LibGuides: Legal Resources: Databases, Law Portals, & Search Engines

Databases

Law Firms

Employment

Personal Legal Resources

American Bankruptcy Institute
Michigan Community Resources
Legal Pro Bono Referral Program
Nolo Bankruptcy Center
Planning for Your Peace of Mind: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Medical and Legal Decisions
State Bar of Michigan Legal Aid
Contact information for legal aid, law-related organizations, community services, and dispute resolution programs that offer services searchable by county.

Law Portals

American Bar Association (ABA): LawInfo.org
American Law Sources Online
Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute
EISIL: the Electronic Information System for International Law
Emory Law Links to Free Legal Sites
Law Library of Congress: Guide to Law Online
Law Moose! World Legal Resource Center
A specialty search engine indexing a selection of valuable legal research sites with a special effort to include sites describing and linking to legal reference materials worldwide.
Michigan eLibrary: Legal Information Reference Center
Search over 12,800 state-specific legal forms by topic including Adoption, Bankruptcy, Name Changes, and more. A majority of the full text legal reference books provided through NOLO.
Public Library of Law
Calling itself the "one of the world's largest free law libraries," this site includes case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, legal forms
World Legal Information Institute
Free, independent and non-profit access to worldwide law.

Specialized Law Search Engines

DRAGNET: New York Law School Library
"DRAGNET stands for "Database Retrieval Access using Google's New Electronic Technology," a specialized search engine that was developed by librarians at the New York Law School. This feature enables you to "drag the net" through a group of free law-related Web resources. A DRAGNET search is like a Google search, except that it runs in only a select group of websites, produced by the organizations and entities listed below. The sites were chosen by our Library staff for their reliability and utility to legal researchers.* DRAGNET now contains search tabs that look at specific portions of the law. Each tab can generate up to 100 hits, ranked for relevance by Google’s search engine. DRAGNET can be a good tool to begin a research project, giving you a sense of what kinds of materials can be found on your topic."
Cornell University Law Library Search Engine

Government

SEC
U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission
Federal Digital System (FDsys)
Free online access to official government publications; it can be a starting place for research.
Congress.gov
This site replaces http://thomas.loc.gov. "Congress.gov is the official website for U.S. federal legislative information. The site provides access to accurate, timely, and complete legislative information for Members of Congress, legislative agencies, and the public. It is presented by the Library of Congress (LOC) using data from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Office of the Secretary of the Senate, the Government Publishing Office, Congressional Budget Office, and the LOC's Congressional Research Service."

County Government Directory

CountyOffice.org is an Internet database of county government offices in the United States. Use it to locate your county assessor, board of elections, chamber of commerce, child support offices, colleges, coroner, courts, and much more, with all relevant details.

County Office.org