Printer-friendly version

September 2006

Legal Journals on the Web
A list of with links to all legal journals available in full text on the web for free.  Prepared by the law librarians at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University (Canada).

GLIN (Global Legal Information Network)
The Global Legal Information Network is a public database of laws, regulations, judicial decisions, and other complementary legal sources contributed by governmental agencies and international organizations. These GLIN members contribute the official full texts of published documents to the database in their original language. Each document is accompanied by a summary in English and subject terms selected from the multilingual index to GLIN. All summaries are available to the public, and public access to full texts is also available in participating jurisdictions.

Famous Trials Website
Douglas O. Linder, Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, has created the Famous Trials website. The site covers numerous famous trials and includes links to documents and other relevant information. The trials include historic trials such as the trials of Socrates, Thomas More, John Brown and Oscar Wilde. More recent trials such as the Clinton Impeachment, the O.J. Simpson trial, and the Zacarias Moussaoui trial are also included.
(from the Moritz Legal Information Blog)

American Prosecutors Research Institute
The American Prosecutors Research Institute (APRI) is a non-profit national clearinghouse for information on the prosecutorial function, as well as a research and program-development resource for prosecutors at all levels of government.  The major program areas of the APRI include, among other topics, "Child Abuse and Exploitation," "Community Prosecution," "Drug Prosecution and Prevention," "Violence Against Women," "Gun Violence Prosecution," and "White Collar Crime."  Each area contains information for visitors including an overview of the topic, news, CLE information, related publications, and links to other sites for further information.  Legal researchers will appreciate the Institute's "Publications" section,
organized by topic, which is a good source of in-depth and free documentation and resource guides.  The "Research" section offers information about prosecution and criminal justice policies and programs, including a detailed section on empirical research.  The APRI site is searchable.
(from Cornell Law Library's May 15 2006 InSITE)

Fifty-State Summary of Family Law
From Tom Mighell's Internet Legal Research Weekly: This is just a small part of the ABA's Family Law Section site, but it has some great information.  Here' you'll find a set of tables summarizing the certain family law issues for all fifty states.  You can check out custody criteria, grounds for divorce, property division, third-party visitation, and other topics.  A nifty way to compare family laws amongst the states.

March 2006

The World Factbook 2006 is now available on the Central Intelligence Agency Web site. The World Factbook remains the CIA's most widely disseminated and most popular product, now averaging almost 6 million visits each month. In addition, tens of thousands of government, commercial, academic, and other Web sites link to or replicate the online version of the Factbook . This reference site is updated biweekly throughout the year to provide wide-ranging and hard-to-locate information about the background, geography, people, government, economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The nine primary information categories and the 139 subcategories for most entities include geographic coordinates, current account balances, number of mobile cellular telephones, heliports, legal systems, refugees, literacy, HIV/AIDS-deaths, and much more. Included among the 271 geographic entries is one for the "World," which incorporates data and other information summarized where possible from the other 270 country listings. The World Factbook 2006 contains six appendices with reference information ranging from abbreviations and descriptions of international organizations and groups to cross-referenced lists of country data codes. The 2006 edition includes 15 reference maps, which are available in both JPEG and PDF formats. Many country maps and flags have been updated to reflect changes and refinements over the past year.

February 2006

Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations
Legal abbreviations can be a puzzle to both new students and experienced professionals. This web-based service allows you to search for the meaning of abbreviations for English language legal publications, from the British Isles, the Commonwealth and the United States, including those covering international and comparative law. A wide selection of major foreign language law publications is also included. Publications from over 295 jurisdictions are featured in the Index. The database mainly covers law reports and law periodicals, but some legislative publications and major textbooks are also included. The Index is still under development. NB The index is based on the 16th edtion of the Bluebook.

PointofLaw.com is a web magazine sponsored by the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute Liability Project that brings together information and opinion on the U.S. litigation system.  Updated daily with news and commentary by a wide variety of legal opinion-makers, PointofLaw.com focuses on areas such as employment law, medicine and the law, scientific evidence, products liability, and business regulation through litigation.  Legal researchers and students will appreciate the site’s “Articles” section, which contains a selection of articles chosen as useful introductions to issues of tort law.  These articles are not necessarily introductory to tort law generally, but are designed to provide greater exposure to articles and issues not well known or easily accessible.  PointofLaw.com’s main content is its news forum, which is updated multiple times daily with unique commentary on current events.  The site’s posting are not available for comment.  PointofLaw.com is searchable and syndicatable to your favorite RSS reader. (from InSITE, a service of the Cornell Law Library, March 6, 2006)

January 2006

U.S. Congress Votes Database from washingtonpost.com
A database of all votes in the United States Congress since 1991 (102nd Cong.) that is browsable by particular Congress or individual member.

