Once you've defined your claim and ensured that the topic is not currently preempted, you need to monitor the topic and any important cases/statutes you will be discussing to make sure that nothing important changes between when you've done your research and when you finish your note. There are several services that make this monitoring easier:

You may also want to review dissertations and theses to make sure your topic has not been preempted.

Potential law review note topics must be throughly reviewed to ensure that they are presenting a novel claim that has not been previously addressed or made obsolete by further legal action. This does not mean that your topic must be completely obscure or entirely novel, just that whatever nuance or angle with which you wish to approach the topic must be original. If you discover that your proposed claim has been addressed by someone else or that the case on which you were basing your argument has been reversed or superseded, you will need to alter your approach. This review is essential to determining what materials are relevant to your argument and has to be repeated throughout the research and writing process.

Luckily, a thorough review of relevant material is necessary to the writing process anyway, so once your topic passes its preemption check, you will already have a significant portion of your research completed. Be sure to keep good records of the material you review. The best place to start is with a standard search of the legal literature and a citation check for all your primary law references - resources for this process are listed below and to the right.

Once you are satisfied that your topic is sufficiently novel, you can shift into monitoring mode, to ensure that further developments do not preempt your topic without you knowing.  There are several services that will provide topical reports and monitor case developments for you, and they are listed in the left hand column.

Doing a preemption check means thoroughly reviewing existing scholarship to ensure first that your proposed claim is original and, secondly, that any key cases or statutes on which your argument is based are still good law.

To review legal scholarship, conduct searches in multiple databases of legal periodical articles. Try several different combinations of search words to make sure your searches are sweeping up as much relevant material as possible.

You can never know for sure if someone else is working on the same topic you are, but you can review locations where law faculty regularly post working papers, or where you can find information on upcoming legal conferences, workshops, and symposia.

If your proposed topic touches on foreign law or legal issues, you may want to review some foreign publications. A basic index is listed here; try the Law Library's A-Z Database List for more.