Altlaw.org - Legal Information for the People

Why go through the bother of going to law school, if all the information you need to know about the law is available on Altlaw? Well, maybe it's not the same thing, but Altlaw is definitely a good source of factual information from court cases and legal opinions dating back fifteen years. The website has a searchable database of federal appellate and Supreme Court opinions (no state court cases yet).

You can use advanced search options (proximity searching, Boolean, concentration, wildcards, etc.) to find what you're looking for, quickly. This service is free. If you've ever wondered, "Can I sue someone for this?" or "Has this ever been decided in court?", now you can find out for yourself using Altlaw. You can even download all of the cases from the site directly in one full swoop. The site is currently accepting writers who want to contribute. It doesn't specify whether you have to be a lawyer to contribute.

"The law is meant to belong to the people, but it can be surprisingly hard to find. Case reports, a major part of the laws of the United States, are hard to get at, and even when on the Internet, rarely searchable. To get full access you generally need either a library of law reports, or an expensive subscription to an online database, which can cost hundreds of dollars per hour.

AltLaw is a small effort to change thatâ€”to make the common law a bit more common. AltLaw provides the first free, full-text searchable database of Supreme Court and Federal Appellate case reports. It is a resource for attorneys, legal scholars, and the general public."

Either people will just use this to study for exams in law school, or it will actually become an authoritative source of legal information. It's well-organized and has a nice design. In theory, it's a great idea, but they have to work on getting more information on the site.

Going back fifteen years isn't very far. After all, we have hundreds of years of history just in the U.S. What about going back at least fifty years, or a century?

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