Please contact a librarian if you have questions about this guide or discover additional resources that should be added.


                                           Image Credit: Atarimaster

Research Steps

  1. Brainstorm and make notes. Write a list of keywords, terms of art, jurisdiction, times, known names (for example, a particular judge), etc. before ​you start searching. This pulls out some of the terms and concepts you'll want to keep in mind as you search, but also is a benchmark from which you can cull and refine as your understanding progresses.
  2. Search for secondary sources such as practitioner manuals, Treatises, journalarticles, American Jurisprudence, ALRtreatises, journal articles, American Jurisprudence (Am. Jur.), and American Law Reports (ALR).
    • These sources are expert narrative coverage of your topic but also will cite to relevant authority like controlling statutes, regulations, and decisions. Note these authorities.
  3. Use the intelligent tools of the database to help you identify related materials and authorities.These tools include citing references (WL), headnotes, table of parallel authorities (to locate regulations from a US code cite), notes of decisions/annotations, and using the topical sections of the databases (immigration) instead of keyword searching case law broadly.
  4. Keyword search with your enhanced understanding and key terms to finalize the searching portion of your research. This will help you ensure you didn't miss something obvious, on-point, or recently released.
  5. Shepardize your authorities to make sure all the law you found is still good law.
  6. Now you should have a quality collection of the most pertinent materials so you can move into the legal analysis phase necessary to apply what you've found and write your argument.

See our Summer Standout (formerly Prepare to Practice) guide for more practical research advice including strategy and organization, especially researching regulatory issues and the overview of Federal Administrative Law.