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Free Legal Research Tools — Every Targeted Parent Should Bookmark

A curated index of free, authoritative legal-research databases that targeted parents, self-represented litigants, and their counsel can use to find statutes, case law, and procedural references — across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the EU, Australia, India, and the broader Commonwealth.

All of these are free at point of use. Several offer APIs. Several require free registration for higher-volume use.

United States

CourtListener

  • URL: https://www.courtlistener.com
  • Coverage: All US federal courts and most state appellate courts. Searchable opinions, oral arguments, dockets.
  • API: REST API (free, requires email signup for token). https://www.courtlistener.com/help/api/rest/
  • Best for: Searching for recent appellate PA-related rulings, tracking specific judges' opinions, building citation lists.

Justia

  • URL: https://law.justia.com
  • Coverage: US Supreme Court, federal courts, state statutes by chapter, US Codes annotated.
  • API: No formal API, but pages are scrape-friendly.
  • Best for: Looking up specific state-statute citations (already used extensively across the /jurisdictions/ index).
  • URL: https://www.law.cornell.edu
  • Coverage: US Code, Code of Federal Regulations, Supreme Court opinions, state-by-state legal materials.
  • Best for: Authoritative annotated versions of US federal statutes. Stable URLs, citation-quality references.

Federal Register

  • URL: https://www.federalregister.gov
  • Coverage: US federal agency rules, proposed rules, notices.
  • Best for: Tracking federal rulemaking on parenting / family-services topics.

Congress.gov

  • URL: https://www.congress.gov
  • Coverage: US federal legislation — bills, statutes, Congressional Record.
  • Best for: Looking up the legislative history of US federal family-law statutes.

Canada

  • URL: https://www.canlii.org
  • Coverage: Federal + provincial Canadian case law and statutes. Bilingual EN/FR.
  • API: Free API on request.
  • Best for: Searching Canadian PA appellate authority, finding federal/provincial Divorce Act jurisprudence.

United Kingdom & Ireland

  • URL: https://www.bailii.org
  • Coverage: E&W, Scotland, NI, Ireland — case law and selected legislation.
  • Best for: Looking up Re C [2023], Re P [2024], and other recent E&W Family Division and Court of Appeal rulings. Free, no registration.

Caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk

  • URL: https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk
  • Coverage: Official UK government caselaw archive (post-April 2022).
  • Best for: Authoritative versions of UK judgments.

European Court of Human Rights

HUDOC (ECHR official database)

  • URL: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int
  • Coverage: Every ECHR judgment, decision, and admissibility ruling. EN/FR.
  • Best for: Pulling the full text of Strand Lobben v Norway, Improta v Italy, Petrov v Bulgaria, and any other Article 8 family-life rulings.

Australia

  • URL: https://www.austlii.edu.au
  • Coverage: AU federal + state case law and statutes; also NZ, PNG, Pacific.
  • Best for: Family Law Act 1975, FCFCOA decisions, state-by-state family-law variations.

India

Indian Kanoon

  • URL: https://indiankanoon.org
  • Coverage: Indian Supreme Court, High Courts, and selected lower courts. Statutes by year and topic.
  • Best for: Indian family-court PA references under the Guardians and Wards Act 1890 and Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act 1956.

EU & cross-border

EUR-Lex

  • URL: https://eur-lex.europa.eu
  • Coverage: Official EU law portal. Treaties, regulations, directives, CJEU case law.
  • Best for: Brussels IIb Regulation (EU 2019/1111), GDPR Article 15, EU family-law harmonisation instruments.

Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH)

  • URL: https://www.hcch.net
  • Coverage: International family-law conventions — including the 1980 Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.
  • Best for: Cross-border abduction / wrongful-retention cases and the Article 13(1)(b) grave-risk jurisprudence.

Other useful sources

Government statute repositories

Each country / jurisdiction's official statute portal is the canonical source. See /jurisdictions/ for the per-jurisdiction list (we link directly to official portals where possible: legislature.gov, e-legislation.de, legislation.gov.uk, etc.).

Academic case databases

  • Casetext — https://casetext.com (free trial)
  • Fastcase — https://www.fastcase.com (free via many bar associations)
  • Casemine — https://www.casemine.com

How to use this index

For any PA / custody / family-court issue:

  1. Start with your jurisdiction's primary statute — find it in /jurisdictions/.
  2. Look for binding appellate authority in the relevant national database above (BAILII for E&W, AustLII for AU, etc.).
  3. Check for ECHR Article 8 anchors in HUDOC if you're in a Council-of-Europe state.
  4. Pair with the Bernet framework — see /research/ and /open-source/infographics/bernet-5-factor.png.

Verified upstream publishers

This index draws on the curation of two independent publishers in the field:

Contributing

PRs welcome to add additional free authoritative databases. Required: (1) URL, (2) coverage, (3) API/registration status, (4) what makes it useful in PA practice.

— Curated by Alan Markson · AntiAlienate.com · CC BY 4.0