Links to
U.S. Legal Resources
on the Internet

Copyright 1996-2019 Ronald B. Standler

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. U.S. Federal Government
    1. Agencies
    2. U.S. Congress
    3. U.S. Courts
    4. U.S. Federal Law
      1. U.S. Constitution
      2. Federal Statutes
      3. Code of Federal Regulations, Federal Register
      4. Other documents from GPO
      5. Federal Rules for Courts
  3. Massachusetts
  4. Professional Responsibility
resources for students:

Search & Seizure Law (Fourth Amendment)

Legal Resources

Collections of Links

Introduction

This document contains my collection of links to legal resources on the Internet. Because I am licensed to practice law only in Massachusetts, I have collected state resources only for Massachusetts.

This collection of links is intended for use by students and professors, for scholarly research. I strongly urge litigants to hire an experienced attorney, instead of arguing their own case, pro se.

Attorneys who do online research often use WestLaw, which is an expensive, proprietary database that contains full-text of all reported cases in state and federal courts in the USA, and all current state and federal statutes, together with a powerful search engine. Because I use Westlaw, I have not collected links to free copies of court opinions.   Because I nearly always work from primary sources (i.e., statutes and judicial opinions) — I sometimes also cite articles in law reviews — I have not collected links to websites with legal topics.

The emphasis in this collection of links is to maintain a relatively small collection of links to either (1) authoritative sources of documents on U.S. law or (2) excellent collections of links to American legal resources.   I have posted at www.rbs2.com/lawlink2.html a separate collection of links to resources on German law, legal history, and international law.

Readers who are unfamiliar with law libraries and legal citation style may find my handout at www.rbs0.com/lawcite.htm useful.

1. U.S. Federal Government

1.A.   Agencies

Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Federal Register, and presidential Executive Orders are linked below.

Census Bureau

Consumer Price Index (CPI)   calculator
inflation statistics
Kitco gold prices since 1833 (for extending inflation data back before the CPI) -- not a U.S. Government website

Copyright Office homepage
Copyright Forms
list of designated agents 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)
Copyright Office Appeals Board Decisions since 1995 (unique Internet resource posted by Franklin Pierce Law School IP Mall)
My collection of links for music copyright in the USA.
Copyright renewal search at Copyright Office only since Jan 1978;   —   (books published in the US between 1923 and 1963: Stanford Univ.)
Restored copyrights 17 U.S.C. §104A GATT (May 1996 to Aug 1998)

Federal Communications Commission homepage

Federal Statistics

Federal Trade Commission homepage

Patent & Trademark Office homepage
USPTO Patent search full-text from Jan 1976
USPTO Patent assignment
Google patent search data from IFI CLAIMS

Federal Criminal Justice

Department of Justice homepage
      FBI

U.S. Postal Inspection Service

U.S. Secret Service

my collection of links for reporting computer crime

1.B.   U.S. Congress

U.S. House Of Representatives homepage

U.S. Senate homepage

Library of Congress homepage
  congress.gov homepage (formerly "Thomas: Legislative Information")

Congressional Record, transcript of proceedings on floor of the U.S. Congress
advanced search, query builder at congress.gov (beginning 1995)

browse by date at congress.gov (beginning 1995)

archive at congress.gov (only years 1989-1994)

congress.gov bills proposed in House or Senate

legislative histories for selected U.S. statutes, website of Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C.   Includes: Copyright Act of 1976 and Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998

Biographies of all members of U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate since 1774.

1.C.   U.S. Federal Courts

U.S. Supreme Court homepage

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

U.S. Court of Appeals for 1st Circuit
U.S. District Court for Massachusetts

Federal Judicial Center
Federal Judiciary homepage

biographies of all federal judges since 1789

1.D.   U.S. Federal Law

U.S. Constitution

I posted a little (only 34 Kbytes) HTML webpage that contains the full text of the U.S. Constitution and the first ten amendments.

U.S. Constitution from National Archives

Constitution with terse explanation of each paragraph (from U.S. Senate)

U.S. Constitution (from Government Printing Office in 2014)

Annotated U.S. Constitution prepared by the Congressional Research Service in the Library of Congress: from congress.gov,   from Government Printing Office,   from Cornell Law School.

The Constitution, and especially its first six Amendments, is terse and the full meaning is interpreted in decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. For that reason, it is helpful to have a scholarly annotation of the Constitution, with citations to the Court's decisions. Do not overlook library books on constitutional law, just because those books are not freely available on the Internet! Two widely used law textbooks on this subject are: For a list of federal court cases interpreting the U.S. Constitution, see the first 17 volumes of the U.S. Code Annotated, which is published by West Publishing Company.

U.S. Federal Statutes

U.S. Code
Printed volumes are available in law libraries.
U.S. Code from Government Printing Office
U.S. Code from House of Representatives
U.S. Code from Library of Congress

Title 17 of U.S. Code (from Copyright Office with their endnotes and their presentation of amendments since 1976).

