Appendix by M.A. Cunningham
The Guide to Louisiana and Selected French Legal Materials and Citation is designed to provide authors, editors, students, and practitioners with a manageable reference source for legal materials particularly relevant to the practice of law in Louisiana. The scope of the work extends to the judicial and statutory materials of Louisiana and France, Louisiana's legislative and executive materials, Louisiana's state publications, Louisiana and French periodicals, and civil-law treatises. The various forms of these legal materials are identified and their coverage and content recorded or briefly examined. Information that is helpful in the efficient use of a particular source and that is not obvious on immediate handling is also provided. Bibliographical information concerning recent and commonly held materials such as the Southern Reporter, Second Series, was thought to be unnecessary and has been omitted.
Bibliographical and research information is presented by way of citation rules and examples. This format will economize the user's time by providing enough information concerning a particular source and its contents to allow for the Guide's use without requiring the reader to wade through extraneous information. This organization, of course, does not afford an in-depth or evaluative discussion of the sources or legal research in general. For occasions when reference to such a source proves necessary, two works by Kate Wallach, Louisiana Legal Research Manual (1972) and Bibliographical History of Louisiana Civil Law Sources: Roman, French and Spanish (1955), have proved over time to be the standard in Louisiana, while Judge Albert Tate's collaboration with Warren J. Hebert in Treatises for Judges: A Selected Bibliography (1971) provides a quick reference tool. For a guide to the records of colonial Louisiana, see Henry P. Beers, French and Spanish Records of Louisiana: A Bibliographical Guide to Archive and Manuscript Sources (1989). French legal materials are thoroughly surveyed in Charles Szladits & Claire M. Germain, Guide to Foreign Legal Materials: French (2d ed. 1985).
By combining source and citation information into a single reference work, the Guide will in most instances dispense with the need to consult both a treatise on legal bibliography and a citation manual during the research process. The Guide, however, is source specific and should be used as a supplement to a more comprehensive system of citation. A basic grasp of citation form, therefore, is assumed throughout the Guide. The two leading systems of legal citation are The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (15th ed. 1991) and The University of Chicago Manual of Legal Citation (1986). As the Tulane Law Review follows The Bluebook in all other matters of citation, examples will conform to the typeface conventions for law reviews found in The Bluebook.
Five topical headings serve as a general outline for the Guide. Each designates a current source of law. Subheadings denote the specific types of materials examined in that section and, in some instances, include an introductory description of the sources of law for that section. Following each subheading are rules of form that discuss specific materials and the citation form for those materials.
About the Author
M.A. Cunningham. Judicial Clerk to the Honorable Charles Schwartz, Jr., United States District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana. B.A., Pitzer College, 1989; J.D., Tulane University, 1992.
Citation
67 Tul. L. Rev. 1305 (1993)