The interim law librarian: Part 5 - what to do with this small amount of new knowledge?

My brief time as a law librarian is nearly over.  I have rather enjoyed it, I have to say.  I have not had to teach anything, and most of the enquiries have been about referencing, but I did look into sources of French law, liaise with a supplier about a change of database interface, and look into ebook platforms.   It has certainly been interesting to learn about the habits, resources and conventions of another subject discipline.   

With all this new found knowledge, I find myself wondering what use health students might make of law resources.     They may encounter legislation and case law referenced in articles and books.   Do they know how to decode the citations, and how to find that material?    The book on medical law and ethics that is on their reading list has a brief mention of how to decode a reference to a case in a law report, and mentions two of the law databases, but goes into no detail.

Do they need to find and read the primary source material, or is it more usual for them to rely on articles, books, and reports about legal matters, that they find through their usual sources?    We have been asked in the past about how to cite legal information in Harvard or Vancouver, so some of them have sometimes used those primary sources.

As health professionals they work within the law, laws about their registration, about consent and safeguarding, and law relating to specific procedures or circumstances.   What do they need to learn about how the law works?    In hospital practice, they would have a legal department to help them work with, and interpret, the law.   And, I assume, advice from professional bodies and Royal Colleges.

I find myself wondering too what information there is in the health journals about legal matters.      What health law journals are there, and are they indexed in the "standard" databases they use?  How useful are those databases for health law?   Would the legal databases add more?    Are the journals indexed in those standard databases enough, or are there other journals that would be useful (and not require specialist legal knowledge) but which are only in the legal databases, or in databases like Scopus and Web of Science?  

I joined some law librarianship lists, followed some legal things on Twitter, and signed up to updates from some legal blogs.  I think I will keep those as they are for now...   

The interim law librarian: Part 4 - databases

And now, databases.

Trying them out has been interesting - my favourite search detailed health topics work (as you might expect!) less well in law databases than they do in health ones!   

Although things like just "nurses" and "caesarean section" work quite well.  

I can see that some topics like safeguarding and consent would work well, and the question is whether searches would find different types of information from searches in the usual health sources (they would, I am sure), and whether that different type of information is valuable to undergraduate health students (that I need to ask).

My colleague made some excellent videos for the law students, which have proved very useful for this interim law librarian too!

The law databases have books (are they all there in full text), journal articles (ditto), legal commentary (which might search in handbooks), forms (official ones) and precedents (which seem to be texts for letters, procedures for interviews and explanatory leaflets), cases, legislation and statutory instruments.

There may also be practical guidance, and indexes of legal terms.  

As well as wondering what is in the law databases about health, I wonder what is in the health databases about law?    Of course, not law books and primary sources, but articles in health journals, which might reference those primary sources.

If they do, how do the health students get on tracking down the primary sources?    What do they know about the nature of those sources?

Some research needed!

The interim law librarian: Part 3 - secondary sources

Primary sources (that is, case law and legislation) are partly discussed in another post.    

Secondary sources are commentaries on those primary sources, so, books and journal articles are secondary sources, as are websites and news sources.   

A book might be a textbook for students, or a more detailed book about a narrower area of law, for practitioners.    Or it might be something encyclopaedic like Halsbury's Statutes of England.

Primary sources are authoritative.    Secondary sources are useful and may lead you to primary sources, which you would then track down.

You might use secondary sources in an assignment or if writing another secondary source, as you discuss primary sources.   You would not, I think, use them in court, although you might use them to locate cases and legislation to use.  

In a similar way, in health, you would not include books as "evidence" in evidence based practice, if you could find research studies in articles.   

We have several collections of ebooks, with different behaviours when it comes to automatically getting new editions, and different interactions with our discovery system (one does not interact, so the books are not in the "Library catalogue").   

Some journals are in those collections with the ebooks, although some are published by publishers that this health librarian is more familiar with and appear in their collections.

I wonder what there is in these books and journals about medical and health law, that is not discoverable in the health librarian's favourite sources.

I also wonder if our health students ever need to use legal sources, particularly the primary ones.

Both of those things need their own blogpost, and first, some research!

The interim law librarian: Part 2 - primary sources (cases)

I am, as related in a previous post, looking after law for the time being.   

So, primary sources.    As opposed to secondary sources (for which there is a separate post).

You don't always need to make a bibliography - so, checking your institution's guidance for referencing seems very wise!   But if you do make one, you list primary sources (in a "table of authorities") separately from secondary sources.     

And the table of authorities is divided into sections by material type.

Primary sources are case law, and legislation.   

I was going to write this post about all the sorts of primary source, but there is enough to observe about cases!

These are the authoritative sources and the ability to find them is paramount.    Cases are reported in law reports.  There are many series of law reports, some of which are seen as more authoritative than others.  And some cases don't get reported at all - only the ones that seem (to the people compiling the law reports, I assume), legally significant.

A case may be reported in more than one law report.   So, one case may have more than one citation.   Since 2001 there have been "neutral citations", which refer to the court and not the law report series.   

A case in point (sorry) is one mentioned in a law report in the Times on Monday 20th June.   Cited there as [2022] UKSC 16, searching for it in Westlaw Edge finds it, but also shows the citation  [2022] 6 WLUK 111, and also shows it was reported in the Times on June 20th 2022.

In OSCOLA, you would give the neutral citation first, then the law report citation, using the hierarchy of law reports to decide which law report citation to include.   

Then, there is legislation, so Bills, Acts, statutory instruments...   I think those need a separate post.

The interim law librarian: Part 1 - OSCOLA

Rewritten 24th June 2022

I am covering part of a vacancy, so am a law librarian in addition to the day job.   An interim law librarian, if you like, or, if you prefer health terminology, a locum.

These "interim law librarian" posts are not designed to be introductions to law librarianship, of which there are already plenty by proper law librarians.

Instead, they are observations about law librarianship, by a health librarian.

The source of most enquiries has been OSCOLA, being the referencing style used by our Law School (and many others).   I have had the occasional enquiry in the past from health students about how to reference UK  legal materials.    Harvard can cope - there are examples in our guide (and in Cite Them Right).   Our guide to Vancouver said nothing, and what we could find in the longer guides related to US law, so for our own guide to Vancouver, my law librarian colleague and I devised examples.    

It is a footnote style and uses ibid (neither of which I have needed to worry about before now) and of course tells you how to reference sources that are peculiar to law.

As well as general enquiries about it, is this reference correct, how to reference a website, there have been more complicated enquiries, like referencing US state law or law from other countries, and secondary referencing.

The "other countries" enquiry involved two countries, one covered in the excellent IALS LibGuides, under Jurisdiction guides, the other not, but the US BlueBook seemed to take a similar approach to OSCOLA, recommending using citation practice from the country in question, so their advice seemed to apply.  I thought.

Some enquirers have wanted their references checked - my regular enquirers ask this as well - we don't really do this but for OSCOLA it was a useful exercise for me, while trying not to proof read!

Where have I found help relating to OSCOLA?   Our own guide, of course, is first port of call and is bookmarked.   I watched the videos my colleague made for her students about OSCOLA, very helpful.   Also bookmarked are a couple of other libraries' guides (in case), Oxford's own guide (the long one, not the short one), and I have also downloaded the OSCOLA chapter from Cite Them Right.  And I have a colleague who supports researchers who knows about OSCOLA.