The Public Library of Law


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/