flickr photo by debagel

By Mark Stuckey

I know that no one here at the College of Law wants to believe it, but there will come a time when you need legal resources and not have (free) access to the panaceas that are Westlaw Next, Lexis Advance, or even Bloomberg Law. But fear not, I am going to expose you brief glimpse of the world of free legal resources (well, for Georgia at least).

Statutory Law

• The Georgia General Assembly has been gracious enough to fund a free, searchable, unannotated version of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, the code is hosted by Lexis. You can find it in all of its glory here.
• Fastcase: when you become a member of the Georgia Bar you will have access to Fastcase which has a free unannotated version of the Georgia Code as well as Georgia session laws from the legislature. For Georgia Bar Members click here. For GSU students here.
• For older, archived Georgia Codes check out Archive.com which spans from 1799 – 1933.
• For those interested in municipal ordinances check out Municode, a great free resource that has complied a bunch of city ordinances in Georgia and other states.

Case Law

• Fastcase is a great resource for a lot of things, including finding case law. Go on check it out you know you want to. For Georgia Bar Members click here. For GSU students here.
• There is a pretty cool website called FindLaw that has both Georgia Appeals and Supreme Court opinions for free!
• And finally, Google Scholar is a free resource provided by our friends at Google that will allow you to search for case law from any jurisdiction. It may not have all the bells and whistles of your commercial databases, but it is a good place to start.

Administrative Law

• Executive Orders – the office of the Governor has an archive of executive orders made by that office. Check them out for free here
• Attorney General Opinions – the office of the Attorney General of Georgia also has an archive that contains opinions from that office take a look here.
• Rules and Regulations – click here to find regulations passed by state agencies.

Well, there you have it; a rather brief and superficial overview of some free Georgia legal resources that are available to you. On a final note, always keep in mind that the ultimate free legal resource is one that you probably spend a lot of your time studying in already, yeah that’s right, the Law Library.