The Public Library of Law

Please note that this post is from 2008. Evaluate with care and in light of later events.

The Public Library of Law:

What is the Public Library of Law?

Searching the Web is easy. Why should searching the law be any different? That’s why Fastcase has created the Public Library of Law — to make it easy to find the law online. PLoL is the largest free law library in the world, because we assemble law available for free scattered across many different sites — all in one place. PLoL is the best starting place to find law on the Web.

What is available on PLoL?

• Cases from the U.S. Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals
• Cases from all 50 states back to 1997
• Federal statutory law and codes from all 50 states
• Regulations, court rules, constitutions, and more!

This is an intriguing new research tool that I just discovered today. While I do most of my research on Westlaw and LexisNexis (since it’s free to students), I’m very interested by the idea of much less expensive (or free!) tools. Two reasons for this interest: (1) increasing public access to the law and (2) saving myself or my firm/corp/non-profit/agency money in the future (Westlaw/LexisNexis are very expensive).

Search for yourself at: http://www.plol.org/