In any legal research task, it is crucial to determine if legislation governs the issue you are researching.
The most effective way to determine if statutes, regulations, or other legislation (e.g. bylaws) apply to your question is in the Exploratory Research Stage, where introductory sources and/or the person assigning your task are likely to point you towards relevant statutory authority.
In this Stage, for each legislative provision you have identified:
Once you have a citation for the relevant legislation, you should locate and read carefully the relevant statutes and/or regulations using official government sources.
►See Researching Statutes and Researching Regulations for more detail.
Even once you have identified and located relevant legislation, you cannot rely on what it looks like at any given moment.
This is because legislation can be amended at any time—for example, a bill could be enacted that will amend, repeal, or add to your target provision. Once an amending act is passed and comes into force, there may still be a delay between when these changes appear in the official online version of an act.
Every provision you use in your research must therefore be "updated"—you need to check for amendments that have been enacted and come into force in your jurisdiction. Depending on your research, you may only be interested in amending legislation that is in force (e.g. as of the date of your client's legal issue), or you may also be interested in upcoming amendments.
►See Researching Statutes and Researching Regulations for how to update legislation.
The final stage in legislative research is to note up your target provision, which is also known as looking for judicial consideration. Are there cases that have considered, applied, or interpreted this section? Have the courts commented on its constitutionality?
►See Noting Up Legislation for more information on finding judicial consideration.
If there is applicable legislation for your research question, noting up will often be a good entry point into the Case Law Research Stage.
