Legal Research:

10 Easy Steps to Legal Research
From Washington Courts.

ATLA Exchange
The ATLA Exchange is a unique litigation support and networking service available exclusively to ATLA members. The Exchange tracks and stores "inquirer" information, case abstracts, references, verdict and settlement data, experts, articles, and other trial-level litigation information. Principal research areas include products liability, motor vehicle cases, medical issues, professional negligence, transportation, discovery abuse, toxic torts, insurance bad faith, and civil rights.

Basic Guide to International Legal Research, A (College of William and Mary)
This guide provides information on many primary and secondary sources for international legal research.

Browser's Guide To "Legal" Call Numbers, A (Southern Illinois University)
This guide provides information on the Library of Congress call numbers for United States Law, Law of Individual States, and Foreign Law.

Court Rules (South Texas Law School)
This guide is intended to explain the importance of court rules and to inform researchers of the sources available to provide the text and annotations to these rules. Court rules establish uniform procedures which provide all parties to a lawsuit with the information necessary to conduct the proceedings before a particular federal court. Since these rules provide guidelines for everything from the preparation of papers to be filed before the court to strict time limitations for filing motions and briefs, it is imperative that one know where to locate them.

Doing Legal Research in Canada
This page is an online guide to doing legal research in Canada. The guide provides information and links to print and online resources and is aimed primarily at researchers outside of Canada needing an overview of Canadian legal research.

Federal Statutory Research (George Washington University)
There are two types of  federal laws: private laws and public laws. Private laws generally benefit a particular person or group of individuals. Public laws are of general application. This research guide focuses on how to research federal public laws.

Federal Tax Research (George Washington University)
The sheer mass of material available to conduct federal tax research may be confusing to the novice researcher and produce a frustrating lack of results. This guide focuses on primary materials from Congress, the courts, and the Internal Revenue Service. It also provides information on a few of the major secondary sources.

Finding Constitutions and Statutes (University of Minnesota)
This guide assists in locating the constitutions of other countries, the Constitution of the United States, and states. In addition, this site describes how to find statutes for other countries, federal statutes and state laws.

Guide to Treaty Research, A (George Washington University)
This guide describes selected treaty indexes and finding tools as well as sources of treaty texts. Included are resources in paper, microfiche, CD-ROM, and online databases available through LEXIS and WESTLAW.

How To Find A Case When You Do Not Have A Citation (College of William & Mary)
The principle of stare decisis binds courts to adhere to the higher court holdings in previous cases in the same jurisdiction. Therefore, in researching a legal issue, it is beneficial to locate cases with similar facts and issues to your topic of research. Not all judicial decisions are published, but those that are published are usually issued chronologically by the court. Consequently, other sources, such as digests, must be used to locate cases by topic. This guide instructs researchers on selecting and using a digest effectively.

How to Locate Attorneys (College of William and Mary)
This guide is intended to assist the researcher who wants to find information about a specific attorney or who wants to locate an attorney who practices in a specific area of law or in a particular geographical area.

How to Find Laws and Regulations
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Understanding legal citations and finding them.

How To Research A Supreme Court Case If You Have Only The Case Name (College of William & Mary)
This guide describes how to find the citation to the Supreme Court Opinion (a citation is the abbreviation that includes a volume number, reporter, and page number), locating and reading your case, locating the lower court cases that led to the Supreme Court case, and finding explanatory information about a Supreme Court Case.

InfoTrac/LegalTrac (South Texas Law School)
This guide is intended to instruct researchers on the use of InfoTrac/LegalTrac computers to locate citations to articles in periodicals, journals, and law reviews. These articles can provide valuable information to start or supplement research.

Law Research Guides (Harvard Law School Library)

LawResearch - Search Forms
Serves as an electronic reference librarian which manages an "electronic card catalogue" of some 100,000 universal resource locators (url's) called hyperlinks. Locates legal informational resources found solely on the Internet. [LRC's Newsletter] [Money Search] [Search Engine Directory] [International Law] [US Federal Law] [US Law by State] [Practice Areas] [Law & Economics] [Law History] [Law Firm Directory] [Law & Ethics] [Law Publications] [Law Discussion Groups] [Global News]

Legal Research Guides (SMU)
A very thorough and well organized collection of legal research guides available in html and pdf formats.

Legal Research Using the Internet - Introduction to Online Legal Research
A web site intended to explain why the Internet is useful for legal research, and describe some of the major resources available on the Internet for researching the law of the United States and other countries, comparative law, and international law. It concludes with tips for the net-traveling researcher.

Legal Transcript Library
A legal research tool for defense attorneys. It contains thousands of transcripts of medical expert testimony. Features keyword search capability to greatly reduce the number of transcripts subscribers need to access. Provides subscribers with transcripts which can be immediately downloaded, e-mailed, or printed and sent to them. Transcripts are in an easy to read condensed format together with a hyper-linked word index.

Lexis-Nexis
A leading provider of online legal, news and business information. The LEXIS-NEXIS Web site provides information for current and potential subscribers about the various products and services offered by the company.

LLRX.com
A well-written comprehensive, free site on the web for legal professionals interested in wide ranging expert content on research and technology related issues.

Locating Federal Regulations (George Washington University)
Regulations are promulgated by government agencies to enforce particular statutes under their jurisdiction. Researching federal agency regulations can be difficult. Agency regulations are numerous and can be amended frequently. This guide is intended to provide information on locating regulations.

Nolo's Legal Research Center
Legal research online -- find statutes, state and federal laws. Plus, access Nolo's plain-English articles and FAQs. Useful information concerning methods of legal research to help you find the answers you need.

Researching The Law Of Canada (Univ of Minnesota)
This guide is intended to assist with researching the law of Canada. Information includes Constitution Acts, Canadian Statutes, Administrative Regulations and Decisions, Cases, Finding Aids, Citators, Law Reviews, and General Reference Sources.

Solving Legal Research Problems - Univ. of Illinois Law Library

Shepard's Citations
Shepard's Citations are available electronically on CD-ROM and online as well as in print. Shepard's Daily Update service provides researchers using any medium with the most current citations information available throughout the internet, fax or an 800 number. Court opinions from across the nation are electronically transmitted directly to Shepard's, and citations are current within 24 to 48 hours of receipt of an opinion.

UCC ( Uniform Commercial Code )

VersusLaw
Versus Law is a source of Full Text opinions from Federal and State Appellate Courts. The Law Library at V. brings all the court opinions together in one searchable collection on the Internet. With court opinions going back as far as 1900 and updated daily, V. is one of the most comprehensive and current sources for legal research on the Internet. Over 20,000 legal forms available online.

Virtual Chase, The
The Virtual Chase is designed for legal professionals who want to perform research on the Internet. This site features several articles on research strategies and a few research guides.

Westlaw