General Background


Using the Web for Legal Research
Free Sites vs. Subscription Databases
Advantages to Internet Legal Research
Drawbacks to Internet Legal Research
Tips for Better Research Using the Internet
Citation Issues
Types of Law Available on the Internet
Cost of Westlaw Example
Basic Research Tips

Brad Paisley "Online"

Using the Web for Legal Research


There are thousands of outstanding legal websites available through the internet. Many of the best law-related websites are free to use - created for public use by government agencies, research and academic institutions, organizations, commercial publishers, and individuals. Research on the web is most effective when the researcher has exposure to many law-related websites and has a realistic expectation of what can be found on the web. The web is most useful for legal research if you are looking for:

  • Recent legislation and regulations
  • Current codes
  • U.S. Supreme Court opinions
  • Foreign and international law
  • General information on hot topics
  • Current general and legal news



Free Sites vs. Subscription databases


Many fee-based research services, including Lexis and Westlaw, also use the internet as their method of delivery. Free legal research websites are a supplement to, but not a substitute for, other legal research tools in print and by subscription. The researcher must always consider whether free websites, fee-based databases, or print sources are best for a particular research question.

This outline concentrates on free legal research sources. However, law students should also consider using subscription databases available on campus, especially for doing non-law research, as well as Lexis and Westlaw. Collections of online subscriptions include:



Advantages to Internet Legal Research


  • Cost. Many useful legal research websites are free.
  • Format. Some websites offer legal documents in pdf and other image formats that allow exact page citations and greater reliability. Many offer a choice between keyword searching and browsing. Digital documents can be stored and sometimes can be edited.
  • Availability. Legal research websites are available anywhere the researcher has internet access, including office and home. Free websites are available without needing IP authentication or a password. Many legal and government documents are now only available on the web.
  • Authority. Although the researcher needs to be able to evaluate the reliability of a website, many legal materials are posted on the websites of the government entities that produce and publish the documents or come from electronic files made available by the government agencies. Academic and organization websites can be reliable sources of links to legal materials, but as secondary sources of analysis may be no more reliable than commercial sites



Drawbacks to Internet Legal Research


 Internet legal research sites:

  • Are Incomplete.Not everything is available on the web. And what is there is fragmented and scattered over a large number of websites. Free websites don't offer a comprehensive collection of treatises, digests, citators, practice materials, and analytical materials.
  • Are ephemeral. Materials on the web move to other locations or are removed, and URLS become inactive. Citations to internet sources are frequently no longer good by the time an article is published. Choose legal research websites that are intended to be archival and permanent for citation purposes.
  • Don't offer equivalents to print secondary sources. Standard secondary sources cited in legal research are produced by commercial publishers and are rarely available for free. Editorial enhancements to primary materials (annotations, analysis, headnotes) available in commercial legal publications are also generally unavailable on the web. Traditional quality controls of scholarly and commercial publications are absent from the web.
  • May have content not available to search engines. Many websites contain data that is not searchable with general search engines, known as the "invisible" or "deep" web. Even the most powerful search engines cover only a fraction of the web. The invisible web includes pages without their own URLS, including those created only when a search form is completed on the host site, password-protected pages, even those that are free with registration, and pages that site administrators make unavailable to indexing. To learn more about the invisible or deep web, see this white paper from BrightPlanet.  To find searchable invisible web databases, see the Complete Planet Deep Web Directory. For more articles, presentations, and resources on searching the invisible web, see the LLRX article Deep Web Research 2008.
  • Lack standardization. Legal research websites are created and maintained by different entities with different interfaces, structure, search features, and content. The web isn't organized, and many research sites aren't indexed by directory websites.
  • May not support complex searching. Truncation and Boolean searching are usually not available on general and law-specific search engines. The number of search terms you can enter may be limited. It may be impossible to limit a search by date, and many web documents are undated. Long documents may not be completely indexed by search engines. Many research websites only search keywords, not full-text documents.

The researcher needs to evaluate carefully any website used for legal research. Anyone can put up a website purporting to offer legal information. For information on evaluating a legal research website, see the following articles:

Before using and relying on legal information from the web, ask the following questions:

  • Who wrote this?
  • Who posted it?
  • Is there an editor, and is anyone checking the text for errors?
  • Is the website maintained by a reliable entity?
  • Is it from an official source?
  • Is the source unbiased?
  • Has it been updated?
  • Is coverage complete, or is it limited to either recent or historical information?
  • Does the website offer as much as a print or subscription source?
  • Can the site be browsed? Can it be searched by a search engine?
  • Can documents on the site be printed or downloaded easily?
  • Does the website offer advanced or Boolean searching?



