Identification of Trends in the Teaching of Legal Research

Legal educators and practicing attorneys have long criticized the legal research skills demonstrated by new attorneys. In the late 1980's and the early 1990's a survey of law firm librarians' perceptions on legal research skills of law students and new attorneys confirmed the notion that law students were graduating with inadequate research skills. A series of articles written by Christopher and Jill Wren and Robert Berring and Kathleen Vanden Heuvel were published in which the Wrens advocated the process method of instruction in lieu of the Berring and Vanden Heuvel's bibliographic method. This paper uses content analysis of course descriptions of legal research classes in the top one hundred law schools as ranked by U.S. News and World Report to identify the existence of trends in the manner of legal research instruction, the identity of the instructor, the method of grading and the credit allocated the course