Free Friday: Online Case Law

While free access to case law has been available for some time through sites like

  • The Public Library of Law: Developed by Fastcase, the Public Library of Law contains cases from the U.S. Supreme Court, Courts of Appeals and all 50 states (since 1997), as well as federal statutory law and codes from all states, regulations, court rules, and constitutions. Other features include RSS feeds for recent state and federal decisions, a user guide and web tutorials on finding cases and statutes.
  • AltLaw: A project of Columbia Law School's Program on Law and Technology and the Silicon Flatirons Program at the University of Colorado Law School, AltLaw features full text search of the last few decades of appellate and Supreme Court opinions. For most Circuits, coverage is limited to the last 40 to 50 years and West Reporter Citations are not available for the most recent cases. State law and district court cases are not currently available.
  • PreCYdent: PreCYdent emphasizes their search, which "ranks results by "authority", using mathematical techniques, such as eigenvector centrality, similar to those used by advanced Web search engines, as well as proprietary techniques we have developed that are specialized to the legal domain." The current version contains only U.S. Supreme Court and Court of Appeals cases. PreCYdent also allows you to register and upload legal documents.

Other great resources for online legal research with a poverty law focus include LSNC's Legal Research Tools and Legal Research on the Internet, a resource by the Shriver Center. -M

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technola - May 18, 2008 9:41 PM

J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi discuss case law in the public domain with Professor Thomas F. Bruce, Director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School, Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.org and Andy Martens, Senior Vice President of New Product Development, from Thomson West in a recent podcast episode of Lawyer2Lawyer.

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