Cathy, how would you recommend [researching] legal matters[...]?
There are probably books on how to do legal research intended for nonlawyers. Unfortunately, I don't have a specific recommendation or endorsement.
A lot of the skills required are not specific to law though. Probably the most important skill for legal research is impeccable reading comprehension, understanding all the nuances of the language and not reading things that aren't there. For example,
the error I identified earlier in the thread was almost certainly the result of a failure of reading comprehension. The author confused "and" and "or", and it's difficult to imagine what could explain that other than trouble parsing English sentences. You have to master reading comprehension before you can analyse any written instrument, whether it is a statute, a judicial opinion, a contract, a novel, a blog article, or a post on this forum.
Once you've mastered reading comprehension, you need to know where to find the relevant documents for your issue, so that you can read them. That skill is actually specific to law and requires understanding where the law comes from.
Once you find the relevant documents specific to your issue, you need to understand how they interact with all other areas of law, which tends to require a broad base of general knowledge about law. For example, trusts are not really an isolated thing you can learn about on their own. In order to understand the law of trusts, you would also need an understanding of property law, the law of agency, contracts, equitable principles, and a lot of other things. You'd need all that knowledge so that you can properly understand the relevant documents that are specific to your issue.
So, I certainly wasn't intending to suggest that legal research is easy. It will probably take a few years of study to become good at it. I wasn't really suggesting it as a practical course of action for the average person. Most people would be better served by retaining counsel than by trying to become an expert on legal research. However, the abstract point I was making with my earlier post is still important: secondary sources, although possibly helpful, are only descriptions of the law, they aren't the law themselves. This may sound obvious, but I've noticed lots of people, for example, think that publications on the IRS website
are the tax code, and that's just not the case.