28 August 2006. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals provides free online access to oral arguments, opinions, unpublished orders and other case material. Search by party name, case number or recent date. There is no information on the extent of the coverage. However, it appears to go back at least to 1999. Even better, the court offers text-based RSS as well as two podcasting formats - audio-based RSS and iTunes - for keeping up to date with newly released documents. 27 August 2007. A joint project of Columbia Law School's Program on Law and Technology and the Silicon Flatirons Program at the University of Colorado Law School, AltLaw provides free access to appellate level federal court opinions. Coverage is clearly indicated and varies by court.
While it is possible to browse cases in the database in reverse chronological order, the site provides both a simple and advanced search interface. When using the simple search box on the home page, enclose phrases in parentheses. Advanced search features including the ability to limit queries by specific courts.
Search matches display well in the browser. You may also opt to display a case in the original PDF from the court, or in ASCII text format. AltLaw is a useful alternative to the federal case search options at LexisONE and FindLaw. 17 December 2004. Revised 9 December 2005. Find a commercial database of briefs filed in U.S. federal and state courts. Search by keyword, case name or attorney name to find information, including an abstract, about matching briefs. Downloading briefs incurs a charge, but the searching is free. Registered users (free) can take advantage of an e-mail notification service for discovering briefs that match your search terms. 17 December 2004. Revised 9 December 2005. Court Record Services, Inc. offers U.S. Supreme Court (1984 to present) and U.S. Court of Appeals (1981 to present) records and briefs in portable document format (PDF). Search by keyword, case name or docket number to retrieve information, including an abstract, about matching briefs. You can then purchase and download PDF images of the court-stamped documents. Site registration required. 20 August 2007. Revised 23 August 2007. The non-profit Public.Resource.Org, Inc., run by activist Carl Malamud, is working to make federal (and later, state) court decisions available for free. As of this writing, the site provides about 50 pages of text, which it says comes from volume 2 of the first series of the Federal Reporter.
The structure of the Web site resembles the older gopher technology. When you click the above link, you will see a directory structure containing the files that comprise this site. You may download all 50 pages, but they are contained in a 3.6-gigabyte, uncompressed TIFF file.
Alternatively, you may browse the Table of Cases (see file 2f.toc.html) and then open the corresponding files. The file names appear to be labeled like legal citations (e.g., 2f.0001.tif is 2F1 in the Table of Cases, or the legal citation, 2 F 1 (Federal Reporter 1st Series, 2nd volume, page 1).
Notation: The Table of Cases does not provide access to every scanned page available in the directory. You will have to check consecutive file names to discover the ending of the case. For instance, the case at 2 F 1 comprises 5 files - 2f.0001.tif through 2f.0005.tif. Also, as of this writing, there is no way to search the cases. 13 September 2002. Prepared by the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, this publication offers the text of the Constitution, amendments, proposed amendments not ratified by the States, and case annotations. Researchers may perform keyword searches or download relevant portions of the text. Downloading in portable document format (.pdf) is also available.
28 September 2000. LLRX.com offers search access to source information for federal and state court rules, forms and dockets. The database includes links to over 700 sources. Search by keyword (e.g., pennsylvania forms to find links to federal and state court forms), or browse by one or more of the following criteria: jurisdiction, document type, or state. The database returns links to credible sources that match your query.
A tremendous improvement over the former court rules guide, this resource is easy to use, uncluttered, and fast.
13 May 2003. 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. 9 January 2002. Revised 2 August 2002. Attorney Peter Nordberg covers in detail the U.S. Supreme Court's 1993 decision on scientific evidence and the admissibility of expert scientific testimony (Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals). Find commentary regarding U.S. Supreme Court post-Daubert decisions and procedural issues. Also find case annotations for key Circuit Court opinions as well as opinions by field of expertise. Nordberg arranges these annotations by Circuit and by fields of expertise. A section of the site (called Substance) provides basic information about Daubert and tries to correct misinterpretations. Another offers the author's thoughts about some legal tactics he "wishes somebody else would try first." Overall, a very useful site for learning about Daubert and monitoring developments.
