Three recently developed websites are worth taking a look at if you’re looking for free case law, especially outside of Washington State.  (As previously mentioned, www.legalwa.org is a great site for searching Washington-specific case law.)

All three sites mentioned below search U.S. Supreme Court cases, but have unique search engines that often return different results from the same search.

The first site is Precydent. This site allows you to refine your search by jurisdiction and to search using Boolean operators. You can also limit the search by date, and retrieve cases ranked by authority, date, or jurisdiction.

The next site is AltLaw, a joint project between the University of Colorado and Columbia University Law Schools. This site also allows advanced searching and Boolean searching, but does not search as many jurisdictions, particularly lower courts, as Precydent searches.

The third site is Public Library of Law. You can only search one jurisdiction at a time on this site, and there are no Boolean operators available to limit the search. Be aware that this site is sponsored by FastCase, and they may not allow full functionality without paying a fee.

In a recent podcast, Rita K. talks about these sites and others, incluidng FindLaw, the Legal Information Institute from Cornell, and LexisOne.