Complementary Course: "research in Legal Databases"

1. Knowledge and understanding. The Course aims to provide students with a thorough and practical knowledge of the most common legal databases, both commercial and free. This will be done in real time in the classroom with the analysis of the most common contents and research methods. 2. Application of knowledge and understanding. The acquired notions will be of immediate theoretical and practical utility to improve the relationship between the user and the technologies used, and will allow a more accurate understanding of all aspects of digital legal research, an aspect now fundamental for the legal profession. 3. Formulation of judgments. The Course will provide students with the ability to choose at any time a correct use of the technologies and the environment in which they will operate, with independent evaluation approaches (and not necessarily linked to the product or to the "most used" software) and with a constant practical attention to a use of technologies that is useful in the future professional context. In particular, they will be able to tackle any legal database, or collection of legal documents, without any problems, and complete a search useful for the study or for the preparation of documents. 4. Communication skills. The Course will give students the opportunity to learn complex technological and computer-juridical issues and to expose and treat them with language properties and with clarity. 5. Learning skills. The Course aims to provide students with a concrete improvement in their IT-legal skills with a very rapid learning curve and with the possibility of immediately using, even outside the university context, the concepts learned. In particular, the learning will specifically concern the search for legal information in the most common databases. The Course has, also, the specific goal of giving students: a thorough knowledge of the legal databases, both from a technical point of view and with reference to the legal contents, on the assumption of the acquisition of the first basic elements, and notions, during the previous university career; the ability to critically address a problem of finding information in a very large database and resolve legal issues by re-elaborating the concepts learned and the information retrieved; strengthening the technical and IT language relevant to the subject, especially with reference to research operators and activities; the ability to link the different topics in order to elaborate useful proposals for the solution of concrete cases, also through practical online research carried out with the active participation of the students.

At the end of the Course the student who has successfully learned the subject will have an in-depth knowledge of the Course topics, with the acquisition of a reasoning method suitable for dealing with more specific and complex IT-legal subjects with respect to institutional notions and to search for data without problems and information in the most common legal databases.