Capstone Research
Choosing Your Topic
- Pick a topic that interests you. You and your Capstone will be spending quite a bit of time together, so choosing a topic that you find interesting can help you stay motivated.
- Seek out a faculty supervisor who specializes in your area of interest.
- Seek out a librarian to create a research plan.
- Find the sweet spot between being able to find NOTHING written about it and too much.
- This might be a multi-stage process where you start exploring a general topic looking for ways to narrow, or you start narrow and expand or make analogies to other areas of law
- There are a lot of guides to topic selection. Here are a few example:
- Look for unresolved points of law, circuit splits, new or challenged legislation, issues of first impression, etc.
- Your casebook may suggest some of these unresolved topic areas.
- Try practice area news in Law360, Lexis+, or Topic Highlights in Westlaw
- You may want to create a news alert in Bloomberg Law.
- Check SSRN for pre-publication articles
Additional Resources
Modern Legal Scholarship: A Guide to Producing and Publishing Scholarly and Professional Writing by Call Number: KF250 .C684 2020ISBN: 9781531010270Publication Date: 2020Located in Law Library Reserve Room.
Scholarly Writing: Ideas, Examples, and Execution by Call Number: KF250 .C528 2019ISBN: 9781531013707Publication Date: 2019Located in Law Library Reserve Room.
Scholarly Writing for Law Students by Call Number: KF250 .F35 2017ISBN: 9781683282075Publication Date: 2017Located in Law Library Reserve Room.
Academic Legal Writing by Call Number: KF250 .V64 2016ISBN: 1634598881Publication Date: 2016Located in Law Library Reserve Room.
