Research Proposal Review - Urgent - 4 Hours

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Research Proposal

The question I intend to research is whether an Indiana Court can make a ruling that a child is a Child in Need of Services (CHINS) based solely on the admissions of one parent when the other parent cannot be located. Currently the Court in my county routinely makes CHINS findings based solely on the admissions of one parent, whereas multiple statutes and court cases make it clear that such a practice is not allowed. I will need to analyze this question from both a legal (statutes and cases) and ethical (rules of professional conduct) angle. However, questions of public policy are specifically excluded. I will not be asking what the law should be. Rather, the question is solely what the law is currently. I chose this project because I was specifically asked to research this question at my job, and I simply do not have the time to take on more than one research project at once. Thus, I intend to kill two birds with one stone by writing one memo for two purposes. All names will be replaced to ensure confidentiality.

I will be using Westlaw exclusively to research court cases and statutes which are relevant to answering this question. My process begins by either selecting a relevant case or statute if I know of one, or inputting various searches until I find one. I also specifically read through the table of contents for the relevant section of Indiana statute, which in this case is I.C. 31-34. Once I have found a starting point, I then browse through the list of cases that specifically cite to the chosen case or statute to see how the Court has interpreted it. I repeat this with a variety of cases and statutes until I have found my answer. If necessary, I will also look at the Indiana Practice Series to get a simplified summary of the law on a certain topic. However, this assumes that the issue I am researching has been considered before. If the issue is new or generally unthought of, then this step will prove unhelpful.

I will present the results of my research in a memo format as per the conventions of the legal profession, the most relevant of which is that no reference or works cited page is used. Informal documents such as this rely exclusively on in-text citation, and the Bluebook system fully accounts for this to make the citations as useful as possible. The body of the memo will be organized as follows: Summary of problem; Research questions; Relevant law; Analysis; Conclusion. The mark of success for this project will be whether I find a clear answer, whether that answer is persuasive to my superiors at my job, and whether the Court finds the answer persuasive.