What are encyclopedias?

Before examining these two sets, a brief note about citing to Legal Encyclopedias. Though both the Blue Book (The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, 20th ed., 2015) and ALWD (ALWD Guide to Legal Citation, 5th ed., 2014) give you rules for citing to legal encyclopedias, you should be very hesitant to do so. As secondary resources, legal encyclopedias have no binding authority in any jurisdiction. The true authorities are those cases and statutes that are discussed within the legal encyclopedias and which you find while conducting further research after beginning with legal encyclopedias.

That said, legal encyclopedias are sometimes cited bycourts in their opinions. For example, here is an excerpt from a recent case where C.J.S. is quoted for a point of law that involves Eminent Domain.

Perhaps the best advice as to whether you should cite legal encyclopedias in legal documents, would be a warning label stating not “Handle with Care,” but “Cite with Care.”

C.J.S. is a 166 volume legal encyclopedia published by the West Group. It provides a basic summary of the entirety of American Law organized into several hundred Titles, each Title consisting of one broad legal subject. Each Title’s subject is further subdivided into a detailed outline, with each section of the outline covering a narrow point of that Title’s broad legal subject.

Shown here is the beginning of the list of Titles in C.J.S.

Here is an example of a C.J.S. Title, “Military Justice.” The first few pages of a Title provide a broad “Analysis,” or overview, of the outline of that Title. The top of the picture shows the start of the Analysis of this Title. After the Analysis is the detailed outline of the Title "Military Justice," as shown in the bottom part of the picture.

Here is a further excerpt of C.J.S.’ coverage of Military Justice, this time showing a single point in the detailed outline of this subject, Section 16, “Validity of Enlistment.” Note that each section starts out with a summary statement of the law covered in that section. The discussion that follows fleshes out this point and provides citations to representative case law and to relevant statutes. (Note that the unfamiliar abbreviation "M.J." stands for the Military Justice Reporter.)

C.J.S. has a five volume index that covers the entire set. The index allows you to look up terms related to the issue you are researching and refers you to the relevant Titles and sections related to your research.

Shown here are the C.J.S. index volumes and a small excerpt from the index itself.

There are also indexes throughout the entire set. If a volume has more than one Title in it, an index in the back of that volume can be used to find particular sections from any of those Titles. (If a Title spans more than one volume, there will only be an index in the back of the final volume containing that title; that index will also cover any other titles also found in the final volume of that multi-volume title.)

So, for example, if you never took any classes in family law and needed a brief overview of what is involved in getting a marriage annulled, you could skip the general index, grab the volume of C.J.S. that contains the Title “Marriage,” and look in the index in the back of that volume, as is shown here.

Most Volumes of C.J.S. are supplemented with annual pocket parts that are in the back cover of each volume. These pocket parts contain additional case citations and further discussion of the legal issues contained in that Title, and will reflect any recent significant developments in that area of law.

Occasionally, the editors of C.J.S. will republish an entire volume, or multiple volumes. This will happen when the supplemental materials in the pocket parts for those volumes have become so voluminous as to warrant republishing them, or when the editors re-organize a particular Title (or Titles). When this occurs, the republished volumes will be so new that they won’t have a pocket part in the back. Instead, they will have a card in the back cover to indicate that the volume is current and has no pocket part.

When the editors revise entire volumes in C.J.S., they might re-organize the outline for the Titles in that volume. If you were to come across a citation to C.J.S. that pre-dated a revision to that Title, the section you look up may no longer discuss the point of law it covered prior to that revision. In that situation, you will find some “Tables of Corresponding Sections” at the beginning of that Title. These tables provide you with the current section that corresponds to the pre-revision section. For example, shown here is the conversion table found at the beginning of the C.J.S. Title "Mines and Minerals." The point of law that formerly was found in section 110 is now covered in sections 118, 129 and 130.

Occasionally, as part of this revision process, Titles are renamed as well as revised. For example, the former Title “Insane Persons” is now covered by the new Title “Mental Health,” which has a table indicating where sections of the former Title are covered in the new Title.

Some of the legal subjects covered by specific Titles within C.J.S. deal with statutes more than others do. At the beginning of many of those Titles, you will find a “Table of Statutes and Regulations Cited." For example, here is the beginning of such a table in the C.J.S. Title “Civil Rights.” This excerpt of the table gives you cross references to the sections within Civil Rights and the footnotes within those sections where particular citations to the U.S. Code are discussed.

Because C.J.S. is published by West, one of its most useful features is its cross-references to relevant Topic and Key Numbers from the West National Reporter System Digests. For example, the excerpt from the C.J.S. Title “Homicide” shown here covers unintentional killings committed during the commission of a felony. Under the “Library References” section is a reference to the Digest Topic Homicide and the Key Numbers 18 and 18(1): these are the parts of the Digests where cases dealing with this issue can be found.

Remember, the footnotes in C.J.S. contain onlyrepresentative case law. To find all relevant cases from any jurisdiction, you would need to use the digest for that jurisdiction’s cases. (For more information about doing this, refer to the CALI lesson How to Find Case Law Using the Digests.) C.J.S. provides these references to make your research easier: after reading the relevant coverage on a subject in C.J.S., you can take the Topic and Key Numbers you find to the digest for the jurisdiction you are researching and immediately dive into the part of the digest where you can find all cases relevant to the point you were researching in C.J.S.