Is Google Scholar good enough for a legal writing memo?

It is good enough to find cases and read them, but not to confirm they are still good law. Google Scholar has no citator, so a case that was reversed or overruled will look identical to one that was affirmed. Find the case wherever you like, then run it through KeyCite or Shepard's on your student account before you cite it.

Do I keep Westlaw and Lexis access after graduation?

Usually for a limited period and under conditions that change annually. Both vendors run graduation programs that typically extend access through bar study and sometimes longer for clerks and public-interest employers, often with limits on commercial use. Ask your library or the campus vendor representative during your 3L year rather than assuming; many state bars also provide free Fastcase or vLex access to members, which fills the gap.

Can I use ChatGPT to write my case briefs?

You can, but the point of briefing is the reading, so you are trading the learning for the artifact. A better use is to brief the case yourself and then ask the model to identify what you missed or to generate a hypothetical that tests the holding. Also confirm your professor's policy, because some treat AI-generated briefs used in a graded cold-call or assignment as an honor code issue.

Which single site should a 1L bookmark first?

Cornell's LII, because it puts the U.S. Code, the C.F.R., and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Evidence with advisory committee notes one click away, and the committee notes will resolve more Civil Procedure confusion than any commercial outline. Add CALI second, once you have your school's authorization code.

Are paid outline banks or brief subscriptions worth the money?

Rarely, and only after you have checked what your library already provides. West Academic and Aspen study-aid subscriptions cover most of what students buy individually, and CALI is free. If your library lacks a specific title you need for a hard course, buying that one book is a better use of money than a subscription to a generic outline bank.

Where do I find court filings without paying PACER fees?

Use the RECAP Archive on CourtListener, which contains millions of documents that other users have already purchased and contributed. Install the RECAP browser extension so that anything you do pull from PACER is added to the public archive. Bloomberg Law's docket coverage through your student account is another no-cost route and is often more complete for state courts.

Best Websites for Law Students

Which free sites can actually replace Westlaw for finding law?

For finding and reading primary authority, free sources are now genuinely competitive. CourtListener, run by the nonprofit Free Law Project, hosts millions of opinions, has integrated the Caselaw Access Project's digitized reporters, and includes RECAP, an archive of PACER filings you can search without paying PACER fees. Google Scholar's case law tab does full-text search across federal and state decisions and shows citing references. Cornell's Legal Information Institute gives you a clean, current U.S. Code and C.F.R., the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Evidence with advisory committee notes, and Wex for quick definitions.

What free sites do not give you is reliable citator coverage. There is no free equivalent of KeyCite or Shepard's, so verify that a case is still good law on Westlaw or Lexis before you rely on it in a brief or a memo for a job.

For the Supreme Court specifically, use supremecourt.gov for slip opinions, the docket, and argument audio; Oyez for argument audio synced to transcripts and case summaries; and SCOTUSblog for case pages, cert-stage tracking, and its statistics packs. For state law, the state legislature's and judiciary's own sites are the authoritative versions.

courtlistener.com — opinions, dockets, RECAP filings, free docket alerts
scholar.google.com — full-text case search and citing references
law.cornell.edu — U.S. Code, C.F.R., federal rules with committee notes, Wex
govinfo.gov — official PDFs of the Federal Register, U.S.C., C.F.R., and many court opinions
oyez.org and supremecourt.gov — argument audio, transcripts, slip opinions

Which paid platforms are you already paying for through tuition?

Westlaw, Lexis+, and Bloomberg Law all give law students free academic accounts. Use them differently rather than picking one. Westlaw and Lexis are where you run citators and search secondary sources like American Jurisprudence and the Restatements. Bloomberg Law is usually the best of the three for federal and state dockets, transactional precedent and draft documents, and its practical guidance and market data — and it typically has fewer usage restrictions than the other two.

HeinOnline is the one students underuse most. It has page-image PDFs of nearly every law review back to volume one, plus compiled federal legislative histories, the U.S. Code through time, and Session Laws. If you are writing a note or a seminar paper, start in Hein and SSRN rather than Google.

All three major vendors run graduation or extended-access programs for bar study, clerkships, and public-interest work, but the terms change every year. Ask your library's reference desk or the campus vendor representative in your 3L spring rather than relying on what an upper-year told you.

What study-aid sites are worth your time?

CALI (cali.org) is free once you get your school's authorization code from the library. It has hundreds of interactive lessons organized by subject, and they are especially useful for mechanical doctrines — personal jurisdiction, Erie, hearsay exceptions, the rule against perpetuities — where repetition beats reading. CALI's eLangdell imprint also publishes free casebooks and supplements.

