Civil research can uncover information of a non-criminal element that is nonetheless telling about a subject's character. Even if character issues aren't your primary concern, civil documents can provide valuable data on a subject's personal, corporate, or financial past. Sometimes, requestors must do nothing more than establish the facts while withholding moral judgments of them.

Private investigators, employers, novelists, and journalists are just a few of those who look to civil research to provide insight into their subjects' universes. Here, issues of privacy continue to stoke an already hot debate about what should and should not be available to public view. If you're a creditor wondering why you haven't been repaid on your loan, most would agree that you have a right to investigate your borrower's history (though ideally you'd have done this prior to approving the loan). By the same token, if you're a wrongly accused private citizen, you probably don't think your prospective employer should have access to your invalid records.

What Civil Research Can Unearth

Conducting civil research can yield information on everything from child adoptions and small claims to unlawful detainers and probates. Traffic infractions, bail forfeitures, and family mediation documents are open to scrutiny as well. By cobbling together such data, a researcher can paint any number of possible pictures of his or her research subject. This is important to bear in mind when interpreting the findings with which one has been furnished.

There are those who believe that everyone should be entitled to redemption in the form of pardons, expungements, and other negations of past misdeeds. If you're hiring an important employee, however, you may feel you have the right to know what your candidates do in their off hours, especially if it involves criminal activities. Here, the line between the civil and the criminal starts to blur, as issues of ethics and personal choice enter the picture, making the legal considerations of hiring and firing that much more nettlesome.