Collapse of the Structure of the Legal Research Universe: The Imperative of Digital Information

Legal research, in particular the way in which law schools provide legal research training to first-year law students, is the mom and apple pie issue of legal education. Everyone is willing to criticize the lack of it, praise the importance of it, or discuss the reasons it has not been done so well. After all, the whole corpus of legal education is constructed around Dean Langdell\u27s theory that the law library, the place where the law student conducts research, is the laboratory of the law, and the process of legal research has been intertwined with the process of legal reasoning that is still the core of legal pedagogy. This is to say nothing of the popular perception that lawyers know how to find the law. While most people realize that no lawyer can hold all necessary legal doctrine inside of her brain, people assume, and expect, that lawyers know how to find the relevant law