international legal-education
How to effectively search laws?
<p>A common answer to problems and situations includes <em>researching your state/country's law</em> to check what are the consequences of a particular action. </p>

<p>As a layman, it is difficult to do this research effectively, since it's hard to find a comprehensive resource/channel of this information, and Legislative Language is complex and very structured.</p>

<p>Is there a method I can consistently apply for <em>most</em> political regions (Country or State) in order to do this research, and efficiently find what I'm looking for?</p>

<p>This really depends on <em>what you're looking for</em>.  For example, if you want the details of a specific regulation or the statutory definition of some term, the internet is pretty good!  If you can't follow legal language, or if you want to know whether something is <em>legal</em>, you probably have to hire a lawyer.</p>

<p>In general you can't effectively determine the legality or legal consequences of an action: As noted in <a href="https://law.stackexchange.com/a/1196/10">this answer</a>, even the <em>enumeration</em> of laws is an unsolved problem.  But you can look for "safe harbors" ... if you know in which statutes or case law you are likely to find them.</p>

<p>This is one reason we can't just <a href="http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/lets-kill-all-lawyers" rel="nofollow noreferrer">kill all the lawyers</a> ;)</p>
