Legal research is the disciplined skill of finding the rule that governs a problem, reading it in its proper place in the hierarchy of authority, and confirming it is still good law today. This guide teaches the two questions behind every search—is this source actually law, and does it bind my court—by explaining primary versus secondary authority and mandatory versus persuasive authority. It shows how constitutions, statutes, regulations, and cases stack up, how to decode a citation on sight, and how to choose among free tools like CourtListener, govinfo, and Cornell's Legal Information Institute and paid platforms like Westlaw and Lexis. It walks a repeatable research workflow, adds a working primer on statutory interpretation after the fall of Chevron deference, and explains how citators such as Shepard's and KeyCite verify that a case has not been overruled. It closes with candid guidance for non-lawyers, a full worked example, and a warning drawn from real sanctions imposed on lawyers who trusted an AI chatbot's invented citations.