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Background: As a follow-up to the practice exercises for citing statutes (refer to week 6 Discussion) that Chang provided for the LCA paralegals, you and Chang discuss the value of research practice. Chang mentions that case citations in Westlaw, e.g. in Negative Treatment, Citing References, and Notes of Decisions, offer readers information about opinions’ potential relevance by identifying their deciding courts. Chang asks you to prepare a new practice exercise that can be offered to the other paralegals for their review.
Instructions: Label each Part and number/letter of each response so it’s clear which question is being answered.
Part A
Read the following invented citations. You should be able to tell which court or category of courts produced the cited opinion by looking at the abbreviated reporter name and parenthetical information. These eight choices are the ONLY acceptable answers for Questions 1 through 12.
The U.S. Supreme Court
A U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
A U.S. District Court
The Maryland Court of Appeals
The Supreme Court of Maryland
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals
The Appellate Court of Maryland
Other – none of the above
Again, don’t look up these in Westlaw – they are fictitious citations.
290 U.S. 522 (1930) is from ____________________.
151 F.3d 230 (9th Cir. 2019) is from _____________.
592 F.2d 710 (D.C. Cir. 1994) is from ____________.
256 F. Supp. 2d 350 (D.D.C. 2013) is from ______.
22 A.3d 393 (D.C. 2018) is from________________.
12 A.3d 632 (Md. Ct. Spec. App. 2015) is from ___.
349 F. Supp. 2d 910 (D. Md. 2011) is from ______.
421 A.3d 17 (Md. 2023) is from _______________.
558 A.2d 559 (N.J. 2003) is from ______________.
789 A.2d 24 (Md. 1998) is from ______________.
424 P.3d 188 (Ariz. 2016) is from ____________.
830 A.3d 226 (Md. App. Ct. 2023) is from _____.
Part B
13. Assume LCA is working with a client who is being charged with impersonating a federal marshal. Go to the U.S.C.A. search page (Home → Statutes & Court Rules → United States Code Annotated (USCA)) and type impersonat! /s federal marshal into the GSB. On the results page, the first statute shown should pertain to federal officers or employees. Select that statute, then cite it using Bluebook format.
14. Using the Notes of Decisions from the statute located in Question 13, you want to find a case concerning federal marshals. Click on Notes of Decisions (shown in image, below).
On the next page, first look at the Table of Contents provided by Westlaw on the left (red oval). Alas, there are no headings that say “federal marshal.” So we need to search the text of the Notes of Decisions. To do this, click on the magnifying glass icon (purple oval) on the right.
Clicking on the magnifying glass icon makes a pop-up search box, “Search Notes of Decisions.” Type marshal into the search bar.
This search should produce at least two cases. Locate the opinion decided in 1997, and cite the case in Bluebook format. (Note: Omit the subsequent history of the case from your citation because The Bluebook usually doesn’t require denials of certiorari that are more than two years old.)
15. Is the opinion cited for Question 14 still good law? Explain why or why not.
16. Cases in Notes of Decisions are deemed especially useful by Westlaw editors, but there may be other relevant opinions. You decide to look for additional opinions that address impersonating a federal marshal decided under the statute located in Question 13. First, click on Citing References.
On the next page, on the left side of the screen you’ll see a column with the heading, Content types:
Under Content types, click on, Cases. After clicking on Cases, the word Filters will appear to the right of Content types.
Click on Filters, and a new search box will appear on the left titled Search within results. Click on the search box, and a larger pop-up box, also labeled Search within results, will appear. In that search box, type, impersonat! /s “federal marshal” − include the quotation marks! Next, click on the blue Search button. How many cases are returned as results?
17. Once again, look at the column on the left side of your screen. Under Search within results there are several filter types followed by expanders to the right of each type.
Click on the expander (+) next to Reported Status and select Reported. Now how many cases are returned as results?
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