Researching the Contract Issue in Secondary Sources
Researching the Law in the Restatements and Treatises: Scroll the Left-Side of the Screen
Researching the Contract Issue in Restatements
Search the Restatements for background information and annotations to relevant case law with the following keywords from the fact pattern:
breach /s contract /s regulat!
Consider the relevance of the title and the displayed information from the sections nearest the key terms. Skim the results for additional relevant key terms (such as impracticable, impossibility, or performance) that you might use in additional searches, like the following:
breach /s contract /p regulat! /s (impractic! OR impossib!)
The Restatement only becomes binding authority when a higher court in the jurisdiction adopts it. But even if it has not been adopted (as in this case), the Restatement can still be used to find background information and relevant starting authority in your jurisdiction, such as Aiea Lani Corp. for the contract issue.
Researching the Contract Issue in Treatises
A search within secondary sources should always include the treatises since they offer the most comprehensive discussion of a legal issue. You can filter the treatises by Publication Type within the Secondary Sources or you can filter by Practice Area or by Topic.
However, if you already know the best titles for your search, you can locate each from the Universal Search box and search directly within. You can search within the Universal Search box for either the title of the resource or the topic it covers. For our contracts issue, the two best contract treatises are Williston on Contracts and Corbin on Contracts.
After browsing the Table of Contents, use keywords from the fact pattern and/or those discovered from earlier searches to conduct another search. Let's use the following search string:
breach /s contract /s impossib!
According to the section titles and the recurrence of our key terms, the early results in the list are helpful and relevant, especially the third result (WILLSTN-CN § 77:3), which discusses a relevant concept based on our facts called foreseeability. Therefore, we would want to read this section for confirmation of its relevance. Doing so informs us that the section and concept are, indeed, relevant, and leads us to a helpful annotation, Warner v. Denis, 84 Haw. 338, 933 P.2d 1372 (Ct. App. 1997).
Researching the Contract Issue in Encyclopedias
Researching the Law in Encyclopedias (Am. Jur. 2d, CJS) and the American Law Reports (ALR): Scroll the Right-Side of the Screen
The above twelve (12) results from American Jurisprudence, 2d, and Corpus Juris Secundum were not on-point with our client's facts, so always use the variety within your search terms to run additional searches to seek confirmation of previous searches or to get more relevant results. Let's use different key terms (from our fact pattern and those we have picked up during our search) to construct the following search string for a search:
contract /s impossib! /s perform!
Even with a new search string, and having filtered for the encyclopedias, there are still too many results. So consider using another key term to search within results to narrow them further, like the term foreseeability that we gleaned from the treatises, and is relevant to our facts.
The nineteen (19) results yield such relevant sections as CJS CONTRACTS § 697 and AMJUR CONTRACTS § 646, supporting the argument that the contractor should have been able to foresee the presence of iwi kupuna and, thus, contractually protected himself against the discovery. These sections also include annotations to Warner v. Denis, 84 Haw. 338, 933 P.2d 1372 (Ct. App. 1997), which we found earlier in the treatises. Seeing a relevant case repeat across the secondary sources or the finding aids increases the likelihood that the case will be helpful to our argument.
Researching the Contract Issue in the American Law Reports (ALR)
Let's search the American Law Reports (ALR) with the following search string:
breach /s contract /s impossib! /p regulat!
The result list includes two relevant ALR annotations (2 A.L.R.7th Art. 3 and 104 A.L.R.6th 303) that discuss the helpful sections from the Restatements that we researched earlier (sections 261 and 264).
Filtering by Jurisdiction leads to another mention of Aiea Lani Corp. v. Hawaii Escrow & Title, Inc., 64 Haw. 638, 647 P.2d 257 (1982). The recurrence of Aiea Lani Corp. across multiple secondary sources and finding aids suggests the starting authority will likely be helpful to our argument.
