Legal Research Tools: Find A Case

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Loislaw provides two efficient shortcuts for conducting a case search — Find A Case and SelectCite — when subscribers know the citation in advance.

Find A Case

Find A Case allows direct retrieval of single or multiple citations. To retrieve a single citation known in advance, simply type it into the Find A Case dialog box near the top of Loislaw's main browser window. To retrieve multiple citations, click on the "Multiple Citations" link that sits directly underneath the Find A Case box.

A new dialog window will appear for searching multiple citations. Users can enter several citations, compile them into a list, and then retrieve all the documents at once. Type the citations into the first box; click Add Cite to List after entering each one. Click Look up List of Cites to retrieve all the documents. To remove a citation, select it and click Delete Cite from List.

The forgiving feature of Find A Case: 'normalization' of citations

Find A Case does not require a strict match between a user's entry and an official citation. While the entry needs to approximate the form of an official citation, Find A Case will often work without regard to punctuation or minor typos; users may actually omit periods or spaces (for example) and still retrieve the correct document.

In a process called 'normalization', Find A Case compares irregular citations or variants entered by the user to many known forms of official citations. Within a certain range of variation, Find A Case will select the right form, normalize the user's entry, and retrieve the desired case.