Free & Low Cost U.S. Legal Research Guide

For people without access to commercial database sources for U.S. legal materials, the Georgetown Law Library has published a guide to Free & Low Cost Legal Research on the Web:

"The major legal research databases can be prohibitively expensive for some researchers. There are, however, a number of online alternatives that are either free or less expensive than Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw. "

"The first part of this guide provides an overview and links to different types of free materials and the second part summarizes the features and costs of less expensive databases. "

Of course, for maximum historical depth, noting up of cases and expert commentary, the big database providers are still tops. But it is interesting to note how quickly free sources have been expanding in recent years.