Name:Orizu Precious 
Matric No: 19/law01/223
Dept: Law
Course:Legal Method 

Assignment 
Discuss the secondary source of Law in Nigeria.
  
  Solution 

The materials used for legal research are generally divided into two broad categories: primary sources and secondary sources.  Primary legal sources are the actual law in the form of constitutions, court cases, statutes, and administrative rules and regulations.  Secondary legal sources may restate the law, but they also discuss, analyze, describe, explain, or critique it as well.  Secondary sources are used to help locate primary sources of law, define legal words and phrases, or help in legal research.  In short, anything that is more than the actual law is considered a secondary source. 
    
Secondary Sources
Secondary sources of law are background resources. They explain, interpret and analyze. They include encyclopedias, law reviews, treatises, restatements. Secondary sources are a good way to start research and often have citations to primary sources.Secondary sources are a great place to begin your research. Although the primary sources of law--case law, statutes, and regulations--establish the law on a given topic, it is often difficult to quickly locate answers in them. Secondary sources often explain legal principles more thoroughly than a single case or statute, so using them can help you save time. Secondary sources also help you avoid unnecessary research, since you are tapping into work that someone else has already done on an issue.
Secondary sources include:
	•	Legal encyclopedias
	•	American Law Reports (ALR)
	•	Treatises
	•	Law journals
	•	Restatements
Secondary sources are particularly useful for:
	•	Learning the basics of a particular area of law
	•	Understanding key terms of art in an area
	•	Identifying essential cases and statutes
Treatises

In this context, legal treatises are single or multi-volume works dedicated to the examination of an area of law. Treatises tend to be very good at describing the law, they're good law finders, and many of the classic treatises are persuasive. Treatises tend to provide an in-depth discussion of a particular area of law and will provide the researcher with references to a few cases and statutes. The important legal treatises in several areas of the law. To identify and locate a legal treatise, use a library catalog like (searching by topic and handbook, or topic and nutshell)
. Note that the word treatise is not often associated with a legal treatise in the catalog record.

Legal periodicals

Legal periodical articles are in-depth discussions of narrow areas of the law and legal issues. Articles in academic journals tend to revolve around very theoretical and cutting-edge legal issues. Articles in practitioner-oriented journals tend to be more practical. Periodical articles can be very good law finders; they tend to have a great many footnotes with a lot of legal citations. Some articles by eminent scholars can be persuasive. Occasionally, legal periodical articles can be useful for explaining the law, but often they are too theoretical for that. The major American legal periodical indexes are the 
(also on Lexis ) and
. In addition to the two major North American periodical indexes described above, there are many indexes devoted to articles on particular topics. When using an index database such as a legal periodical index or a library catalog, a good strategy is to identify a book or article that looks relevant, notice the subjects or descriptors assigned to the item by the indexer or cataloger and run a new search based on the subjects or descriptors found. In general, full-text sources are not very good tools to use for finding periodical articles on a particular topic. However, there are several databases that include full-text legal periodical articles.
To use a full-text tool to find periodical articles, a user has to construct an online search and the online search will return articles that contain the particular language that the user chose. An index, on the other hand, will get a user articles that an editor has decided are about the topic selected.

Legal encyclopedias

Legal encyclopedias are immense sets of books that briefly describe all of the main legal issues for a particular jurisdiction. An encyclopedia can provide a basic introduction to an area of law and will provide the user with some case and statutory citations. Legal encyclopedias will not delve deeply into an area, nor will they discuss the finer points of an area of law. Legal encyclopedias are available online and in print. The two national encyclopedias are Americans Jurisdiction. Many states also have legal encyclopedias, which are available in print or online.

ALR

ALR provides topical annotations that focus on relatively narrow areas of the law, but discuss it in some depth. They provide a good basic grounding in law, as well as serve as good case finding tools. ALR is available in  prints. Annotations can be identified in print by using the Alr. 

Restatements

The restatements were developed by legal scholars initially to restate the law, and currently to describe what the law should be. In either case, Restatements are very persuasive although they are not very good at describing the law. 
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