Legal Information on the Internet
Despite the truism that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” the internet has made it somewhat easier to find legal information. Roughly one-third of the content of a large American law library, mostly statutes, regulations, and cases, also known as primary sources, can be freely accessed online. Secondary sources, such as authoritative treatises, newsletters, and journals, which help legal researchers understand primary sources, are much harder to find online and for no cost.
In comparison to many states, Washington has outstanding internet publication of primary sources. The statutes (Revised Code of Washington) and administrative regulations (Washington Administrative Code) are both published by the Office of the Code Reviser and available on their website. For the judicial branch of government, Washington appellate decisions are first published online by the Supreme Court’s Reporter of Decisions before being printed in book form. Washington Courts also has a free online opinion search.
For secondary sources in Washington, two frequently used sets are the Washington Practice Series, a multivolume set published by ThomsonReuters, and the Washington State Bar Association deskbooks. Full access to these resources is not freely available online, but they can often be found at county law libraries or from the Washington State Law Library. The Northwest Justice Project publishes Washington LawHelp, an outstanding resources website for civil and family law issues. Official court forms can be found for many types of cases at the forms page for the Washington Courts.
Primary sources of federal law have been freely available on the internet for the past several decades. The Government Printing Office publishes primary law including the U.S. Code and the Code of Federal Regulations at their www.govinfo.gov portal. The U.S. House of Representatives Office of Law Revision Counsel provides the best free version of the U.S. Code and is the office responsible for keeping it current. For judicial opinions, each federal court publishes its own opinions. They are aggregated on PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) which, unfortunately, the federal courts charges a user fee to access.
Google provides free searchable access to both state and federal appellate opinions on its Google Scholar service. Although not quite as robust as fee-based legal research sites like Westlaw or LexisNexis, Google Scholar provides a citator function to allow researchers to find cases to cite the case they are reading. This is critical as it allows legal researchers to find the newest cases about a topic and determine the current state of the law.
Google Scholar also provides searchable access to scholarly articles, including law review articles. While only a portion of these articles are available as full-text documents, users can request copes of law review articles from the Washington State Law Library via email at Library.Requests@courts.wa.gov. (RM)
