Official v. Unofficial

Many field libraries contain both official and unofficial sets of books. There are some differences between them. A set of books is considered official when one of the two following tests is met: . If the book is published pursuant to some sort of statutory direction or law, then it is considered to be the official set of books to report the laws or cases within the jurisdiction of the legislative body that enacted the statute. For example, there is a federal statute that states that the United States Code (U.S.C.) will be the official set of books to report all the statutes enacted by the U.S. Congress. Any other set of books that reports these same statutes would be considered unofficial. . The other test is met when the author of the book allows a publisher to print the material. Since the author has given permission for the printing, it is considered official. If you authored a book and then authorized a certain publisher to print it, you then would consider that publisher's printing of your book to be the official version and any other printing by another publisher to be unauthorized and thus considered unofficial.

Most libraries contain official and unofficial sets of books that report the same cases. For example, the U.S.C. is the official set of books that reports the statutes enacted by Congress. Additionally, two unofficial sets of books that report the same law are the United States Code Annotated (U.S.C.A.) and the United States Code Service (U.S.C.S.).

You may ask yourself why there are three sets of books that report the same thing? There are several reasons a command might want to subscribe to the unofficial set of books as well as the official set of books. The unofficial sets often extend beyond a single jurisdictional boundary and will report the case for an entire geographical area rather than for a single state. For example, the Atlantic Reporter, part of the National ^{Reporter System,} covers the cases for the states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Washington, DC. When several states report cases in a single set of books, you can see why the set of books would be published sooner than publishing one set for each state.

The unofficial sets are usually uniform in how the material is indexed. West Publishing Company, for example, uses the system known as the key numbering system for all its books.

List of Lawbooks in the Typical NLSO Law Library

The following list of lawbooks is usually included in all NLSO law libraries:

l United States Reports

l Lawyer's Edition of the Supreme Court Report

l Supreme Court Reporter

l United States Law Week

l Federal Reporter

l Federal Reporter, 2d Series

l Federal Supplement

l Military Justice Reporter

l Court-Martial Reports

l United States Code Annotated

l Code of Federal Regvlations

l Black's Law Dictionary

l The local state statutes

Sources of Authority

There are three types of books in the law library; those that contain the laws that are to be enforced by our government; those that explain or try to describe the law; and those that help us to find a particular law. These books fall into three basic categories called primary authority, secondary authority, and finding tools. Do not confuse this manner of description with official and unofficial.

Primary authority includes rules for human behavior that are enforced by the state or federal government. In other words, it is the law and it must be followed. Primary authority may be in the form of court decisions, statutes enacted by our Congress or other legislative bodies, or administrative law.

You will find that when Congress enacts a law, it is usually written in very broad and general terms so many people are affected by it. The courts then apply the laws to a specific set of facts. The courts also use prior decisions of courts to guide them in how to decide a case. A legal term known as stare decisis is followed in most cases by the court system. By definition it means to adhere to precedents and not unsettle those things that are already established. In simpler terms, this means that when the facts of a current case are basically the same as the facts in a case previously decided by the courts, then the decision reached by the court in the current case should be the same as it was in the earlier case.

Secondary authority is not the law itself, but instead is an explanation or description of the law. Since it is not actually the law itself, it lacks legal authority in a formal sense, but it has some degree of persuasive value. This persuasive value exists because of the soundness of the reasoning of the explanation or description; or possibly because of the status of the court presenting it; or possibly because of the author's explanation or description. It, most often, is contained in unofficial sets of books, but not always.

Some types of books that might be secondary authorities are text books, treatises, commentaries, restatements, and periodicals.

Finding tools are those books that help the researcher to find a particular law contained in a primary or secondary source. It is estimated that some 30,000 new decisions are made each year in our court systems. In addition, there are already more than 18,000,000 published decisions. It would be physically impossible for any one person to read all of them, let alone try to remember them and then use them to prepare a case for trial. As the term finding tools indicates, these books are the tools of the researcher. Learning to use them makes conducting research much easier.

Some samples of finding tools are digests, citators, encyclopedias, phrase books, indexes, some loose-leaf services, annotated compilations, and dictionaries.