U.S. Statutes at Large
The Statutes at Large are used mostly for historical research. Printed volumes are available in every law school library.
1951-current from Government Printing Office
1789-1875 Statutes from Library of Congress

C.F.R., Federal Register, Executive Orders

National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) homepage
CFR from NARA
Federal Register from NARA
Executive Orders from NARA

CFR from Government Printing Office (GPO)
Federal Register from GPO

Other Documents from Government Printing Office

Help: What is available from GPO
History of Bills in Congress, from GPO
Compilation of Presidential Documents from GPO
Statutes at Large from GPO
U.S. Code from GPO

Federal Rules

The Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, Civil Procedure, and Evidence are statutes, part of 28 U.S.C.
The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure are statutes, part of 18 U.S.C.

Federal Rules in PDF (from House of Representatives, Judiciary Committee).

The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University has HTML versions of all six sets of Federal Rules, including a useful Overview of each set of rules.

2.   Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Massachusetts Constitution

A. Massachusetts Statutes
B. Judiciary
C. Massachusetts Attorney General

D. Massachusetts Secretary of State
E. Attorney Regulation

links to Massachusetts legal resources
by law libraries

  1. Boston College

  2. Boston University

  3. Harvard Law School

  4. New England School of Law

  5. Social Law Library in the John Adams courthouse in Boston

  6. Suffolk Univ. Law School
Massachusetts Laws (commercial website)

Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly newspaper

3.   Professional Responsibility

Professional Responsibility in the USA denotes the legal rules that regulate conduct of lawyers. including punishment such as disbarment. The rules of Professional Responsibility are promulgated by each state's supreme court. Legal ethics is a related topic that denotes how lawyers should behave, even if not required.

The American Bar Association Center for Professional Responsibility publishes the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which are the basis for the legal rules adopted in most states.

American Bar Association links to Legal Ethics & Professional Responsibility

The Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct are given above.

Cornell Legal Ethics Library ended March 2013, but old documents still available.

legalethics.com by Peter Krakaur and Professor David Hricik of Mercer University School of Law

Resources for Students:
Fourth Amendment

PDF copies of Fourth Amendment cases at U.S. Supreme Court. For Criminal Procedure Class taught by Prof. Carlton Bailey at Univ. Arkansas School of Law.

Search and Seizure by John Wesley Hall, Jr., a trial lawyer in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Prof. Joel Samaha at the University of Minnesota has posted a collection of documents including briefs, transcripts, arguments, opinions, and contemporary newspaper accounts of the U.S. Supreme Court cases in Olmstead, Katz, White, Miller, and Kullo.

Search & Seizure by Prof. Tom O'Connor, Ph.D. at North Carolina Wesleyan College. A terse summary of Fourth Amendment law.

Resources

FindLaw
FindLaw Resources, arranged by practice area.

LexisOne Resources, arranged by practice area.

Cornell Legal Information Institute was one of the first collections of legal information on the Internet.

CourtTV has a collection of documents in highly publicized cases in the USA since about 1990.   The Smoking Gun has documents on crimes by celebrities or politicians.

Avalon Project at Yale Law School has copies of documents in law, history, and diplomacy.

Collections of Links

U.S. Court of Appeals for 7th Circuit Library's links

Library of Congress law links to federal, state, and foreign law

American Bar Association, Legal Technology Resource Center law links

Jurist, legal news with links to sources, a website supervised by Prof. Bernard J. Hibbitts at the Univ. of Pittsburgh Law School

New York links

Links at Law Schools

Librarians in law schools often post a collection of links at the library website, of which the following are particularly noteworthy. These links are presented alphabetically by the name of the law school, city, or state.

Boston University Law Research Guides
Emory Law School Electronic Reference Desk
Franklin Pierce Law Center library links
      FPLC Intellectual Property Mall (click on "web resources")
Georgetown Univ. Law Library links to specific topics and jurisdictions (federal, state, international)
Georgia State Univ. Metaindex for Legal Research
Harvard Law School Research Guides

Univ. Montana law library homepage
      Univ. Montana links to federal law
      Univ. Montana links to state resources

Washburn Univ. (Kansas) large collection of legal links
Univ. Washington legal links
Yale Law School legal links

Excellent State Court Websites

The following state courts have distinguished themselves by placing their judicial opinions on the Internet in an easily searchable way:
  1. Oklahoma in the year 2002, this website had complete coverage back to the year 1890

  2. North Dakota in Jan 2009, this website had complete coverage back to Dec 1965.





If your state has not posted an archive of its judicial opinions on the Internet for free searching, please write to your state legislators and ask that they fund and require such a website.


Copyright 1996-2019 Ronald B. Standler
http://www.rbs2.com/lawlinks.html
First posted 9 Oct 2004, revised 24 June 2019

If you are an attorney who needs assistance with legal research, I provide legal research services.

If you are seeking an attorney, I have posted hints for how to find an attorney.

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