Judicial Confirmations Process: Selecting Federal Judges in the Twenty-First Century  JURIST, the online legal news and research service based at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, recently invited Professor Jason Mazzone of Brooklyn Law School to put together a panel to address the ongoing battle on Capitol Hill over judicial nominations.  The panel included legal
scholars and political scientists offering thoughts, analysis, and suggestions on the judicial confirmation process.  JURIST has now published the essays penned by the various contributors.  The essays are collected and linked from one page.  Professor Mazzone provides an introductory
overview using the famous Marbury v. Madison case as a starting point.  Other contributors go on to examine whether the confirmation system is broken, questions of life tenure, and what the recent trends are in the federal judicial selection process.  This is a nice site to get an array of viewpoints on this timely topic.
(from InSITE, a service of the Cornell Law Library)

November/December 2005

Legal Profession Statistics
A compendium of statistics about lawyers and the legal profession compiled by the ABA and organized into categories that include: lawyers; law firms; law students and legal education; justice system; corporate counsel and law departments; bar associations; technology; and courts and caseloads.

Grotian Moment: The Saddam Hussein Trial Blog created and maintained by the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. The web site features key documents related to the Iraqi Special Tribunal, answers to frequently asked questions, and expert debate and public commentary on the major issues and developments related to the trials of Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi leaders.

October 2005

A new Supreme Court decisions database
from Justia.us (in collaboration with oyez.org and uscourtforms.com) provides free access, with full text search capabilities, to the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States (volumes 1-545+ of United States Reports).  The site also provides links to blogs on the Supreme Court and constitutional rights as well as to resources on the Supreme Court.

September 2005

John Roberts, Supreme Court Nominee
Nomination hearings for the D.C. Circuit Court in 2003 as well as circuit court decisions and biographies of Judge Roberts. (From the University of Michigan Documents Center)

Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party is a selection of 448 photographs depicting people and events associated with the militant wing of the American women’s suffrage movement. The images span from about 1875 to 1938 but largely date between 1913 and 1922, during and immediately after the suffrage campaign. The 448 images are a subset of the approximately 2,650 photographs included in a large body of records created or collected by the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and subsequently donated to the Library of Congress Manuscript Division in 1941 and 1979.

August 2005

Center for Individual Rights

The Center for Individual Rights (CIR) is a nonprofit public interest law firm dedicated to the defense of individual liberties, focusing on the areas of Civil Rights, Free Expression, Religious Liberty, and Federalism.  The Center’s website provides in-depth background material on some of the firm’s more controversial and important cases, including FAQs, news and magazine articles, press releases, time lines, and fact

sheets.  Legal researchers will appreciate the Center’s amicus briefs, motions and filings, and other legal documents not easily available elsewhere.  CIR also makes available on their website, in PDF, the text of each court decision along the chain of appeal.  Visitors may search for cases arranged by topic or by court, or browse all of the Center’s active and recent cases.  The site’s search engine is advanced and allows users to perform complex queries. (from InSITE, Cornell Law Library)

February/March 2005

pretrieve is a free public record search engine.  Users can enter a person's name and a state and perform searches in a variety of different records databases, including  criminal, court, financial, professional, birth and death records. 

LLM Guide is a database of master of laws programs worldwide.  From
Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites:  "If you find yourself beset by the urge to return to law school, here is a site for you. LLM Guide is a database of master of laws programs worldwide. As the site explains:
'For lawyers, in some ways the LL.M. is the equivalent of what an MBA is for business people. Many law firms prefer candidates holding an LL.M. degree as it indicates that a lawyer has enjoyed advanced legal training and is able to work in a multinational legal environment.'  The site allows you to browse through lists of programs arranged by location or search programs by keyword. A list of the most popular programs arranges them by how often they have been viewed. (The most popular is the University of London's External Programme.) The LLM Guide also features a discussion board, a personal watch list and a tool for requesting more information about a program."

December 2004/January 2005

The Law Library of Congress
"The mission of the Law Library of Congress is to provide research and legal information to the U.S. Congress as well as to U.S. Federal Courts and Executive Agencies, and to offer reference services to the public ... To accomplish this mission, it has created the world's largest collection of law books and other legal resources from all countries, and now moves into the age of digitized information with online databases and guides to legal information worldwide."

The Memory Hole
Billing itself as "rescuing knowledge, freeing information," this site seeks "to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known."  What can you find on The Memory Hole? Government files, corporate memos, court documents (e.g., lawsuits and transcripts), Congressional testimony,
news articles, and more.  According to journalist and author Russ Kick, the publisher and editor of the site, "the emphasis is on material that exposes things that we're not supposed to know (or that we're supposed to forget)."  One of the site's most useful functions is providing access to web pages that have been taken down.

