Research Classes for Legal Practice in First-Year Curriculum

Legal research instruction covers topics including statutes, cases, secondary sources, and research strategy. Please direct questions to library instructional staff or 202-662-9140.

Research Lectures for Classes & Clinics

Reference librarians are available to provide presentations to classes and clinics on a variety of specialized research techniques. These research lectures will provide more advanced legal research instruction in consultation with the requesting faculty member and will build upon the basic research strategies and tools covered in the first-year curriculum. Reference librarians present on subject-specific research areas (e.g., tax law, health law, environmental law, and music law), as well as specialized legal research instruction (e.g., legislative history and administrative law research), tips and tools for using electronic research databases, research in non-legal sources, and other advanced research techniques.

Faculty members interested in having a reference librarian visit their class should contact the library teaching staff or 202-662-9140 for U.S. law or non-legal topics and the foreign and international librarians or 202-662-4195 for international and foreign law topics.

Library Training for All Students

The library offers additional training open to all students throughout the academic year.

Workshops include Research Strategies for Seminar Papers, which covers tips and resources to help students select a topic, conduct a preemption check, and find books and articles for their research. This is offered during the fall and spring semesters.

Additionally, the library offers a Prepare to Practice Series for students to improve their legal research skills. Sessions cover basic, advanced, specialized, and practice-oriented topics.

Please direct questions to the library teaching staff or 202-662-9140.

Vendor Training for All Students

Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg Law offer training and webinars on how to use their products to do legal research.

Library Training for Faculty Research Assistants

The Law Library will be holding two training sessions for new faculty research assistants (RAs) this semester. This introduction to library services, resources, and databases also covers best practices for planning, discovering, and logging your research.

The sessions will be:

In-Person: Thursday, February 6 at 12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. in the Computer Learning Center (Williams Law Library building)
Virtual: Friday February 7 at 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. via Zoom

The same material will be covered in both sessions. The virtual session will be recorded, with the recording available to all registrants.

Pre-registration is required by Monday, February 3. Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made at least one week prior to the session for which you are registering. Accommodation requests and questions should be sent to Samantha Ginsburg, Research Services Librarian, at sg1847@georgetown.edu at least one week prior to the session for which you are registering.