Legal Research Pedagogy

In my time teaching legal research and analysis, I have gone back and forth on whether to have a required textbook or any required readings. For me, research courses are most effective when they are practice-focused, but the right textbook or readings can help students prepare to use the resources we are teaching. But it can be frustrating to plan a class on the basis that the students have actively done the reading, only to find out that they at best skimmed it. As I look forward to next year's classes, I have once again begun to contemplate whether or not to require a text.  For legal research courses, a textbook can help the course have legitimacy. The optics are good; law students may see the course as more substantive and therefore more worth their time. But requiring a textbook (yet another expense for students) is superfluous if the students aren't engaging with it effectively, or at all. I started doing some background reading on the value of utilizing te...