About Legal Journal
Legal Journal is an independent reference site that helps you find court records, case law, statutes, and other legal source material through official channels.
Our Mission
Public legal information in the United States is scattered across hundreds of official websites: fifty-plus state judiciary portals, the federal PACER system, state legislature sites, law-school libraries, and county clerk offices. Most of it is free to access, but finding the right starting point is hard. Our mission is to map that landscape. We curate and verify links to official sources and explain, in plain language, how to use them.
Everything we publish is general reference information. We point you to the primary source, whether that is a state court's records portal, a published opinion, or a law library near you, and we explain what you will find when you get there. You can see the full scope of what we cover on the Legal Journal homepage.
On the Web Since 1999
LegalJournal.net first came online in 1999 as the Electronic Legal Journal, and spent years afterward as a directory of legal-research sources: library catalogs, government databases, and court sites. The web has changed a great deal since then: court systems that once required an in-person visit to a clerk's office now publish searchable case indexes, and nearly every state posts its statutes and appellate opinions online for free.
The current edition of the site is a full rebuild with a single focus: pointing readers to official, primary sources. We removed anything that did not serve that goal, re-verified every external link against the official site it points to, and rewrote our guides around how these systems actually work today.
How We Research Our Guides
Every guide starts at the primary source. When we describe a state's court records system, we work from that state judiciary's own website. When we cite a rule or a case, we state its holding conservatively and link to where you can read it yourself. We prefer .gov domains, official court portals, the American Bar Association, and accredited law-school libraries, and we check each URL before it is published.
Our sourcing standards, review process, and corrections policy are documented in full in our editorial policy.
What Legal Journal Is Not
We are not a law firm, and we do not give legal advice. Nothing on this site applies the law to your particular situation, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. If you need advice about a specific legal problem, you need a licensed attorney in your state.
We are also not a background-check service. Legal Journal hosts no court records; we link to the official portals where records are held. Nothing here is a consumer report, and records you find through official sources must not be used for employment, tenant, or credit screening. Our legal disclaimer explains these boundaries in detail.
How to Reach Us
Corrections, broken-link reports, and source suggestions all go straight to the people who maintain the site. See the contact page for how to reach us and what to include in a correction report.