Legal Research

If you want legal research and writing, there are a variety of services which you can contract out for. Although one would think that in a democracy like we have, the laws would be open to public scrutiny and readily accessible to the perusal of any ordinary citizen, the reality of the situation is much different than that. It is possible to do some limited legal research on your own.

For example, if you want to look up a specific law and you know its number, you can probably find it. But that is about it. Try wading through thousands of pages of that law to find the exact meaning as it applies to whatever your area of concern is. It is just simply not possible for you to do, and that is the truth!

Of course, where outside legal research really comes in handy is if you are trying to research a whole area of law. Unless you are already familiar with the way that law is organized, you can forget it. Our laws are extremely burdensome, arcane, and complex for one and one reason only: it give power to lawyers, legislators, and other legal professionals. It keeps them in business when in reality we could do better without them. So if there is an area of the law which you need to understand for your business or personal needs, you had best get someone to do your advanced legal research, or else you are out of luck.

Of course, you are not completely out of luck without legal researchers. Sometimes, you can figure out how to do legal research on a particular issue, and be pretty successful at it too. For example, I have been part of a campaign to save some of the last local wetlands in the San Francisco bay area. We do not have the money to hire legal researchers. We have to do our own legal research ourselves.

But on this particular issue, there has already been so much pioneering environmental work done, that we have been quite successful at doing fairly advanced legal research and finding out how to petition the government using existing endangered species laws. It is easy to get scared off by the complexity of legal research, and at first we were scared away too. But soon we found out that, with enough determined work, an ordinary citizen really can participate in the democratic process.