Summer Adjudication Research Roadblocks

Over the summer I worked in the lab and did my internship at a local law firm. I started examining the pulled cases on LexisNexis an online legal research platform. We were hoping that this platofrm would give us more information on the cases than is available online. Unfortunately, I only found few specific examples of the cases I have pulled from our dataset. For any cases that I did find a related case through Lexis, there was limited information without any specific details regarding the details of the crime charged. The only information I found was a restatement of the charges brought against the defendants.  In addition, the cases are all at the appellate level. There are no entry-level cases featured on the site. This means that the only cases that render any results are those in which the decision of the jury or judge was appealed, and the case was subsequently heard by a higher court. For the few cases that did reach higher courts, none of the cases added any details to help to classify whether or not the cases involved an instance of human trafficking. We were hoping the database would provide more information for our research but sadly we came up short on our expectations, just another important research lesson learned by working in the lab! 

Jadon Cox

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