The Problem:
A major client’s son, who attends a public middle school, is being teased in a sexual manner by one of his male classmates. The school says that because the teasing is by a fellow male student, it can’t constitute “sexual harassment,” and that “boys will be boys” and the son just needs to get a thicker skin. The son is starting to dread going to school. Your job: to find some useful law which will encourage the school to take this situation seriously. Your helpful law librarian suggests James Rapp’s excellent seven-volume set, Education Law (Matthew Bender, 1984). But — oh no! — the volume you need is out. Will you have to do some needle in a haystack Westlaw or Lexis search to find a relevant case, which will turn out to be from Idaho in 1972? No! This is the time to go to American Law Reports, or “the ALRs,” a series of reporters begun in 1919 (and now up to its sixth “series”) which contain “annotations” (really, they’re like very detailed law review articles) on over 27,000 legal topics.
What is an ALR annotation?
Each ALR annotation addresses a single legal issue. The author discusses the most important cases and state or federal statutes governing that issue, and also points you to places where the issue is discussed in other research and practice sources, such as American Jurisprudence, Corpus Juris Secundum, L.Ed’s Federal Procedure (which we don’t have), Am Jur Proof of Facts, Am Jur Pleading and Practice Forms, and the L.Ed and ALR Digests.
In addition, annotations will usually include a list of law review articles on the topic, and may even give you West Digest key numbers and sample Westlaw and Lexis search queries, to help you find more cases. Finally, the annotation will include a list of other, related annotations, which may help you find one that is even more relevant to your issue.
The ALRs are all on the second floor, with the regional reporters and digests. If you look at them you will find — yikes! — the original ALR, as well as its successors, ALR 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th and6th, and ALR Federal and ALR Federal 2d, hundreds of books altogether.
Why does the library need this many different versions of the ALR (some of them really ancient and out-of-date looking)?
Here’s why: while most of the early ALR annotations have been replaced, over time, with new and more updated versions, some have not. For that reason, we still need to keep the older editions of the ALRs. Also, the ALR Federal discusses only federal laws and statutes (guessed that from its title, didn’t you?), whereas the regular ALR discusses topics which are affected only by state law, or by a combination of federal and state laws. Note, though, that a topic which is affected by both state and federal law may be discussed in both the regular ALR and the ALR Federal. One of those annotations may be more comprehensive or up-to-date than the other, so you really should find and read both.
How do I find any annotations on my topic?
The ALRs have a ridiculous number of indexes, tables and digests. Fortunately, the indexes of many of the ALRs are combined, and some are overlapping, so you won’t have to look at everything.
In the “Problem” above…
You probably don’t know whether the situation is governed by state law, federal law, or both. So first, you’ll want to take a look at the Quick Index at the end of the ALR Federal 2d. The heading “Schools and Education — Sex and sexual matters — harassment — student’s peer” (ah ha!), sends you to 141 ALR Fed 407. That is, volume 141 of the original ALR Federal, at page 407. This turns out to be a 37 page annotation entitled “Right of Action Under Title IX of Education Amendments Act of 1972 (20 U.S.C.S. secs. 1681 et seq.) Against School or School District for Sexual Harassment of Student by Student’s Peer,” by Belinda Bean, J.D. (Great name!). But what if this issue is governed by state laws, too? Best to check the ALR Quick Index at the end of the ALR 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th and 6th.
Keep in mind that this index covers only the regular ALRs, and not the ALR Federals. Interestingly, this index does not have the precise heading “Schools and Education — Sex and sexual matters — harassment — student’s peer,” which you found in the Quick Index for the ALR Federal, but under the more general heading “Schools and Education — Sex and sexual matters,” and also under the heading “”Schools and Education — discrimination,” you will find the entry “Liability, under state law claims, of public and private schools and institutions of higher learning for teacher’s, other employee’s, or student’s sexual relationship with, or sexual harassment or abuse of, student, 86 ALR5th 1.” And if you go to page one of volume 86 of the ALR 5th, you will find a 56 page annotation with just this title. If, on the other hand, you had looked in the combined ALR Index for the ALR 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th and 6th, andALR Federal and ALR Federal 2d, you would have been referred to both annotations. But either way works, in this case!
You might also have found these annotations using the ALR Digest. Let’s say that in your first, desperate moments of trying to find some California law, you did a Westlaw search and found the case Doe v. Petaluma City School District, 949 F. Supp. 1415 (N.D. Cal. 1996), involving a junior high school student who was harassed by her peers. The case itself doesn’t solve your problems; it focuses on the narrow issue of the standard for bringing a claim under Title IX, and doesn’t really discuss what constitutes harassment in schools; but it does yield a potentially useful key number: Civil Rights (key) 128. If you go to the books in the ALR Digest containing the Civil Rights key numbers — Wait!! They start at 1001! Is this a cruel joke?
Well, as discussed in our guide “Using the West Digest System,” when areas of law grow and change, their West topics are re-numbered. Most digests include conversion tables to help you keep up. Unfortunately the ALR Digest does not, so you will need to go to a regular digest (such as the Federal Practice Digest 4th) to discover that Civil Rights (key) 128 has now become Civil Rights (keys) 1066 and 1067(1-5). But once you do this (and you might take note of the potentially useful cases under those key numbers in the regular digest), a look at the ALR Digest under those key numbers directs you to the annotations we’ve already discussed, as well as a few more which are less relevant to your issue.
Furthermore, if you had found that Petaluma case, you could also have looked it up in the ALR 5th and 6th Table of Cases, to see if it was discussed in one or more annotations.
Important!! Don’t forget to update your research!
The editors of the ALR series are constantly adding new information to their existing annotations, writing new annotations to replace old ones, and generally making changes. Don’t run out of the library, clutching photocopies of an annotation, before you’ve done these things:
Can I search the ALRs online?
What if your boss wants a memo on her desk by the time she gets back from lunch, and you don’t have time to go to the library, search the ALRs, and get back? No fear! The ALRs are available on Westlaw, updated weekly, in the “ALR” database (although it may not be included as part of your firm’s license, in which case you will pay a $12 fee for each annotation you actually view). A bonus: unlike the print annotations, the online versions are updated weekly, and superseded annotations are generally removed from the database.
Just in case, though, you would be wise to “Keycite” any useful annotation that you find, to make sure that part of it has not been superseded by a subsequent annotation. Another bonus: some annotations are included in the online database which are not included in the books, for whatever reason.
As with any search on Westlaw, you will probably want to try several different queries. In this case, a terms and connectors search of (school or student) /3 “sexual harassment” yielded 66 documents, including, at result 13, “Right of Action Under Title IX of Education Amendments Act of 1972 (20 U.S.C.S. secs. 1681 et seq.) Against School or School District for Sexual Harassment of Student by Student’s Peer,” 141 ALR Fed 407; and at result 30, “Liability, under state law claims, of public and private schools and institutions of higher learning for teacher’s, other employee’s, or student’s sexual relationship with, or sexual harassment or abuse of, student,” 86 ALR 5th 1, which are discussed above; also, at result 36, an annotation entitled “Tort liability of public schools and institutions of higher learning for injuries caused by acts of fellow students,” 36 ALR 3d 330, which might also be useful.