You should start by using Lexis, available through the APUS Richard G. Trefry Library, to access law review articles on your topic. Those law review articles will become a point of departure to access primary sources on your topic, such as statutes, legislative materials, case law, regulations, and others. Of course you may also use law review articles, other periodicals, and other secondary sources for your paper.

Note that as you read these articles and other materials, you should take notes. You must have a system in place from this point forward to keep track of your sources and the information you pull from your sources. It is helpful to draft your full Bluebook citation for each of these sources before you start taking notes. As you take notes, keep careful track of exactly where you find the information. This will help you immensely when you start writing and footnoting your sources.
You should now have enough to be ready to finalize your proposal. That said, before you begin to draft your final formal proposal, it is important to take a step back and think about your topic and the feedback you have received on your previous assignments, which are the building blocks for this formal proposal. Ask yourself why the topic matters, and why you care about it. Consider what you have learned from your readings. This will likely involve going back and reviewing your notes. Ask yourself again what your purpose is in writing about the topic. What do you want your reader to walk away thinking about after reading your paper? Once these things are clear in your mind, and you have helpful notes on your paper, you are ready to start finalizing the proposal. Do not just blindly cut and paste from your earlier submissions. Instead, put it all together carefully, proofreading for structure, content, and writing mechanics / grammar. This is your formal proposal, so make sure you get it right. Be sure to ask me if you have any questions.

Your research proposal should contain all the key elements involved in the research process and include sufficient information for me to evaluate the proposed study.

Regardless of your research area and the methodology you choose, all research proposals must address the following questions:

a. What is your topic?

b. What is your thesis? What do you plan to prove or illustrate in your paper?

c. Why you want to write on this topic?

d. How you are going to do it? Specifically, what resources to you intend to use? For example, will you research mostly case law, statutes, the Constitution and legal articles written on those cases and your topic? This section should list some of the actual cases and statutes that you plan to discuss in your paper. I need to get a sense of the specific primary legal sources you plan to use in your paper.

Please be as specific as possible in this proposal. This assignment will give you a good foundation to use to start the process of research, outlining and writing your paper.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE RESEARCH PAPER FOR THIS CLASS MUST BE YOUR ORIGINAL WORK. IT IS AGAINST THE APUS PLAGIARISM POLICY TO USE WORK THAT YOU MAY HAVE SUBMITTED IN A PREVIOUS OR SIMULTANEOUS CLASS. THERE HAVE BEEN SOME INSTANCES WHERE APUS STUDENTS WERE TAKING MULTIPLE GRADUATE LEVEL COURSES AND SUBMITTED THE SAME PAPER FOR MORE THAN ONE COURSE. THIS IS AGAINST THE APUS POLICY.

Nuts and Bolts of Paper/ Proposal:

Your paper will automatically go through Turnitin. Please review your report – if it is yellow, orange or red you may need to insert some additional citations or paraphrase some material. If you do have a red or orange report, you should include a note to your instructor explaining why and how you mitigated it with citations, etc.

Please use 12 font and one inch margins. Please include page numbers. Please double space. Recommend using topic and sub topic headings to organize your paper.

Please include a reference page at the end of your paper where you list all the references used in your paper.

Please use the Blue Book citation format to list your references. Information on this format can be found in the Resources or at this link
http://www.law.cornell.edu/citation/.

Please remember to USE FOOTNOTES!! Footnotes are sequentially numbered starting with 1. No two have the same number even if they refer to the same source. Please also include a reference section at the end where all sources are listed in proper Bluebook format.

Recommend that you proof read your paper several times to ensure that you have no spelling, grammar or punctuation errors and to ensure that your paper flows well and is organized.

*** Please note that the research paper for this class must be your original work. It is against the APUS plagiarism policy to use work that you may have submitted in a previous or simultaneous class. There have been some instances where APUS students were taking multiple graduate level courses and submitted the same paper for more than one course. This is against the APUS policy. Please review the policy at:

http://www.apus.edu/student-handbook/writing-standards/index.htm#Academic_Dishonesty

LSTD 299 Formal Final Project Research Proposal_1_