Free legal information in United States

Definitions

In short, “legal information”, in this context, means:

• Primary law
• Scholarship produced by the legal academy
• Treatises, form books and other practice materials
• Tools that analyze or manipulate the above and deliver them to the user

Free, “gratis”, is no the same as open. Open means the material or tool is unencumbered by legal and physical traits that inhibit its use by others.

Examples

Examples of multi-sourced free access government-provided national legal information systems include, in Europe, Legifrance (France), FINLEX (Finland), Jersey Legal Information Board (Jersey), InfoLeg (Argentina), Albanian Official Publications Centre (Albania) and BelgiumLex (Belgian government portal). Perhaps the most outstanding example, EUR-Lex, comes from a regional organization, the European Union.

The few examples in Asia include LawNet Sri Lanka and Mongolia’s Legal Unified Information System (legislation) and Judicial Information Centre (cases), both run by the government’s National Legal Centre.

Other sources,for example, are Juridicas (UNAM, Autonomous University of Mexico) or AltLaw (Columbia and U. Colorado Law Schools; now discontinued)), from some repositories of legal scholarship (for example, bePress Legal Repository).