what are law journals, manuals and digests?

Answer 1

Law journals are legal articles written primarily by 2nd and 3rd year law students at law schools accross the country. Each law school publishes at least one law journal, and many law schools publish several (i.e., International Law Journal, Journal of Immigration, Journal of Criminal Law, etc.). For a law student, it's quite a resume booster to get published in a law school journal. A few journals are published by attorneys practicing in a certain field of law; but again, the overwhelming majority are published by law schools. The purpose of an article published in a law journal is generally to aid other lawyers on very specific, complicated, and narrow issues of law (i.e., "The Clash of Rival and Incompatible Philosophical Traditions Within Constitutional Interpretation: Originalism and the Aristotelian Tradition").

A manual is more of a general how-to guide that covers a specific realm of law (i.e., "Discovery Ethics and Strategies"). These are usually written by practicing attorneys, and published for other attorneys.

A legal digest is simply a compilation of published cases. Digests do not generally organize the cases by any particular subject; rather, they are grouped by geography (i.e., cases published in the digest of the "Ninth Circuit" come from appeals from the states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington).

An attorney will often begin research on a particular issue by reviewing the law journals; he'll confirm that the law student was right by reading the cases cited by the law student in the digests; and he'll then devise a legal strategy from ideas gathered in a manual.

This is a much-abbreviated explanation. But I hope it helps.