Welcome to the research guide for free and low-cost legal research. Our goal is to help you find accurate and useful legal information when you don't have access to the expensive "big three" legal databases: Westlaw, Lexis, or Bloomberg Law. We've divided the guide by type of legal document (legislative, judicial, administrative) with additional sections on secondary sources and materials for our local jurisdictions (the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia). This guide was last updated 22 September 2022.

This guide discusses both free and low-cost options for legal research. The free resources are listed first, with the low-cost resources following. If a resource charges a fee, it will be noted in the description. These low-cost options are usually available through a subscription and are not pay-as-you-go or pay-per-use.

Here are the major free resources we cover in this guide:

LII: The Legal Information Institute was founded in 1992 by Tom Bruce and Peter Martin of the Cornell Law School. It was one of the first 20 websites in the world, and the first non-high-energy physics website. It is the grandparent of all of the other LIIs around the world. It has federal and state statutes, codes, court opinions, and regulations. It also has a legal encyclopedia/legal dictionary, Wex.

GovInfo: The web presence of the U.S. Government Printing Office. They have the U.S. Code, statutes, bills, the CFR, the Federal Register, and other federal government documents.

Caselaw Access Project: From Harvard Law School, this includes all official, book-published state & federal United States case law — every volume or case designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States (including all state courts, federal courts, & territorial courts for American Samoa, Dakota Territory, Guam, Native American Courts, Navajo Nation, & the Northern Mariana Islands. 

Justia: Justia includes federal and state statutes, codes, court opinions, and regulations.

FindLaw: A free service from Thomson Reuters, the folks who own Westlaw. It has federal and state statutes, codes, court opinions, and regulations. It also has a legal encyclopedia, American Jurisprudence, Second (Am.Jur.2d).

Here are the major low-cost resources we cover in this guide:

Fastcase: A complete legal research platform, it includes federal and state court opinions, statutes, codes, regulations, and a citator. Current WCL students, faculty, and staff have access through our account. Fastcase is also an included benefit with membership in most state and local bar associations. For those not in a bar association, they have monthly and annual fees that are much less than the big three legal research databases .On these pages, primary links to Fastcase are for non-WCL users and will take you to a login page. If you are a WCL community member, use the [WCL proxy link] next to the primary link instead.

Casetext: A complete legal research platform, it includes federal and state court opinions, statutes, codes, regulations, and a citator. Law students and faculty can get free access by using this form. They also have monthly and annual fees that are much less than the big three legal research databases.

HeinOnline: A source for many law-related materials, including reported cases, statutes, codes, regulations, academic law reviews, treatises, documents, treaties, and more. Current AU students, faculty, and staff have access through us. Hein does offer individual subscriptions, as well as very short-term subscriptions at a lower cost. On these pages, primary links to HeinOnline are for non-WCL users and will take you to a login page. If you are a WCL community member, use the [WCL proxy link] next to the primary link instead.

Legal research is more than just finding the texts of laws, judicial opinions, or regulations. Anyone can upload a document to the web and say it is law. You need to know that the source on which you are relying is accurate and authoritative. Law is also constantly changing. Statutes are amended or repealed. Judicial opinions are overturned, narrowed, or questioned. Regulations are amended, superceded, or rescinded. You need to know if the text you are relying on is still valid law.

This is what the big legal databases give you, at a hefty price: authoritative texts, validity citators, and finding aids. They are the digital continuation of 150 or so years of print legal publishing. The tools that used to be available in print in any good law library are now available only to those who subscribe to the databases. This trend toward sequestration of knowledge of the law has concerned many people, in this country and abroad. One result was the creation of the Free Access to Law Movement and the creation of many free or low-cost legal research tools. As the US Supreme Court said recently,

"[N]o one can own the law. 'Every citizen is presumed to know the law,' and 'it needs no argument to show … that all should have free access' to its contents."

Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. ___, No. 18-1150, slip op. at 7-8 (2020)(citing Nash v. Lathrop, 142 Mass. 29, at 35, 6 N.E. 559, at 560 (1886), as cited by Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244, at 253-254 (1888)), https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-1150_new_d18e.pdf.

Unfortunately, while many of the free resources are reliable and authoritative (many of them are on the official websites, and you can't get more authoritative than that), and their finding aids are greatly improved, they often lack the tools needed to establish whether or not the text you have is still good law. Citators are expensive to maintain, and are thus rare among the free and low-cost legal research tools, but with some effort you can still do good legal research independent of the big legal databases.