1.4 Importance of Legal Research

The importance's stations (the answer's tour): (i) the profession — the lawyer's craft is research (the case's authority, the statute's meaning, the client's answer); the advice and the brief are research products; (ii) the judiciary — the reasoned judgment rests on retrieved and synthesized authority (the precedent discipline); (iii) the legislature and reform — the law's improvement on evidence (the gap-analysis feeding the Law Commission and Parliament); (iv) the legal education — the dissertation, the seminar paper, the article (this course's own purpose); (v) the administration — the rules, directives and institutional designs researched rather than guessed; (vi) the public — the access-to-justice knowledge (the legal-needs studies), the accountability (the court-monitoring research). The closing sentence: in a common-law-influenced system where precedent binds and statutes are amended annually, no lawyer can rely on memory — research is not the lawyer's luxury but the licence.