Law Student Guide to Free Legal Research

Sarah Glassmeyer, the Faculty Outreach Librarian and an Assistant Professor of Law at Valparaiso University School of Law has created a new website called, The Law Student Guide to Free Legal Research on the Internet. The site aims to help law students with free internet legal research and is sponsored by the Free Law Coalition, which includes Cornell's Legal Information Institute and Justia. The website offers a Research Primer as well as links to federal law resources, state law resources, and secondary sources.

A post on Sarah's website (SarahGlassmeyer(dot)com) leads off on a candid note:

Here’s a couple things I believe:

1.There are several providers of free legal information out there that are reliable enough to recommend to my patrons to use.
2.Librarians need to collaborate and communicate more with information vendors – all information vendors…Wexis, ILS providers, independents and non-profits.
3.Most legal research educational materials suck. They’re dry and the publisher bias contained within some is almost laughable.
4.Legal information vendors use tactics to get law students hooked on their products that would make a drug dealer blush.

The project is aimed mainly at law students and has links to these resources:

• Primary Federal Law – cases, codes, regulations
• Secondary sources – law reviews, forms, dictionaries, encyclopedias
• Primary State Law – cases, coced, regulations

There is also a blog featuring developments in the #lawgov movement, new resources that are available and general thoughts on legal research. The inaugural post by Austin Groothuis introduced the new site using the same crack dealer/addict metaphor that critics of the major legal databases often use.