Recently, a member of the Family Law Listserv of The State Bar of Michigan asked how one should interpret a court rule that contains the word "shall" rather than "may." I remembered using a Boolean search strategy to research that very question perhaps thirty-odd years ago to get a case citation for a brief. I remembered from my previous brief-writing that interpretation of statutes is linked to the intent of the Legislature when the statute was enacted, made clear by history of the legislative act. I also remembered that, under Michigan law, case law held that interpretation of court rules followed the same precept as that of interpretation of statutes and also that the word "shall" dictated that "shall" should be interpreted as being mandatory. This was my Boolean search query:
I remember getting thousands of returns to the above Boolean search. I also remember that the first case I opened and reviewed was perfect for my brief. Several years ago, I wrote a blog post titled Effective Computer Research Strategies Using Boolean Techniques This Blog Post and a subsequent one found here https://tinyurl.com/
Knowledge is Power: This is my Number One shibboleth. It is important for you to know how to perform legal research or any other kind of research. You can readily do research into complex issues even if you don't have Lexis Nexis, West Law, The LawNet, or CaseText (free to members of the State Bar of Michigan). You can do a lot of research just by using Google Legal Scholar. However, to narrow down the search and obtain an answer quickly, one needs to use a keyword search--ideally a Boolean research query. Truly, practice makes perfect.
How important is it to do your research yourself? First, you're far more likely to remember the answer to your question if you've worked on parsing out the research. Second, sometimes you may have an emergency and you might need the answer right now. For example, (a) Your brief is due to be filed tomorrow, and it's the middle of the night with no outside mentor available,
OR (b) Michigan State (for example) is playing in the National Basketball Championship and no one is paying attention to anything except the GAME. Second, your paralegal is less likely to appreciate the fine nuances that one or more particular facts may present in the analysis of how your fact pattern fits into the scheme of things. In other words, a legal conclusion may be highly dependent upon specific facts and lack of one fact may preclude the legal conclusion desired for your client.
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Best regards, Jeanne M. Hannah
Traverse City, Michigan
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