Free Online Legal Research

Every section includes links to important cases and additional information from the Legal Information Institute’s online treatise Wex. Also links to LII’s version of the Constitution Annotated, which is in text form.

“The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation (popularly known as the Constitution Annotated) contains legal analysis and interpretation of the United States Constitution, based primarily on Supreme Court case law.” This site has PDFs for each section of the work.

Here you can browse through the Constitution and find links to historical commentary for each provision.

This site includes the Connecticut Constitution and some related historical documents.

Here you can search and browse the official version of the U.S. Code, as well as look up statutes in the Popular Name Table. Note that this is only the text of the statutes without annotations.

Here you can find the status of current bills, as well as information about previous bills and legislation. For older materials, the full text is not always available, but some information about the actions taken on bills may be found.

Here you can browse the Connecticut General Statutes. Make sure to check the supplement for any recent changes, which is linked from this page.

Here you can track current bills with a free account.

Here you can search for bills, statutes, hearing transcripts, and other Connecticut legislative materials.

The Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, DC, has put together a list of already compiled legislative histories of selected federal laws that are freely available online

Here you can browse the Congressional Record, in full text from 1995-present. Click on “CR Index” to search the Congressional Record by topic.

With a Connecticut State Library card, you can access ProQuest Congressional remotely here.

The CT State Library provides many already compiled legislative histories for state laws online. This guide also explains how you can obtain other histories.