14 January 2002. Revised 10 March 2006. A fee-based resource by MDEX (Medical and Disability Experts) Online, the Daubert Tracker tracks federal and state "Daubert" cases. The original U.S. Supreme Court Daubert decision set precedent with respect to scientific evidence and the admissibility of expert scientific testimony. Daubert Tracker maintains a database of reported Daubert, as well as Kumho Tire and Joiner, decisions. In addition to the reported decisions, subscribers may display the court docket online and order filings, as well as briefs and transcripts. A new brief bank (added during February 2006) contains more than "10,000 briefs and other supporting documents from both appellate and trial courts. You may search it for free. Subscribers receive a discount for the documents they download. 5 April 2005. Revised 21 February 2008. The law firm Preston Gates & Ellis LLP provides access to its database of more than 900 electronic discovery cases collected from state and federal jurisdictions around the United States. Search by rule, context, issue or keyword to find descriptions of matching cases. The descriptions include a case citation, the nature of the case, description of electronic data involved, and a description of the electronic discovery issue. When available, it also includes a summary of the case. 6 October 1999. Revised 25 February 2005. Villanova University School of Law maintains this research guide for finding federal court Web sites and court opinions. It notes whether the Web site is the official source of the information or an alternative source. 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.
9 October 2001. National Law Journal offers an excerpt from Robert J. Ambrogi's new book, The Best (and Worst) Legal Sites on the Web. It serves as an index to sites where you can find federal and state court opinions. 6 September 2002. Revised 25 February 2005. Search the U.S. Constitution, United States Code (USC), Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) or the Federal Register. Also find databases containing opinions from the Circuit Courts of Appeals, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court (1893-present). While some features at FindLaw improve the use of these resources over their availability elsewhere on the Web, researchers should take care to verify and update information they find. Other more current sources for the U.S. Constitution, USC, and CFR exist. You can also use this site to find other sources of federal and state case law and statutes. 7 January 2003. Attorney Howard J. Bashman comments on appellate court cases, news articles, and other information pertaining to the federal appellate process.
16 June 2008. 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 here.
While the contents note referenced above indicates that the database is frequently updated, it appears to be current through 1992 or 1993, depending on the section. You may browse the database directory or download portions or the whole database. There is no search feature. 27 February 2003. Computer forensics consulting firm Kroll Ontrack Inc. offers a free monthly newsletter, which provides current news about court decisions, technology, rules of evidence, and other issues pertaining to electronic evidence. A Minneapolis-based firm, Kroll Ontrack provides services for legal professionals, federal agencies and corporations, including data-recovery, evidence collection, electronic discovery, expert testimony, and secure chain-of-custody procedures. 28 August 2000. Revised 8 November 2000. lexisONE offers free case law, legal forms, and a legal sites guide. Find selected federal and state cases covering the past five years as well as a complete collection of U.S. Supreme Court opinions. Researchers may retrieve relevant decisions by citation or by keyword queries.
On 8 November 2000, Lexis rolls out phase two of LexisONE adding numerous free legal documents and forms, an expanded Internet Legal Guide, Matthew Bender forms (for a fee), and free access, by special arrangement and for a limited time, to the Martindale-Hubbell Law Digest. The enhanced site also includes articles on law technology, client development and practice management topics, legal news, information on lifestyle issues, and lexisONE Wireless for access to Lexis products and services via handheld devices.
A service of Georgia State University Law School, GSU Online, the Meta-Index provides a search interface to sites offering court opinions, statutes, legislation, regulations and more. This is an easy-to-use tool that guides researchers through varying search processes at different sites. The owners also regularly check the functionality of the site and its links. 19 November 2001. VersusLaw, in cooperation with the National American Indian Court Judges Association, offers a database of tribal court opinions. Presently, it provides access to the opinions of 11 tribal courts, including Chitimacha Tribal Courts (LA), Colville Confederated Tribes Court of Appeals (WA), Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde (OR), Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation Tribal Court (AZ), Hopi Tribal Court (AZ), Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Court (CT), Mohegan Gaming Disputes Court (CT), Mohegan Tribe of Indians Tribal Court (CT), Navajo Nation Supreme Court (AZ), Saint Regis Mohawk Tribal Court (NY), and Tunica-Biloxi Tribal Court (LA). The vendor has immediate plans to add the opinions of 18 additional tribal courts.
