Law is an unforgiving beast so you would always want to refer to the source law they cite, and finding case law (much more difficult task) which references said Law and see how it’s applied/interpreted in practice.
What you linked is certainly much more practical for educational/informational purposes.
Wonderful site. Does anyone know of other resources for the lay person to get a better grasp of the law, without becoming a laywer? Earlier in my adulthood, I would have appreciated a book explaining in very general terms what exactly lawyers do and some illustrative examples.
I'm very interested in computational law and appreciate all links to people exploring this space. Another I found recently in Singapore: https://cclaw.smu.edu.sg/
I'd assume you should just use the documents as a really good starting point. Plus most lawyer will probably add some articles here or there, or change the phrasing to the way they like to do it.
I would wonder more if there are issues here that matter state to state.
But this seems like a fantastic resource, and I'm not aware of many free ones like it.
Thank you for your perspective. It's quite helpful. However, I wouldn't even a plain text searchable database be better than nothing? And I don't understand how this can be monopolized by Westlaw when law should be public domain…
Huh - this would be a great website to check laws, to compare what laws are used for and what we were told they are for, maybe have some sort of score + highlight the best and worst (also trends, too see if scope is being widened or narrowed for certain laws).
Legal textbooks are the best example of a reference I've seen: the index is grouped by legal concepts and terminology, and is impenetrable to non-lawyers.
Like jargon, it gatekeeps; but that's not its only purpose.
Suffice to say, those in the biz tend to focus mostly on case law, probably because they know the basics of statutory and common law, case law is not codified, and (all) case law is not offered for free even on horribly designed, practically useless government websites.
But, at least for my purposes, state legislation and statutory codifications (and their regulatory counterparts) are also very important to have bulk access to. Even outdated materials are useful, as once I know a section is relevant (because I can run complicated queries against entire datasets), I can begin research using more arcane methods (such as government websites and printed materials.) My treks through the California Codes and the California Code of Regulations would not have been possible without bulk access (I had to do it myself of course, after the Legislative Counsel got forced by CFAC/FAC and MAPLight.org to release the DB), and there was little case law on the issues I was doing research on (that I knew or know of) to guide me.
Outdated material may not be so useful for practicing lawyers, but its extremely useful for the 99%.
I wish this was available for legal texts, making it easy to jump from one law to the referenced next legal provision. Many legal provisions, especially in very regulated areas, make use of “functions” “imported” from other, totally different laws.
Sorry for being off-topic, but if anyone knows a resource for that, I am super interested!
LexisNexis, which does other things now but started in the legal space, offers a huge collection of legal opinions with a fairly good search and linking capabilities. Most clerks and law professionals would have access to it.
I think the benefit of Wikipedia is not access to materials so much as it is the succinct summarization of the legal opinions. Perhaps now NLP could help with this, but it's a very complicated problem to provide a summary of the important bits from a 100+ page legal document.
Law is an unforgiving beast so you would always want to refer to the source law they cite, and finding case law (much more difficult task) which references said Law and see how it’s applied/interpreted in practice.
What you linked is certainly much more practical for educational/informational purposes.
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