Legal Research Resources

Oyez is one of the best free websites for information about the Supreme Court. It includes brief descriptions and the full text of the opinions for many (but not all) Supreme Court case decided from the Court’s beginning in 1789 to the present. This is often the easiest place to go to find an opinion quickly. Note that Oyez will sometimes link you to a partner site, Justia.com, which is a commercial site but still reliable. For cases from 1955 on, Oyez frequently includes links to the audio recordings of oral arguments.

Justia is a commercial legal information site. Its Supreme Court Center includes a comprehensive collection of Supreme Court opinions. It’s often one of the first search results when you Google the name of a case and is a reliable source for accessing a case quickly. If you want more detailed information about a case along with related documentation, WestLawNext and HeinOnline are your best bets. Justia also includes information about state and federal law beyond the Supreme Court, though the site overall is more oriented toward people doing legal research than to historians.

Sponsored by Cornell Law School, this site is linked to Oyez and provides some of the same information as Justia. It frequently turns up when you Google a legal case. Many, but not all, Supreme Court opinions are included on the LII page; Justia is more comprehensive. An advantage of the LII site is that it also includes valuable reference material, including a detailed explanation of the Constitution and legal dictionary and encyclopedia.

HeinOnline has much of the same content as WestLaw, but it includes more law review articles and supporting materials. If you just want to find the legal materials relevant to your case, you might have an easier time using WestLaw. If you want to get a broader sense of what has been written about your case, you might benefit from using HeinOnline. When it comes to the actual cases themselves, HeinOnline will bring you to a PDF of the original printed version, while WestLaw takes you to a digitized version. HeinOnline also uses the more familiar U.S. Reports citation system, rather than the Supreme Court Reporter system used in WestLaw.

The website of the Supreme Court includes useful material primarily related to recent cases. You can find argument transcripts dating back to 1968; audio recordings of arguments starting from 2010; PDFs of opinions from 1991 to 2013 and from 2013 to the present.

United States Reports is a series of bound volumes constituting the official record of the U.S. Supreme Court. This Library of Congress site collects PDFs of these volumes. This site is a great place to go if you want to see the opinions from your case as they originally appeared in print. This site is difficult to use; it helps if you already know the volume number in which your case appeared. This is the first number in the official citation of a Supreme Court case. For instance, Dred Scott’s citation is 60 US 393, which means it is in U.S. Reports volume 60, starting at page 393. You can find your case’s citation by searching in Oyez or Justia. U.S. Reports covers court decisions from 1754 (confusingly, before the Supreme Court was even established--these early volumes cover Pennsylvania court decisions) through 2003. For more recent material, go to the Supreme Court website, linked above.

(Harvard Law) Provides access to all U.S. official published case law from 1658 to June 2018, including all state courts, federal courts, and territorial courts for American Samoa, Dakota Territory, Guam, Native American Courts, Navajo Nation, and the Northern Mariana Islands.