Skip to Main Content

Administrative Law Research: Immigration Concentration Class Site

Using Primary Sources to Find Other Primary Sources

Remember that the second step in the immigration law legal research process is to use the primary sources that you found in your secondary source to find OTHER primary sources!

How do you do that? Here is a case law example.

  1. Read your case to find the primary sources (statutes, regulations, BIA decisions, other cases, etc.) it cites  
  2. Look at your case on Westlaw or Lexis and use citing references to find all the primary sources that cite your case
  3. Look at your case on Westlaw or Lexis to find the editorial enhancements (secondary sources and cross references to related statutes/regulations) linked to your case

Citing References and Context & Analysis

Westlaw's Citing References and Context & Analysis features are one stop research shopping!

Citing References

Once you have found a useful statute/regulation/case/agency decision for your topic, you can click on Citing References to locate all documents on Westlaw (statutes, regulations, cases, agency decisions, secondary sources) that cite your initial document. See below for examples.

Context & Analysis

Once you have found a useful statute/regulation/case/agency decision for your topic, you can click on Context & Analysis to locate useful information (secondary sources, statutes/regulations cross-references) selected by editors about your document. See below for examples.

Regulation Example

When you find a relevant regulation on your topic, you can click on Citing References and Context & Analysis to find the following:

  1. Related CFR sections
  2. Related USC sections
  3. Cases that interpret/cite your regulation
  4. Agency opinions that interpret/cite it
  5. Secondary sources that explain it/provide citations to primary sources

Example - 8 CFR § 312.1

Clicking on Citing References

Clicking on Context & Analysis

Clicking on Citing References

Once you click on Citing References to retrieve all the documents on Westlaw that cite your document, you can narrow your results in two ways:

  1. You can use the Search within Results field to run a terms and connectors search to narrow down your documents
  2. You can click to limit your results to a specific document type

Example - 8 CFR § 312.1