Online Resources
BLM Land Patent Records Search
This heading links to BLM’s land patent search engine
U. S. Rectangular Survey System Land in the Unites States of America is described in its “Aliquot Parts”. This BLM link defines the Section, Township and Range (STR) aliquot parts land description system used to define Land since shortly after the Constitutional Republic was formed.
Land Entry Records Introduction and Links to Resources on Land Entry Case Files and Related Records. These are records that document the transfer of public lands from the U.S. Government to private ownership. These case files cover land entries in all 30 public land states. For land records in the remaining 20 states that were never part of the original public domain, check the State Archives for that particular state. This includes the original 13 colonies, plus Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and West Virginia.
How to do Legal Research
Pathfinders How to use the Legal Research tools found in a Law Library (newly updated and revised).
Online Legal Education Online Law School.
Constitution 101: The Meaning and History of the Constitution” is a free 10-week online course. Hillsdale College offers free courses for the following reasons:
- They are concerned that “most Americans complete their education with little to no knowledge of America’s foundational principles.”
- They believe that: “Every American must understand the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence—these set forth America’s founding principles.”
- And that: “By educating millions of Americans on our founding principles of liberty, America can begin to turn around and restore lost liberty.”
We agree! We also like Hillsdale College because, they remain truly independent by refusing to accept taxpayer-funded government support (even indirectly through student grants and loans); so, don't be surprised if they ask for supportive donations.
Free Online Hillsdale College Courses Our experience with Hillsdale College is, they remain supportive of our national Constitution and and have generated some excellent programs to help people understand the necessity for learning and applying the law. Most of the problems people face in our country today can be resolved only by the people learning our history and the law and applying the same. Their monthly perodical Imprimis often has excelent articles; like the December, 2018 article titled: “Do We Need Our Country Anymore?”.
Law Libraries / Research
The Law Dictionary: based on Black’s Law Dictionary, 2ᶮᵈ Edition (current edition: Black’s Law Dictionary, 11ᵗʰ Edition). According to the author’s daughter, the 1ˢᵗ Edition of this dictionary was written by Henry Campbell Black as a joke. He had recorded many words and phrases used in courts with different meanings from their conventional use. Nonetheless, the published version didn’t include any preface indicating he intended the volume as comical relief; and, it was so well received that subsequent editions were intended to be authoritative works. Respectively, the series is today considered the best and most used legal dictionaries in use today. The United States Supreme Court has often recognized these volumes as a secondary legal source for legal citations. When using any dictionary it’s important to remember the Cardinal Rule of Definitions.
The Avalon Project An excelent resource for historical documents
Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute
Casetext leverages technology to be the fastest growing, most awarded source of legal information online. “Designed from the ground up to be clean, simple, fast, and easy to use” case-law research site. Casetext quote: “We provide the best legal research experience at a price affordable ($65/mo)…Judges, Law firms and thousands of attorneys have switched to Casetext for better, faster research. Now they spend more of their time on higher value work.” Though their service was designed to serve professionals, it is available to anyone interested in studying case law. Their service costs significantly less than either Lexis or Westlaw; yet they claim to be better! Try it free for 14-days and, if you like it, Casetext gives Team Law a 30% Discount off their monthly enrollment fee. Try it out, then join us on our Conference Call and let us know what how you liked your experience.
FindLaw A popular Internet caselaw research site partially available at no cost.
Google Scholar This link takes you to Google's announcement page regarding this new service. From the Advanced Search page, you can limit your search results to: all legal opinions and journals; only US Federal court opinions or only state court opinions; to have the search engine provide you with the actual full text report of cases. Though there is not case site option, if you search using quotes around a case cite the service will pull up the case in the top link on the result page; thus, this is a good new source for free access to the history of law stored in cases and legal opinions.
Internet Legal Research Group A group of outlines of the contents of law study corseware books. It's like a set of Cliff notes for the books law students study for their law school classes.
Liberty Library An excellent selection of documents, including an abundance of foundational documents.
Locate a local Federal Depository
Project Gutenberg A resource for books available in the public domain; it includes many law books.
State and Local Government References
Substantive Law on the World Wide Web (we found many of the links on this source are not updated regularly)
United States Congressional Documents 1774-1873
WashLaw A free service of Washburn University School of Law, access to state and federal codes and more.
WestLaw
U.S. Courts
Supreme Court of the United States
Top 100 U.S. Supreme Court Opinions
United States District Court Locator
U.S. Tax Court
Publications
Declaration of Independence (original rough draft), scroll down to the rough draft image and click to enlarge; there are five pages.
Charters of Freedom, high resolution photographs of: The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution for the United States of America and The Bill of Rights.
The Bretton Woods Agreement (from The Avalon Project)
The Constitution for the United States of America, as presented by Corp. U.S. with live links to high resolution images of the original documents and to respective amendments and historical data.
Founders Online, Correspondence and other writings of six major shapers of the United States as presented by the U.S. National Archives.
District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871, This is a image file of the whole act as it was published in the statutes at large of the Fourty-First Congress, Session III Chapter 62 at pages 419-429. (pdf file size: 3 meg.)
The Magna Carta (from The Avalon Project)
Presidents of The United States (POTUS)
GPO Style Manual, on line access to the style manual
GPO Printing Office, with many links to other government resources, this is an excellent resource page.
GPO Online Bookstore
Searchable Documents
The Federalist Papers
The Declaration of Independence
The Internal Revenue Manual
United States Postal Service Manuals
The U.S. Constitution, links to the National Archives page where they provide both the texts and digitized copies of original documents.
Top 100 U.S. Supreme Court Opinions
Online US and State Code
US Legislature — United States Code, etc.
Court Rules — U.S. Judiciary publication
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — Cornell Law School resource
Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure — Cornell Law School resource
Federal Rules of Evidence — Cornell Law School resource
Code of Federal Regulations (e-CFR)
Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (annual eddition)
Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (e-CFR) Title 26
CFR Parallel Table of Authorities
Federal Register
The Library of Congress
United States of America Legislative Guide to Law Online: (Law Library of Congress) The Nation's Congressional records, annals of Congress etc. are found through this link.
Corp. U.S. Legislative Guide to Law Online: (Law Library of Congress) some of the Corp. U.S. Congressional records are found through this link.
Statutes at Large, 1789-1875. “The United States Statutes at Large, commonly referred to as the Statutes at Large, is the official source for the laws and resolutions passed by Congress. Publication began in 1845 by the private firm of Little, Brown and Company under authority granted by a joint resolution of Congress. In 1874, Congress transferred the authority to publish the Statutes at Large to the Government Printing Office, which has been responsible for producing the set since that time.”
The Social Security Act of 1935 Social Security Administrations presentation of the full text of the Act.
IRS Procedure Manual This is IRS’ source for the Secretary of the Treasury’s authorized procedure for obtaining a Letter Ruling from IRS’ chief counsel; such a ruling should at least designate what the proper forms are for filing a proper tax return, which may go a long way toward unraveling the “incomprehensible tax code”.
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Just for Fun
Quotable Quotes
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