There are numerous free online legal resources, and the State Law Library has compiled a number of legal research guides to help you find them. These guides range in scope from the comprehensive to the trivial, and cover a wide array of subject matters.

The “Doing Business in…” guides from Lexis, for example, are particularly useful to those starting or relocating a business. They detail the laws governing a particular jurisdiction, ranging from intellectual property law to employment law to bankruptcy law. Several of these guides are available in English translations, and the authors of each are renowned practitioners in their respective fields.

The Guide to Law Online, for its part, is an annotated guide to the world’s most significant legal resources. It’s also a handy resource for people interested in obtaining legal information from overseas. The site contains links to useful legal sites from various jurisdictions, including the US, Canada, and Britain. In addition, it offers a comprehensive description of online government gazettes, the primary source of legal information in many countries around the world.

One of the more impressive feats of the guide is the site’s interactive section. Users are presented with interactive exercises designed to encourage them to explore and evaluate the information presented in the guide. The PDF version of the guide includes direct links to each exercise. Similarly, the Bluebook has its own list of notable interactive features, including a mini-guide to the court documents of the various local court systems.