United States Federal Case Law
Justia, a legal portal, offers free access to a wide range of federal case law resources. Find Supreme Court decisions (1759 - Present) and Federal Appeals Court decisions since 1950. Justia also provides access and RSS feeds to Federal District Court dockets.
Google Scholar provides a US Federal case law database which includes US Supreme Court opinions since 1 US 1 (pre - 1776), Federal Appeals opinions since 1 F2d 1 (1924+), and many Federal District Court opinions from the Federal Supplement. Opinions from all 50 states are included since 1950. Internal page numbers are included as well, and cases are hyperlinked to other cases within each case. Click on the "Cited by" link to see citations of a particlar opinion in other case law.
Owned and powered by Fastcase, The Public Library of Law (PLoL) makes available all cases from the U.S. Supreme Court, federal appellate cases from 1950 forward, appellate cases from all 50 states back to 1997, the U.S. Code, select statutes or codes from all 50 states, as well as select state regulations, court rules and constitutions.
Public Resource.org and Law.gov
The non-profit Public.Resource.Org, Inc., run by archivist Carl Malamud, is working via the Law.gov initiative to make all primary law of the United States, including court opinions, available for download in bulk format. Interested law librarians click here to learn more about joining a working group to create a nation-wide inventory of primary law.
RECAP is a Firefox web browser extension that improves the PACER experience while helping PACER users build a free and open repository of federal public court records which includes Federal court opinions. RECAP users automatically donate the documents they purchase from PACER into a public repository hosted by the Internet Archive. As well, RECAP saves users money by alerting them when a document they are searching for is already available from this repository.
CourtWeb enables access to information about select rulings, as well as the text of available rulings, by participating judges in several federal district courts. For case information, search each court separately. For opinions, search individual courts or all of them. Access the full-text search option by selecting any court from the main menu, and then click the full-text search button at the bottom of the screen.
A commercial site which offers comprehensive coverage of both federal and state case law, codes and regulations. Use as a lower cost alternative to more expensive legal databases.
Connect here to find the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. The site offers statistics, reports, the Directory of Electronic Public Access Services, and more.
Non-profit organization, Public.Resource.Org, whose mission is to make all court cases available online for free, now offers the content of the former FLITE database. FLITE, launched by the Judge Advocate General's (JAG Corps) JAG Corps, later changed hands and became the Department of Justice's JURIS database.
JURIS consists of a virtual federal law library. "The general legal data base currently includes the full text of over 225,000 federal cases, including headnotes, as well as headnotes from over 475,000 state court cases. The data base also contains a large number of statutory, regulatory, and administrative files." See the database contents.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals makes available oral arguments from January 2004 to present. The Microsoft Windows Media Player is required in order to listen to the audio files. Searching is by date or case number. The Web site indicates it will maintain the audio files for three months.
Oyez, U.S. Supreme Court Multimedia
Listen to digital recordings of U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments or review the biographies of the 100+ justices that have served on the Supreme Court. The site also provides news concerning the U.S. Supreme Court and a listing of cases argued but not decided. Search or browse the site's collection of U.S. Supreme Court cases to find an abstract of a case, its participants (justices, attorneys), audio files (if available) of the oral argument and oral opinion, a transcript of the oral argument (if available) and a link to the written opinion. Oyez also offers a free iPhone app, "Pocket Justice" to view court information and listen to featured oral arguments.
Search for a District by County Name and retrieve the name of the federal district and appellate courts serving a particular county. Searching for All Counties in a District finds county names associated with a specific federal district or appellate court. Searching for Details by County Code returns the county name and state, as well as the names of the federal district and appellate courts, upon the entry of a county code.
Securities Class Action Clearinghouse
Created and maintained by Stanford Law School, this site offers the full text of complaints, briefs, court decisions and other filings dealing with federal class action securities fraud litigation. It also provides related news headlines, reports (statistics), articles, information about settlements and more. You may browse by company name (other indexes available). Or search the database by litigant name, ticker symbol, court or date (month and year).
Covers the United States Supreme Court - posts are written by lawyers and law students. The blog is funded by Aiken Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
Supreme Court of the United States
The official U.S. Supreme Court Web site. The site provides, among other resources, recent Court decisions, docket files dating back to 2000, an interactive Court calendar, a case citation finder, information on bar admissions, court rules and official opinions from United States Reports, 1991 - present.
The American Bar Association (ABA) Division for Public Education provides analyses of the issues, arguments, background and significance of cases slated for oral argument in the U.S. Supreme Court. Find merit briefs, a summary of legal issues, full-text article about specific cases and more.
The Constitution of the United States of America including analysis and interpretation of the Constitution with annotations of cases decided by the Supreme Court of the United States through June 29, 2004. Annotations include direct Web links to cited cases.
See Also: The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation, Library of Congress.
U.S. Supreme Court Decisions (LII)
Cornell Legal Information Institute provides access to Project Hermes bench opinions issued since May 1990. Browse by date, topic or party name. Some historical decisionLs are also available. The Cornell Legal Information Institute also publishes the LII Bulletin, an online journal covering Supreme Court cases.
This commercial site offers databases of state and federal case law. An alternative to traditional online legal research systems, VersusLaw provides access to federal and state case law, as well as, federal statutes and regulations, legal news, and forms. Online documentation indicates tribal and foreign court availability, but does not specify which courts.
LLRX features three articles by reviewer T.R. Halvorson, which cover this service. See Survey of Online Legal Information Alternatives for Small Law Firms and Public Law Libraries, Preview of VersusLaws USConline, CFRonline, and CFRupdate!, and VersusLaw's V.: A View through the Southern California Online Users Group Rating Scale Lenses.
Willamette law students offer summaries of cases pending before the U.S. Supreme Court via the Web and email. Summaries consist of a concise explanation of the relevant questions of law, case name and number, date of certiorari granted, and lower court citation.
