How should a lay person go about doing legal case history research?

November 2, 2015 7:17 PM

Is there a standard resource or set of resources that a lay person can use to identify past and current civil and criminal lawsuits in a comprehensive set of jurisdictions (including Federal District Courts, State courts, and not particularly concerned with tribunals and tax courts)?

I'm a researcher formerly for an advocacy organization, now going freelance for awhile. That means I no longer have access to things like Lexis Nexis, PACER, and other legal resources that allowed me to search complaints against individuals and businesses, access documents, etc. Basically I am looking for resources that will give me the most centralized (if possible) and comprehensive access to case information, even if I need to contact a local jurisdiction about documents.

Some relevant details:

-- I live in Los Angeles (can't really find good resources on the County Public Library website, but will call the Central branch).

-- I am a UCLA graduate.

-- I am willing to travel to a law library but my understanding is that these are generally closed to the public.

-- Regarding State courts, the most relevant to me are: CA, NY, FL. PA, CO, but if there's some resource that compile all, that's best.

I guess the greatest thing would be if there was a place that gave the public access to Westlaw, PACER, and the legal-searching versions of Nexis. Does that exist? Should I be approaching this a different way? Am I doomed to travel the land doing one-off searches of the hundreds of jurisdictions in this country?

posted by kensington314 to Law & Government (5 answers total)

If you're in the Los Angeles area and are already comfortable with Lexis and Westlaw the Los Angeles Public Law Library has you covered.

And it's totally open to the public. The only limitation is they will time your computer usage.

However, if you can get down to Orange County, the Orange County Public Law Library, will let you camp out all day.

Have fun!
posted by bswinburn at 7:26 PM on November 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

You don't want public libraries, you want state/county law libraries. I volunteered at the county law library for a while and it had Lexis and WestLaw available to anyone, you just had to pay to print it. My law school's library was open to the public and that's not uncommon, but hard copy stuff only - WestLaw/Lexis/etc. weren't available unless you had your own login.
posted by good lorneing at 7:28 PM on November 2, 2015

For reported (and some unreported) cases decided by appellate courts, Google Scholar.

For filed and currently pending cases, some courts provide online access to the listings, and some don't. You can access them via the internet from your home; it does not require a library.
posted by megatherium at 4:09 AM on November 3, 2015

You might see if the UCLA law library will give you a special alumni card. While a lot of law libraries are closed to the public, some do have arrangements for alums (sometimes in exchange for a donation).
posted by rainbowbrite at 6:40 AM on November 3, 2015

For federal district court pleadings on PACER, you can register for your own account, then use a free PacerPro account to save some money. (Much like RECAP, if a document has been downloaded by another user before you, it's free.) You could also search the RECAP archive but that only includes documents someone has already downloaded and contributed with the RECAP extension--it's not comprehensive.

State courts are much more difficult--for example, California does not have a unified state courts database available anywhere and some jurisdictions aren't even online. If you're talking about case law (published opinions) though, Google Scholar and the law libraries mentioned above are great options.

For state court pleadings and dockets, I recommend LegalDockets.com to direct you to any online court access in a state.
posted by purple_bird at 9:06 AM on November 3, 2015 [1 favorite]