2. Online resources
There are many available resources to help you review legal topics and cases. Some of those are:
Legal Information Institute offered through Cornell University – this is a free research tool and can be used to look up cases (caution: the database isn’t historic so older cases may not be available, although significant cases are included even if they are older), statutes, etc. This takes some clicking around to get used to but contains a lot of information, and it is searchable in a number of ways, like by keywords, case names, citations, etc. You can also get to State statutes at this site.
Another free research tool, this is written in more plain language and may be easier to navigate than the LII. However, the information is more general and may not be take into account specific things like varying state law, for example.
Oyez (pronounced oh-yay), a free law project from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII), Chicago-Kent College of Law and Justia.com which focuses on accessibility to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hear you can get cases as well as audio of the oral arguments for specific cases.
As mentioned in Chapter 1, the official site for the U.S. Supreme Court offers a wealth of information, including the activities of the Court on practically a real-time basis. Transcripts and audio for current and past cases are available on this site as well as information about a variety of court-related things, such as the individual Supreme Court Justices and the court’s history.
A word (or two) of caution regarding online legal resources: these sites are current as of the date of this writing (June 2018), but, as with any online tool, their continued viability depends on things like funding and maintenance, and so the availability of these particular sources cannot be guaranteed. In addition, case briefs and other material found online should never be simply copied. First, it is generally considered an act of academic dishonesty to use another’s work, even if the work is based on a legal case. Second, many times the briefs offered will not be exactly responsive to a professor’s specific course (and, in fact, there are many briefs out there that are flat-out wrong!). Third, there is no shortcut available to learn how to read and understand cases; it is imperative to be successful in this course that the brief or other research is your own product.
