56. Similarity to other sources of law

Constitutional Law issues are most often embedded in other issues in the law. Because of this, research follows the same principles and tools outlined above. In the annotated statutes, for example, the first set of cases presented in the annotations are those discussing the constitutional validity of the statute. In some cases it may be useful to learn about the how the constitution affects the law generally in a particular area. The easiest way to approach researching constitutional law is to use the secondary materials devoted to it. Basically, the constitution itself is a short text, but the Supreme Court cases which have interpreted it over the last 200 years amount to an extremely large body of interpretive material which can be hard to digest. The best place to start is by consulting one of the leading texts on constitutional law. They are Laurence Tribe's American Constitutional Law, published by Foundation Press, and Nowak & Rotunda's Constitutional Law, published by West in two versions: a three volume practitioner's text and a one volume recension for students. Once the leading cases are identified, then research can continue simply by additional work using the case law methodology. I have also created a short list of useful Con Law web resources.