LRAC Legal Research Class Site (Gotschall)

Statutory annotations are one stop research shopping! Once you find a relevant statute, you find two things to help with your research.

1. Cases that interpret your statutes (Notes of Decision and Citing References)
2. Secondary sources that explain your statute (Context & Analysis and Citing References)

Example

​A.R.S. § 11-1025 is about liability for dog bites.

You have two choices to find cases that interpret your statute.

1. Click on Notes of Decision to find summaries (written by editors) of legal issues in the cases related to the statute
2. Click on Citing References to find all cases that cite the statute (without the helpful summaries)

Notes of Decision are often helpful for research since a human editor has done the work of reading the case and summarizing what it says about the statute. (Reminder: The human work that goes into Westlaw is what makes it so expensive!)

They are called Notes of Decision because an editor read the case and made some "notes" about what the "decision" says about the statute. They are also called statutory annotations. On Lexis, they are now called Judicial Decisions.

Lexis calls its statutory annotations Judicial Decisions.