Most law libraries subscribe to the West Academic Study Aids Subscription (Nutshells, Hornbooks, Exam Pro, Acing, Short & Happy) and the Aspen Learning Library (Examples & Explanations, Glannon Guides, Emanuel outlines). Check your library's database list before you buy a book. Quimbee sells case briefs and video lectures, and some libraries buy institutional access; treat its briefs as a check on your own reading, not a substitute for it.

For memorization, AnkiWeb plus the desktop Anki app is the standard spaced-repetition tool. Build your own cards from your outline. Premade decks from strangers encode someone else's professor's framing, and your exam tests yours. The same caution applies to commercial outlines generally: they teach the national majority rule, while your exam may turn on the minority position your professor spent two weeks defending.

Where do AI tools help, and where will they get you sanctioned?

General-purpose models — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — are useful for things where you can immediately check the output: explaining a doctrine you have already read once, generating practice hypotheticals, reverse-outlining a case you briefed, or critiquing the structure of a practice answer you wrote. Google's NotebookLM is better than the open chatbots for exam prep because it answers only from documents you upload, so you can point it at your own outline, class notes, and briefs.

They are unreliable for legal research. Lawyers have been sanctioned for filing AI-fabricated citations, most famously in Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (S.D.N.Y. 2023), and the Second Circuit referred counsel for discipline over fabricated authority in Park v. Kim, 91 F.4th 610 (2d Cir. 2024). The rule for you is simple: never cite a case unless you have pulled the actual text in CourtListener, Westlaw, or Lexis and read it yourself.

Vendor tools like Lexis+ AI and Thomson Reuters' CoCounsel are grounded in real databases and are safer, but student access varies by school and license, and they still require you to open every cited source. Before your summer job, read ABA Formal Opinion 512 (2024) on lawyers' duties when using generative AI — competence, confidentiality, communication, fees, and supervision. And never paste confidential clinic or employer material into a consumer chatbot.

Whether you may use AI at all on graded work varies by school and often by individual professor: some ban it outright on take-home exams and papers, some permit it with disclosure, some are silent. Get the policy in writing before you use anything.

What should you use for citation and legal writing?

The Bluebook has an online subscription version at legalbluebook.com that is searchable and worth it if you are on a journal. Two free alternatives cover most 1L needs: Cornell's 'Introduction to Basic Legal Citation' by Peter Martin, which is free online and maps to Bluebook forms, and the Indigo Book, an open-source citation manual. Some schools teach the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation instead, so follow your legal writing professor.

Learn where things live rather than memorizing forms. The Bluepages govern documents you file in court and are what your legal writing course will grade; the whitepages rules govern law review footnotes. Rule 10 covers cases, Rule 10.8.1 covers unreported and pending decisions with database identifiers, Rule 12 covers statutes, and Rule 18 covers internet and electronic sources — including the preference for citing a print or authenticated source when one exists.

Zotero is a free reference manager that handles seminar papers well. For research strategy, the publicly accessible research guides from the Georgetown, Harvard, and Cornell law libraries are better than anything you will find by searching Google, and they are organized by subject and by task.

Which sites matter for jobs, clerkships, and the bar?

Federal clerkship applications run through OSCAR (oscar.uscourts.gov); build your profile early even if you are not applying yet, because it shows you which judges hire and when. Your school's Symplicity or 12Twenty instance is where on-campus interviewing and job postings live. The NALP Directory of Legal Employers gives you firm-by-firm hiring, demographic, and practice-group data for free, and Chambers Associate and Vault add narrative profiles. Above the Law and Law.com cover market news, bonuses, and layoffs.

For the bar, NCBE's site (ncbex.org) is the source for MBE, MEE, MPT, and MPRE information, released past MEE and MPT questions, and the Comprehensive Guide to Bar Admission Requirements, which is the only good cross-jurisdiction comparison. Admission requirements genuinely vary by state — character and fitness deadlines, whether the jurisdiction uses the UBE or NextGen, and score portability all differ — so read your target state's board of bar examiners site directly, not a summary.

What should you skip?

Skip any site selling outlines or case briefs of unknown provenance, and skip AI research startups that cannot show you the underlying document for every proposition. Skip paying for a study aid before checking your library's A–Z database list and your school's CALI code. And skip building a bookmark folder of fifty sites: three or four you actually use beats a curated list you never open.

Best Websites for Law Students