While Casemaker4’s search tools are powerful, sometimes you may find the best way to get what you are looking for is browsing. In Casemaker4 there are two different ways to browse content – Tree View and List View.
Let’s get started!
The State Compilations page is your default landing page. On it, you can see a listing of all 50 States plus the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands; and access those collections. To the left of this list, you can find the Federal Materials menu and Tribal courts menu. Along the top, you can find a drop-down menu version of the same clickable list you see when you start the system. These menus are available by hovering over them on any page, however, clicking on a menu item will then direct you to the corresponding page.
Clicking on any state is going to offer you different collections – at a minimum giving you access to case law, constitution, administrative code, court rules, statutes, and session laws. By default, Casemaker shows you a list view of these materials. This allows you to navigate through the particular items in an index or table of contents fashion. However, along the top of any state or the federal compilations, you will find a blue bar with the option fo Tree View will allow you to navigate through the system in a more visual way, allowing you to expand and collapse the information that you’re looking for. This not only allows you to have a more visual frame of reference for where you are in the library, but it also allows you to explore the content around a particular statute, for example. If you are in Tree View and would like to return to List View, you will find the List View link in the upper grey bar.
Also, in the blue bar in list view is a link for Archive. This will show you previous year versions of materials. The Tree View shows these archived versions in its directory structure so there will not be an archive link in that view.
As you click around and navigate the List View, you will notice in the light grey bar there is a path of how you got to where you are. This is Casemaker4’s breadcrumb trail. It allows you to click to previous points in the hierarchy that you had clicked on. This makes it easy to return to the title or chapter of statute or rules.
Once you click to view the content of a statute, rule or regulation, you will see a document view that is similar to what we have discussed previously when talking about Cases. However, on rule and statutory content, there are some different options on the left tabs. You will find the ability to return to the Table of Contents with the Browse TOC tab. The Annotator tab will give you a list of cases which cited the rule or statute you are viewing. And of course the Archive tab gives you previous year’s versions of the document.
That is all for this week! We will back with more tips and tricks next week. Thanks again for making Casemaker a Valued Member Benefit.
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