Academic Legal Writing - Eugene Volokh [51]
How can you track down some of the sources?
1. Some of them are available on Westlaw or Lexis, for instance in Westlaw's ALLCASES, TRIALORDERS-ALL (civil cases), CRORDERS-ALL (criminal cases), BRIEFS-ALL, and FILINGALL databases, or Lexis's CourtLink service and CRTFLS; BRFMOT and CRTFLS;PLDNGS files.
2. Recent federal court documents can be quickly retrieved from PACER by your law library's research librarians. Librarians probably won't give you direct access to PACER, because it costs the library 8 cents per page. But they will probably be happy to do a modest amount of PACER lookup on your behalf.
3. More broadly, your law librarians will likely be happy to help even with the more difficult document retrieval tasks, so long as you ask them politely and explain to them why the document is important to your scholarship. (For more on getting the help of your law librarians, see the material starting at p. 95 below.)
4. Lawyers who worked on the cases will often be glad to send you public documents in the case, if you ask them nicely and make clear that you're working hard on a serious law review article. If one side's lawyer doesn't help, the other side's might. And sometimes lawyers will even talk generally to you about non-public information: For instance, they could tell you whether the case settled, and sometimes give you a general sense of the size of the settlement.
E. Digging Deeper into the Subject of the Legal Rules
You should also learn as much as you can (given time constraints) about the subject that is being regulated by the legal doctrines you describe.
Thus, for instance, say you're writing about whether the Equal Protection Clause forbids sheriff's departments from releasing more men than women when the men's jails are more overcrowded, and vice versa. You may have thought of the project because you read an article about such a policy in one jail. But call other jails in other places and ask them whether they have the same policy. Do some jails find sex-neutral policies feasible even when others insist that such policies can't possibly work? Do different jails have different sex-based policies, some of which may be less discriminatory than others?
Also try to find out how jails are designed, and whether they can be designed in ways that minimize the need for sex-based releases. For instance, are all jails set up so that there is one building for men and one for women, so that when there's a surge of male inmates there won't be room for them until a new building is built? Or are some jails built in a way that easily lets jailers shift some cells from one gender to the other, so empty women's cells can be used when the men's cells overflow—or at least in a way that lets jailers make sure that both sides are equally overcrowded, and require an equal degree of early release?
These questions might at first not seem directly relevant to the constitutional question, which might in theory be answerable in the abstract. But in practice few legal issues can be answered purely abstractly: There are often doctrines (such as the least restrictive means requirement in Equal Protection Clause law) that require courts to look closely at the facts. And more importantly, you never know what you're going to uncover when you make some calls like this. You might not even know which questions to ask until you talk to a few people.
So call those who have personal knowledge of the subject. Also feel free to call scholars who work in the field—in this examples, criminologists who study jail policies—or even lawyers who work in the field. People are often flattered to be asked for their expert opinion, and while some may be too busy to help, others might be glad to give you a little time.
Do some research yourself, though, before calling on others for help. First, this will help you know what questions to ask. Second, it will make others more willing to help you. You want to show people that their help will supplement your own hard work, rather than that