Free Legal Resources

As the middle of the semester approaches and the cold winter breeze lingers, it's the perfect time to grab a blanket and cozy up at your computer to enhance your legal research skills. While you may already be familiar with major research databases like Westlaw, Lexis, and HeinOnline, have you considered what to do if you don't have access to those resources? The free legal resources at your disposal may be more helpful than you think.

Why Should I Care About Free Resources?

Accessing major commercial providers of legal information can be prohibitively expensive IRL. Additionally, many legal employers may not subscribe to all available content. Fortunately, a significant amount of primary law and select secondary resources are freely accessible online.

What Are the Disadvantages of Free Resources?

The authenticity, reliability, scope, and value of free resources can vary significantly from those of paid resources. For example, SSRN relies on individuals to upload their law journal articles, making it less reliable as a comprehensive resource. In contrast, HeinOnline provides comprehensive access to law journals in its collection and is regularly updated. Access to the text of decided court cases is often available on government websites or other free platforms like Google Scholar; however, these sites do not include the annotations found in Westlaw or Lexis that can aid in locating other relevant laws and highlighting important components of cases. Additionally, the high cost of paid resources can sometimes be justified by the time and effort required to compile information, such as a 50-state survey from free resources versus a professionally compiled one.

Current Awareness: Legal News and Blogs

A crucial skill for attorneys is staying current with legal and non-legal trends, news, and events. It is essential to stay up to date on changes in the law, new interpretations of existing laws, and upcoming cases that could affect your practice. Legal news sources are a great way to stay current with legal and non-legal trends, news, and events. Legal blogs (or "blawgs") are valuable sources of law-related information. You can find legal blogs in nearly every subject area, by state or region, from a variety of viewpoints, and from all parts of the legal community (law academics, law practitioners, law students, law librarians, etc.). Here are some of our favorite free current awareness resources:

• Above The Law is written by former attorneys and focuses on breaking legal news, interesting cases, legal controversies, and the state of the legal industry.
• Jurist is a web-based legal news and real-time legal research service powered by over 80 law students at 30 law schools across five continents working under the guidance of professional staff and academic leadership based in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
• SCOTUSblog provides detailed, regularly updated coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Law Reviews & Law Journals

Law reviews can be useful for providing analysis, opinions, or explanations of the law, as well as covering recent legal developments. Two of the best sources for free law review and law journal articles are SSRN and Google Scholar.

• Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a popular source for works in progress and forthcoming articles. SSRN includes the Legal Scholarship Network (LSN), covering legal scholarship from around the world.
• Google Scholar finds abstracts for scholarly articles from a variety of sources, including free websites, HeinOnline, and other databases. Because of this, not all articles on Google Scholar are free. However, many libraries, including major public libraries, provide a bridge from Google Scholar to their online databases via the “library links” feature in settings.

Federal Statutes & Regulations

Federal statutes and regulations may be found on designated government portals. For example, Congress.gov is the U.S. government’s source for federal statutes and Congressional materials, while GovInfo includes federal agency and regulatory materials. Similarly, state statutes and regulations may be found on their designated government websites. For instance, the State of Rhode Island General Assembly website is home to local bills and laws.

Some additional sources to consider include:

• The Cornell Legal Information Institute - CFR allows you to read the regulation text and links to the corresponding rules, proposed rules, notices published in the Federal Register, and rules published in the Federal Register after the publication date.
• The National Conference of State Legislatures website includes a searchable database of state legislature websites and often provides comparative surveys of state legislation on emerging legal topics.
• The Sunlight Foundation’s Open States site provides access to state legislative information, including pending legislation and votes.

Case Law and Court Documents

Individual courts have varying degrees of materials available on their websites. Some courts will publish recent opinions or opinions of key cases. Other courts lack online materials. Here are some resources we recommend:

• Google Scholar provides extensive full-text coverage of federal and state cases: Supreme Court cases since 1791, lower federal court cases since 1923, and state appellate court cases since 1950. Although not as robust as the citators in paid databases, it also offers citator-like features such as “cited by” for citation counts and “how cited”, which includes snippets of cited text and “depth of treatment” indicators.
• VLex Fast Case - if you are a member of a state bar, many bar associations provide their members with free access to the vLex Fastcase legal research platform. Check if your state offers a reduced or free membership for law students. The Rhode Island Bar Association Law Student Membership is free and offers great benefits!
• The FindLaw website has cases from various courts, legal directories, and topical legal information and forms.

Others

Most law libraries offer online access to their research guides. While these guides may include information specific to their library collection, they also provide references to treatises, online sources, major case law, legislation, and other relevant materials to assist in research. This is our “best of the rest” list of additional resources.

• The Public Library of Law includes cases from the U.S. Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals, cases from all 50 states back to 1997, federal statutory law and codes from all 50 states, regulations, court rules, constitutions, and more.
• Cornell's Legal Information Institute website helps you find court websites. Click through from Get the law > law by jurisdiction > state or federal law to locate court websites.
• State Online Legal Information, maintained by the American Association of Law Libraries, provides links to and information about free online resources for accessing each state's laws.
• The Law Library of Congress links to online sources of domestic, foreign, and international law

While our free legal resource guide is under construction, you may find a more comprehensive list of free legal resources in the Harvard Law School Library’s guide on Free Legal Research Resources - United States.  Good Luck and Happy Researching!