Tips for Better Research Using the Internet


  • Use a law portal or a site with legal content instead of using a general search engine. A researcher who knows the content of the major legal research websites can find information faster and more accurately by going to the website that is most likely to have a particular document. A good subject directory with linked research sites that have been carefully chosen and organized may be a better starting point than a search engine. Bookmark the sites you use most often in your research. Know the print primary sources that would include the document you're looking for, then use the equivalent source on the web.
  • Use law-specific search engines. General search engines search the entire web; law-specific search engines focus a search on legal research sites. Law Crawler searches the contents of FindLaw and other law sites. Georgia State University's Meta-Index for U.S. Legal Research offers a standard search interface for primary law websites. GPO Access offers a search of all collections on the GPO site, including many primary federal materials. USA.gov offers a search of federal and state government webpages.  Westlaw's WebPlus offers a free web search of legal information sites after you log onto Westlaw.
  • Use the advanced search feature for your search engine. The advanced search may support Boolean commands, field searching, or limiting by date. Google's Advance Search allows searching by exact phrase and exclusion of search terms, and it allows limiting a search by language, date, format, or domain. By limiting a search to .gov or .mil sites, you are more likely to find primary documents and materials of federal agencies. By limiting to pdf format, you can find page images of legal documents. Google and other search engines also allow you to find websites that link to a particular page.  For information on doing advanced Google searching, see the Google Help Cheatsheet and Better Searches, Better Results handout.  Keep track of Google news with the Google Friends newsletter.  Keep track of new internet legal research sites with the Internet Legal Research Weekly newsletter.
  • Find cached or archived webpages to retrieve lost URLS. Use the cached pages on Google or the Internet Archive to find snapshots of webpages that have disappeared or changed.
  • Use an RSS feeds aggregator like Netvibes to collect news feeds from your favorite blogs and news sources.  Use this guide to set up a Netvibes page.



Citation Issues


  • ALWD Rule 40.1 requires worldwide web citations to include author or owner, title, URL, pinpoint reference if available, access or update information, and exact date.
  • ALWD Rule 38.1: If a source is available in print and electronic formats, cite the print source if the document is readily available in that format. If the print source is difficult to locate, cite the print source and provide a parenthetical reference to the electronic version.
  • The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (Harvard Law Review Association, 18th ed., 2005) is the authority adopted by law reviews and many courts. Rule 18 deals with electronic media such as commercial databases (Rule 18.1), the Internet (Rule 18.2), and CD-ROM (Rule 18.3).  It instructs lawyers to cite to a traditional print source unless an electronic one offers improved access. It also suggests that lawyers follow a conventional citation with a parallel cite to an electronic source. It further advises that an electronic citation provide all the components of one for the same type of document in print plus additional information pertinent to the electronic source (e.g., URL or Web address, Lexis or Westlaw citation, database name, or CD-ROM title and publisher).



Types of Law Available


 Primary and Secondary Materials

  • Many primary sources containing the text of the law itself can be found on the web. Current codes and regulations, recent session laws, and recent and major cases, are available for most U.S. jurisdictions.
  • Although there are guides and other secondary materials created for the web, and some legal periodicals are available on the web, most major secondary sources are only available in print and in subscription databases. Internet sources offering legal interpretation and advice should be scrutinized closely for their source and potential bias.

  
  Federal and State Materials

  • Federal legal materials are widely available on the internet, including the U.S. Code, Public Laws, the C.F.R., Supreme Court opinions, and many lower court opinions.  All current state codes are available on the web, and state Supreme Court opinions are usually available.


  Branches of government

  All three branches of government produce law.

  • Legislative Branch. Legislation can easily be found on the web and relied on for accuracy and currency.
  • The U.S. Code and all state codes are available. Codes on the web are usually the most current version.
  • Federal session laws and many state statutes can be found on the internet, as well as many federal and state legislative history materials.
  • Executive Branch. The quality and quantity of executive and administrative materials on the web varies by the type of material.
  • Federal regulations are available on the web in codified and uncodified form. Most state regulations are also on the web.
  • Presidential documents and executive orders are available on the web, as are some state executive branch documents.
  • Administrative decisions and agency materials are increasingly being made available only on the web. However, many agency websites have limited search functions and are not kept current. Older administrative materials may be removed from agency websites, and agency sites may limit what is available because of security or political concerns.
  • Judicial Branch. Cases and judicial materials can be found on the web, but the web is not the best place for doing caselaw research by searching.
  • U.S. Supreme Court opinions are available on the web. For other courts, only opinions from recent years are available on free sites.
  • Searching is limited to basic keyword searches in most free sites, or to retrieving by case name, date, or docket number. There is no equivalent to Shepard's on the web, so the researcher cannot be sure if a case found on the web is still good law.
  • Case research (and research of administrative decisions) is best limited to retrieving cases where the researcher already has a case name or citation, or only as a starting point for finding cases that can be updated and verified elsewhere.
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