1L Legal Research - 2022-2023

To promote efficient operation and establish uniform procedures, courts are empowered to enact certain rules relating to procedures and administrative matters. Rules of courts control the operation of the courts and the conduct of the litigants appearing before them. Court rules can dictate everything from time limits to file pleadings to the margins of documents filed with the court. While they may appear to be purely procedural, court rules can have an impact on individuals’ substantive rights.

Sometimes, legal issues will be governed by local ordinances either in lieu of or as well as state or federal laws. Typical topics that may be governed by local laws are education, housing/property, transportation, law enforcement/criminal offenses and environmental conditions, and in many instances, will work in conjunction with state or federal laws on an issue. Local ordinances and municipal codes are often not available in the standard paid legal research databases (such as Westlaw, Lexis Advance, or Bloomberg Law), and they are rarely annotated. However, they typically are available for free online, often on city or county websites that are hosted by Municipal Code Corporation (“Municode”). Municode publishes legal documents for local governments in all 50 states, including local ordinance codes.