730-438 Advanced Computer Assisted Legal Research (CALR)

Note

This subject has a quota of 48 students.

Credit Points

Coordinator

Prerequisites

Torts and the Process of Law; History and Philosophy of Law. An appropriate level of competency at manual legal research.

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

An introduction to full-text retrieval; the principles and techniques of Boolean searching; examination of the strengths and inherent weaknesses of Boolean searching; freestyle searching; the 'freestyle v. Boolean' debate; the 'precision v. recall' debate; how CALR systems 'think'; the DiskRom CD-ROMs; Wilson Disc; Legal Trac; Folio Views; the LBC Complete Legal Research System On CD-ROM; the Butterworths CD-ROMs; an in-depth examination of the Australasian Legal Information Institute's resources and SINO search engine; a detailed examination of the Internet's vast array of legal resources, including a study of the principal search engines; ScalePlus; search strategies, search syntax; anticipating and avoiding syntactical problems; synonyms; truncators; annotating, saving and printing search results.

Assessment

2 examinations, totalling 4 hours overall (90%). Class participation, attendance and compulsory practical exercises (10%).

Prescribed Texts

LDL Online 1997 (Surendra Dayal). Printed materials will also be issued by the Law School.