November 2004

On thelighter side - some legal humor Web sites: 
www.lawhaha.com
www.power-of-attorneys.com
www.lawcomix.com

October 2004

September 2004

By the People: Election 2004

August 2004

Election Law at Moritz

This website, subtitled information and insight on the laws governing federal, state, and local elections, was recently launched by the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.  The site provides a regularly updated guide for the upcoming presidential election.  Among the topics covered are voter eligibility, campaign practices, voting equipment, voting procedures, and voting districts.

Core Documents of U.S. Democracy
An electronic collection of current and historical United States government documents that define the American democracy. These legislative, legal, regulatory, presidential, demographic, and economic documents are selected and authenticated by the Government Printing Office's GPO Access service. Includes the Bill of Rights, Constitution, Federalist Papers, and statistical reference sources.

Science.gov is a gateway to authoritative science information, including research and development results, provided by U.S. Government agencies. The site allows searches across 30 databases and more than 1,700 science web sites. It currently accesses over 47 million pages of government science information.

July 2004

Bibliography of Legal Literature on Same Sex Marriage
An extensive bibliography (including both web-based and print sources) of legal resources on same-sex marriage. There are also links to state legislation and rulings as well as some international materials. 

June 2004

CAN-SPAM Library
For anyone interested in anti-spam issues Gigalaw offers the CAN-SPAM Library.  The site contains links to the law itself as well as executive and legislative histories, FTC action, studies, articles, and much more.

LegalEthics.com
This comprehensive site on legal ethics is organized  by category (e.g., courts, legal reference, practice areas, states)and then by topic within each category.

May 2004

Europe in 12 lessons
Introduces you to the history, purpose, and achievements to date of the European Union in 12 lessons; also includes key figures, maps, history, glossary, and texts of the treaties establishing the Union. This is the English language version, but you can choose other languages.

New World Factbook
This reference work from the CIA provides hard-to-locate information about the background, geography, people, government, economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The information is current as of January 2003.

Admiralty and Maritime Law Guide
Written and published by an admiralty practitioner, this guide will prove useful to anyone involved with maritime or admiralty law. The guide provides links to admiralty law resources on the Internet, including a growing database of admiralty case digests, opinions and international maritime conventions.

March/April 2004

Federal Web Locator
The Federal Web Locator is a service provided by the Center for Information Law and Policy and is intended to be a one-stop-shopping point for federal government information on the Web. The site is hosted by the Downtown Campus Library at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology.

Topix
A news aggregation site that searches the web for news articles and displays them topically.  The front page lists the most recent story in each category.  You can also select the tabs across the top for Local, Business, US/World, Health, SciTech, Life, Entertainment, Sports, and Offbeat news.  The "Local" tab enables access to news pages for hundreds of U.S. cities, with each containing stories culled from several
local newspapers.

February 2004

Brown v. Board of Education Digital Archive  from The University of Michigan Library  "contains documents and images which chronicle events surrounding this historically significant case up to the present. The archive is divided into four main areas of interest: Supreme Court cases; busing and school integration efforts in northern urban areas; school integration in the Ann Arbor Public School District; and recent resegregation trends in American schools."  The archive also includes an image gallery, bibliography, and links to related sites. 

Electronic Resources at the New York Public Library provides a wealth of free information not available on Google. You can access full-text magazine and journal articles, encyclopedias and directories, information on businesses and organizations, and much more.  Access is available 24/7 with your NYPL borrower's card. Click here to learn how to get a library card.

JURIST's Paper Chase, a free, non-commercial current awareness service maintained by University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor Bernard Hibbitts and a staff of law students, tracks and summarizes significant, breaking legal news.

January 2004

Legal Research in a Nutshell Links
This page provides links to websites discussed or mentioned in Morris L. Cohen & Kent C. Olson, Legal Research in a Nutshell, 8th ed. (Thomson West, 2003).

WashLaw
A no-frills but comprehensive index and guide to legal information on the internet.  The site, maintained by staff of the Washburn University School of Law Library, is particularly useful for locating online legal information for all fifty states.

December 2003

Portals to the World
from the U.S. Library of Congress provides selected links to worldwide electronic resources covering media, laws, government, culture, business, associations, statistics, etc.

Drafts of Uniform and Model Acts
The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws and the University of Pennsylvania Law School make available here links for the documentary history of all current draft proposals, including earlier drafts, statements, supporting documents, comments, discussion memoranda, etc.

November 2003

GPO Access
The recently redesigned site for official Federal governenment information includes the U.S. Code, Code of Federal Regulations, Federal Register, Congressional Record, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents (and so much more).

Search Systems Public Record Locator
The site is a searchable directory of more than 11,000 free public record databases. There ar also links to databases where the provider charges a fee.