#TBT - Yes, FutureLawyer, Your Paper Library Is Only Decoration.

Court Listener. Recently, I posted about my obsolete paper library, with two hundred year old volumes containing appellate court opinions, and secondary source books with legal analysis and encyclopedias. They look pretty in the library; but, for a several decades now, they have just been decorative. One of my guilty pleasures is the Perry Mason channel on Pluto. When I want to relax, I watch old episodes of the series that sparked my interest in the law. In the opening and closing credits, a table containing several volumes of Corpus Juris Secundum (CJS), the oldest and most famous legal encyclopedia, are shown. The big blue books were once the repository of general law everywhere. Today, it seems that every time I open my browser, there is another computer aided legal research site, and my favorites, Google Scholar, AnyLaw, and CaseText, along with paid and curated sites like FastCase, are always getting new companions. The non-profit Free Law Project is one of these, and the case search site, Court Listener, contains access to millions of primary law cases, searchable online, for free.