Federal Government Information: Judicial and Legal Resources

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Books on the law formed a major part of the holdings of the Library of Congress from its beginning. In 1832, Congress established the Law Library of Congress as a separate department of the Library. It houses one of the most complete collections of U.S. Congressional documents in their original format. In order to make these records more easily accessible to students, scholars, and interested citizens, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation brings together online the records and acts of Congress from the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention through the 43rd Congress, including the first three volumes of the Congressional Record, 1873-75.

This system contains the full text of 7,407 U.S. Supreme Court Decisions from volumes 300 through 422 of U.S. Reports. issued between 1937 and 1975. Decisions are available as ASCII text files that can be read on your browser's screen or saved to your hard drive and accessed using most word processor programs. To save, use the printer friendly version link at the bottom or top of each decision. Most decisions are very large and may take a while to download if you have a slow internet connection.
Currently available search strategies are simple. We expect that most users will know the case name of the decision they need and will most likely use the Case Name Search option. Otherwise, you may use the Full Text Search option, but beware that the size of the database and the number of words (14.5 million) may require more than one search to find what you need.

FindLaw's searchable database of the Supreme Court decisions since 1893 (U.S. Supreme Court Decisions: U.S. Reports 150-, 1893-). Browsable by year and U.S. Reports volume number, and searchable by citation, case title and full text.
They also maintain an archive of Opinion Summaries from September 2000 to the Present.

The Indigenous Law Portal brings together collection materials from the Law Library of Congress as well as links to tribal websites and primary source materials found on the Web. The portal is based on the structure of the Library of Congress Classification schedule the Law of the Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (Classes KIA-KIP: North America).
Indigenous law materials can be difficult to locate for a variety of reasons. Tribal laws are usually maintained by individual tribes or groups of tribal peoples who may or may not have the resources to make them available in electronic format, or they may only be passed on through oral tradition. In some cases tribal legal materials are available electronically, but they may not be available freely on the Web, or the tribe may want to restrict outside access to the materials. However, we have found many tribes compile their laws and ordinances into a code, and they often provide a digital version of their most recent code and constituti

Information on government and law available online. It includes selected links to useful and reliable sites for legal information.
“The archived information includes English language summaries of laws, regulations, and related legal instruments that in turn link to the full-text PDFs that are in the official language(s) of the country. Legal items from the gazettes of the following countries are now available under the ‘Legislative’ sources list for each jurisdiction: Brazil, Canada, Democratic Republic of Congo, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, Republic of Korea, Kuwait, Mexico, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Taiwan, Tunisia, and United States.”

This is the education and research agency for the federal courts. Congress created the FJC in 1967 to promote improvements in judicial administration in the courts of the United States. This site contains the results of Center research on federal court operations and procedures and court history, as well as selected educational materials produced for judges and court employees.

Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) is an electronic public access service that allows users to obtain case and docket information online from federal appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts, and the PACER Case Locator. PACER is provided by the Federal Judiciary in keeping with its commitment to providing public access to court information via a centralized service.
PACER is available to anyone who registers for an account.
The more than one million PACER users include attorneys, pro se filers, government agencies, trustees, data collectors, researchers, educational and financial institutions, commercial enterprises, the media, and the general public.

The Federal Courts Law Review (FCLR) is an electronic law review dedicated to legal scholarship relating to federal courts. Articles are from scholars, judges and distinguished practitioners. The editorial board, composed of United States Magistrate Judges and law school professors, uniquely combines the insight of the federal judiciary with the perspective of law school academics. The FCLR, founded in July 1997, is a publication of the Federal Magistrate Judges Association (FMJA).

Street Law, Inc. developed landmarkcases.org in 2002, with funding from the Supreme Court Historical Society to provide teachers with a full range of resources and activities to support the teaching of landmark Supreme Court cases. Street Law, Inc. is a global, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization with more than 40 years of experience developing classroom and community programs that educate young people about law and government.

Fastcase has created the Public Library of Law to make it easy to find the law online. PLoL is one of the largest free law libraries in the world, because they assemble law available for free scattered across many different sites -- all in one place.

The Guide to Law Online is an annotated compendium of Internet links; a portal of Internet sources of interest to legal researchers. Although the Guide is selective, inclusion of a site by no means constitutes endorsement by the Law Library of Congress. In compiling this list, emphasis wherever possible has been on sites offering the full texts of laws, regulations, and court decisions, along with commentary from lawyers writing primarily for other lawyers. Materials related to law and government that were written by or for lay persons also have been included, as have government sites that provide even quite general information about themselves or their agencies.