19 January 2000. On The Docket, by Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism -- the same group that maintains Oyez Oyez Oyez -- "offers continually updated coverage of the cases pending before the United States Supreme Court." Coverage includes essays on cases pending and additional information like links to related Web sites, questions presented to the court, dates for oral argument, etc. The Breaking News section of the site informs readers about petitions granted.
Revised 5 September 2003. 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 at FindLaw. Recently, the site announced that it was converting many of the audio tapes to MP3 files. 28 August 2000. The PACER Service Center of the Administrative Office of the Courts offers three new search utilities. Search for a District by County Name retrieves the name of the federal district and appellate courts serving a particular county. Search for All Counties in a District finds county names associated with a specific federal district or appellate court. Search 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. (Warning: the later feature takes a looooonnnng time to load.) 31 July 2007. The American Planning Association makes available this database of abstracts from Planning & Environmental Law. Subscribers can use this research tool to find cases relevant to issues they are working on, searching by state, topic, and date and creating custom folders to save and organize their research. Abstracts contain the case name, citation, court and a detailed description. A subscription to Planning & Environmental Law includes access to PEL Online for the entire staff of the subscribing organization.
The public has the same search options. Results indicate whether there are matches in the database. If there are, you will also see a partial abstract for one of the resulting items. 18 March 2008. Currently an alpha test database, PreCYdent contains court opinions from the U.S. Supreme Court (1759-present), opinions from Federal Reporter, 2d series (1950-forward), Federal Reporter, 3d series (through August 2006), all published and unpublished opinions from the federal circuit courts (check timeliness by following the "our database" link on the home page), federal district court opinions since 2004 except for certain courts listed in "our database," and select state court opinions as listed in "our database."
According to a brief overview published in Law Technology News (free registration required), "the developers of this experimental legal search engine ... claim their tests outperform 'by a wide margin' Westlaw natural language search, not to mention other commercial databases."
PreCYdent is a concept-based search engine that supports Boolean connectors, wildcards and limited proximity searching. Follow the advanced search link and click "Boolean operators" to review the help documentation on constructing a query. 14 February 2008. Revised 18 March 2008. 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. While the case law appears to come directly from Fastcase, other legal documents originate from external sources, such as the House of Representatives (U.S. Code), state legislatures and other trustworthy legal sources. PLoL simply offers an alternate search interface.
Searching here is more advanced than what you would find at a public Web search engine. For instance, the database supports the within (W/n) proximity connector. It also supports Boolean, exact phrase searching and wildcard (*) searching (right-hand truncation only).
Technical notes: You must activate javascript to use this Web site. You must register to display the full text of case law. 5 September 2003. Created and maintained by the library staff at 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). Google powers a site search feature for finding filings by keyword. 4 December 2007. The Southern Africa Litigation Centre maintains a database containing judicial decisions on HIV/AIDS-related issues from in Botswana, South Africa, Nigeria, India, United Kingdom, Canada, United States and other countries. You may browse the database (it's small) by date or search it. Search criteria include the case name, country, subject category, date or keyword.
The full-text of matching decisions appears behind the "link to case" entry in the search results. Formats include HTML and PDF.
Technical note: The date search option did not work during our visit. 18 April 2000. Revised 27 October 2000. The official U.S. Supreme Court Web site opened Monday, 17 April 2000. Visitors may learn about the court, primarily by reading excerpts from a booklet prepared by the Court. Also available is the Court's calendar (current Term), argument calendars since March 2000, hearing lists since October 1999, and the Court's schedule.
Visitors also will find bar admissions information and a form, court rules and two case handling guides. Interestingly, the site offers SLIP opinions leaving the electronic dissemination of BENCH opinions to continue with Project Hermes (See GPO Access or Cornell).
Researchers concerned about the official status of these opinions should note:
"In case of discrepancies between the print and electronic versions..., the print version controls." See URL http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/info_opinions.html.
The site further warns that it replaces BENCH opinions usually within hours of their issuance. In the event differences appear between BENCH and SLIP opinions, the SLIP opinion rules.
