5.3 Primary and Secondary Authorities

The legal-research world's own data-ladder (the doctrinal's gold standard): | Class | Meaning | Legal examples | |---|---|---| | Primary (mandatory) | The law's own binding sources | The Constitution; the statutes (the Gazette's text); the binding precedent (the Supreme Court's rulings — the NKP reports) | | Primary (persuasive-empirical) | The first-hand data of the field | The interviews, the court records studied, the observation (Unit 3's yield) | | Secondary | The commentary on the primary | The textbooks, the journal articles, the theses, the case-notes, the commission reports; the foreign-and-comparative materials (persuasive only) | The researcher'sdiscipline: the secondary leads to the primary, never substitutes for it — the statute is read in the Gazette, not the summary; the case is read in the report, not the headnote alone; the commentary is cited as commentary. The hierarchy's exam-phrasing: mandatory vs persuasive authority (the binding court's rank — Procedural Law-I's jurisdiction ladder, Semester 4); the weight's order (constitution → statute → precedent → commentary).