Don’t be intimidated: anyone can become familiar enough with the law to make a difference.
We’ve assembled an array of links on a wide variety of legal subjects.
We will continue to update this information and appreciate any ideas you have in regard to additional content.
Please contact us at foi@missouri.edu with any recommendations.
Topics include:
Burning issues
- Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press — The Reporters Committee site has several excellent resources about press issues including:
- Open Government Guide — about open records laws nationwide
- Can We Tape? — on legalities of tape recording phone calls
- Reporter’s Privilege Compendium — on shield laws and reporter’s privilege
- Media Center at New York Law School has a voluminous online library of statutes, cases and news, with a focus on telecommunications and FCC regulation.
- Society for Professional Journalists
- First Amendment Center
- American Civil Liberties Union
- Student Press Law Center
- Media Law Resource Center
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Center for Democracy & Technology
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Supreme Court rules
- Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School — full-text cases since May 1990; 610 most important historical cases.
- Findlaw Supreme Court Database — FindLaw’s searchable database of the Supreme Court decisions since 1893
- The Oyez Project — U.S. Supreme Court case summaries, oral arguments, and multimedia. Full-text of the cases are viewable at the Findlaw site.
Making a federal case out of it
- Georgetown Law Library — FOIA Resources
- Findlaw: U.S. Circuit Court Opinions
- LII at Cornell Law School: U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals Search
- More resources available at:
Making a state case out of it
- Findlaw’s State Cases & Codes
- Internet Legal Research Group – State Supreme and Appellate Courts
- Lexis-Nexis’s State Resource Center
- National Center for State Courts
Legal research and writing
- Media Law Reporter — the only weekly reporting service focusing exclusively on federal and state media law, easily searchable on the Web or in print.
- FindLaw — finding lawyers and legal information
- Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School — links not only to court cases, but also to laws and regulations
- American Law Sources Online (ALSO!) — easy-to-use meta-law site, containing federal and states cases, other links to federal and state laws.
- Georgia State Univ. Meta-Index for U.S. Legal Research
- Internet Legal Research Group
- Nolo.com — help with legal research
- LII-Cornell — introduction to basic legal citation
Help for sale
- PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) — the Federal Judiciary’s centralized registration, billing, and technical support center for electronic access to U.S. District, Bankruptcy, and Appellate court records.
- LexisNexis® Matthew Bender® — a leading provider of analytical legal information in print and CD-ROM formats, and via the Internet
- Lexis-Nexis XChange — Lexis-Nexis also offers individual cite and Shepardized searches.
- Versus Law — offers three different online legal research plans
- Westlaw