This guide covers selected resources available to the general public (those unaffiliated with the Law School) that can be considered alternatives to Westlaw and Lexis. While there is no exact replica, we have ordered this list from most comprehensive to least in terms of the amount of materials. For more information on free and low-cost legal research, see our recommended guides.
This site, frequently called Cornell LII, offers all opinions of the United States Supreme Court handed down since 1992, together with over 600 earlier decisions selected for their historic importance, over a decade of opinions of the New York Court of Appeals, and the full United States Code and Code of Federal Regulations. It also publishes important secondary sources: libraries in two important areas (legal ethics and social security); and a series of “topical” pages that serve as concise explanatory guides and Internet resource listings for roughly 100 areas of law.
GovInfo provides public access to official publications in PDF from all three branches of the federal government. A product of the U.S. Government Publishing Office, it is a better resource for final versions of statutes, regulations, and some Congressional documents. Because it contains the authoritative and official version of the documents, you will see this website discussed in many guides on low cost/free research, but if you are researching a topic more broadly, for regulations you should start on the eCFR and the Federal Register; if you are focusing on federal legislation and congressional materials, start on Congress.Gov.
CourtListener is an open-access, open-source database by the Free Law Project. It primarily contains case law from federal and state courts and holds over two million opinions. For full coverage details on federal and state courts, see their Coverage page. Each case is displayed in a user-friendly format and has a list of subsequent citations, authorities cited within, and cases on similar topics. In addition to cases, this source contains some oral arguments for the U.S. Supreme Court and federal circuits; it also holds the RECAP archive, which contains millions of documents from PACER, making it a great place to search for court filings.
Google Scholar allows you to search and read opinions for U.S. state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950; U.S. federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923; and U.S. Supreme Court cases since 1791. Cases are cited in Bluebook format, include internal page numbers, and are cross-linked within the database. The service crawls other free case law providers and provides links to cases on these sites. In addition to case law, Google Scholar also searches secondary sources, such as law reviews and journals; these are often short summaries rather than full text access, so if you hit a paywall, try searching for the article on the Law Library's website.
Free Legal Research Resources - United States, Harvard Law School Library
This is a more in-depth guide than what you will find curated here; check here for more information on finding treaties, government documents, secondary sources, and data sets.
Free & Low Cost Legal Research, New York Law School - The Mendik Library
This guide describes NY state and city resources.
How to Find Free Case Law Online, Law Library of Congress
This guide goes more in-depth on several of the biggest free sources like Google Scholar, CourtListener, and the Caselaw Access Project for those interested in finding cases.
Guide to Law Online: U.S. States and Territories, Law Library of Congress
On this page, you can find a list of guides for each US state and territory. Each guide covers one jurisdiction, introduces the structure of that government, and provides links to free sources of law online.
Many government documents, from case decisions to regulations, are available on government websites, and these are great places for research. For example, the official website of the federal Congress, Congress.Gov, makes available bills, laws, committee hearings, member information, etc.
There are a lot of online directories, such as this one from the federal government, which lists contact information for federal, state, and local elected officials; landing pages for the main branches of government for state, local, and tribal governments; and an A-Z list for federal government agencies.
Alternatively, use a search engine, like Google, to find these webpages; use the name of the office, the jurisdiction, and/or the document that you're looking for in your search terms and include ".gov" to help ensure you're finding the legitimate government websites. For example, searching <<new york city labor regulations .gov>> on Google, brings up the major websites on the city and state labor department regulations.
Many law libraries are open to the public and provide access to legal materials in print or online databases not available to the public at Fordham Law. If you are in New York, check out this list of public law libraries from the state's court system. To find more information on local libraries generally and to see resources specific to each state, look at this guide, Local Law Libraries.
For help accessing these titles, please contact a reference librarian at refdesk@fordham.edu, via chat, or by calling 212 636 6908.