I do not, however, recommend deleting your bookmarks to the Cornell Project Hermes site. The Supreme Court site intends to retain slip opinions online only until the end of the Term or until they appear in preliminary print form, whichever occurs later. Moreover, it fails to provide a way to search them. Researchers may want to depend on it strictly for current awareness and document retrieval.
Government resources note!28 September 2000. The U.S. Supreme Court docket system is now available via the Web site. It covers the current and immediately preceeding Terms.
Case law note!27 October 2000. Beginning with the 2000/2001 Term, the U.S. Supreme Court offers transcripts of oral arguments on a 10 to 15 day delay. 13 November 2003. 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. 23 July 2002. This public interest advocacy site by the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice offers news and information about some of the key cases the organization is currently litigating. It also provides briefs and other legal documents (typically in both HTML and PDF formats), its Public Justice newsletter, a guide for seeking justice through the courts and submitting a potential case to the organization, as well as a database of useful nonprofit resources and contacts for public interest advocates.
18 September 2002. FindLaw reprints, and modifies the formatting of, the Library of Congress publication, The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation. FindLaw's version incorporates the 1996 and 1998 supplements into the text of the 1992 document. (NOTE: It does not incorporate the recent 2000 supplement.) It also creates hyperlinks for internal reference and browsing.
SEE ALSO: The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation, Library of Congress, 1992 with 1996, 1998, and 2000 supplements.
24 October 1996. Revised 18 March 2008. Cornell Legal Information Institute provides a database of court opinions from all U.S. Courts of Appeals. Rutgers University Law School - Camden offers a searchable archive of New Jersey District Court opinions. Coverage begins with October 1998.
Select a federal appellate court from a map of the United States. This database contains opinions from 1893 to present. Retrieve them by official U.S. citation, party name, or keyword. Researchers may also browse the database by year or U.S. Reports volume number. Cornell Legal Information Institute provides access to Project Hermes bench opinions issued since May 1990. Browse by date, topic or party name. Some historical decisions are also available.
The Cornell Legal Information Institute (LII) provides two RSS news feeds for current U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The feeds consists of case captions, decision dates and brief descriptions of the questions of law or holding of the court. The first offers the recent opinions of the court while the second provides a summary of the most current opinions. 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.
17 March 2004. Yale Lillian Goldman Law Library offers a free site (currently in beta) for U.S. Supreme Court records and briefs. According to site documentation, the library selects cases for inclusion "based on a ranking developed from citation data in historical and constitutional texts." In other words, if one of 15 authorities (see list at the site) cites to a case, the library will add the records and briefs. In addition to browsing the archive, you can search it by U.S. Reports citation or party name. Search results also show arguments available at Oyez and opinions from Findlaw and the Legal Information Institute. 18 October 2000. Law.com offers news and legal commentary about the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings as well as copies of the decisions (not free) and information about cases accepted for review. News and commentary appear in American Lawyer Media and affiliated publications.
Decisions, which cover select cases from the 1999-2000 Term to present, appear in chronological order or by subject. To search them by keyword, locate and follow the "advanced search" link in the right-hand middle portion of the page. Enter your key terms and then select "decisions" from the pull-down content type menu. While the engine finds U.S. Supreme Court decisions, unfortunately you cannot limit the search to this Court. Moreover, unless you subscribe to one of Law.com's Practice Centers, you cannot display the opinions.
Information about certiorari granted for the current Term also appears in chronological order or by subject. Displaying the full case summary information, which you may do without a subscription, provides case details including date the petition was granted, date for oral arguments (if known), issues presented, counsel, and amicus information.
10 September 2002. 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 VersusLaw’s USConline, CFRonline, and CFRupdate!, and VersusLaw's V.: A View through the Southern California Online Users Group Rating Scale Lenses.
12 July 2000. WestFind&Print is a simple citation retrieval service. You cannot conduct keyword or other queries, but you can locate and print multiple cases and KeyCite results simultaneously.
|
![tvceditor [at] virtualchase [dot] com](../images/editor_882_sm.jpg){kind=small}