Free Legal Resources on the Internet

Google Scholar includes "academic papers from sensible websites." These cover "journal and conference papers, theses and dissertations, academic books, pre-prints, abstracts, technical reports and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research." Their coverage is inconsistent, however. Coverage is dependent on whether Google can crawl a website to pull the information for inclusion. Add UCI to Settings > Library links to tell Scholar you have access to articles available through UCI databases. So, even if you are not on campus, Scholar will include some UCI databases when you search.

This network is a site for professors and related authors to "publish" working papers, pre-prints, and published papers. Many law professors post to SSRN to increase exposure to their scholarship. There are over 900,000 papers to search.

This is a categorized, searchable directory with links to free, full text, and quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and many languages.

This free search engine searches across over 300 freely available online law reviews, law journals, and document repositories.

This database, developed and hosted by Washington and Lee University School of Law, allows law journals searches by subject, country, or journal rank (where available), to display journal editorial information, and to facilitate article submission to those journals.

Access to federal and state pattern jury instructions across the U.S. from one website compiled by the former Assistant Director of the US DOJ Office of Legal Education. The FAQ provides helpful tips on using the resource.

Many court websites will include court-specific or other jurisdiction-specific forms, as well as jury instructions. In California, the California Courts' website includes a Self Help Center which provides numerous forms, even several in Spanish. Click on "Forms & Rules" to access forms. You can also access jury instructions. From the "Courts" tab, select "Jury Service," then click on "Resources for Court Staff, Judges and Attorneys" to locate California jury instructions, both civil and criminal. Finally, court rules can be located from the "Forms & Rules" tab, under "Rules of Court." From there, choose the link for "Local Rules" and select the specific court.

Georgetown Law Library

USC Law Library