Maintained by James Grimmelmann
Last updated August 2026
This page collects some of the most common resources I recommend for students who want to learn more about intellectual property, technology, and Internet law.
Media outlets with good dedicated coverage of technology law include:
There are a lot of legal blogs. These are a few of my favorites:
I maintain a list of free and inexpensive casebooks that has excellent options for most subjects in the first-year law-school curriculum and most technology and IP subjects.
If you are taking a law-school class or reading primary legal materials for the first time, I highly recommend Orin Kerr’s How to Read a Legal Opinion, 11 Green Bag 2d 51 (2007). For EU law, Jasper Krommendijk and Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius have written primers for legislation and CJEU judgments.
If you need a more in-depth introduction to how the United States legal system works, E. Allan Farnsworth, An Introduction to the Legal System of the United States (4th ed. 2010) is a good primer. It is useful if you have studied law in another country, and if you have never studied law before. If you want a historical presentation, Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (4th ed. 2019) is a well-respected standard.
Under Bryan Garner’s editing, Black’s Law Dictionary (now in the 12th edition, but used copies of previous editions are often much cheaper) has become the gold standard of legal dictionaries. But I’ll be honest: for 90% of your queries, a Google search is good enough.
As for what makes a good answer on a law-school-style exam, I highly recommend John Langbein’s essay Writing Law Examinations and Orin Kerr’s blog post Bad Answers, Good Answers, and Terrific Answers.
The most convenient version of federal statutes (the U.S. Code) is offered by the Cornell LII. The version from the House Office of the Law Revision Counsel is good for historical research. If for some reason you want PDF versions, try GovInfo
For introduced, amended, and enacted versions of bills, Congress.gov is authoritative and easier to use than any alternative I have found.
For rulemaking and other executive-branch actions, the official Federal Register is the go-to.
For regulations (the Code of Federal Regulations), the National Archives eCFR is easy to browse, search, and read. The Cornell LII version is fine too. Non-CFR agency materials are spotty and agency-specific.
For the Federal Rules (Civil Procedure, Evidence, etc.), the LII versions are by far the easiest to work with. The official U.S. Courts site has the records you need to research past and pending changes.
For Supreme Court caselaw, the Court’s own site has recent decisions and paginated proofs of the United States Reports are now posted with admirable swiftness.
For other caselaw, Google Scholar is a good lightweight starting point. None of the many other decent free options particularly stands out. I recommend Case Viewer as a front end.
For federal judicial dockets, CourtListener’s RECAP archive is free and easy to search and often has the filings you’re looking for. If you need something not available there, sign up for PACER, grit your teeth, and get ready to pay $.10 a page for public records. Of the commercial legal database services, Bloomberg Law is by far the best; you get what you pay for, but you pay for what you get.
There are no wholly satisfactory readily available versions of Restatements. Hein has PDFs; Lexis and Westlaw have browsable section-by-section versions. The ALI sells print versions at exorbitant prices.
For Uniform Laws, the ULC’s archive is free and complete but takes more clicks than necessary to get to the actual text.
For law-review articles, Hein Online (subscription-based but free to logged-in Cornell users) has almost everything published in U.S. SSRN has preprints and a lot of work from recent decades; it’s worth searching but isn’t the best for getting authoritative versions.
Not all of Bryan Garner’s books are as good as Bryan Garner thinks they are. But his Modern English Usage (5th ed. 2022) is “extremely good” and for anyone writing about law, his Dictionary of Legal Usage (3d ed. 2011) is indispensable. This is the place to look to know whether to write “pleaded” or “pled.” Get in the habit of checking Garner whenever you’re not certain whether or how to use a legal term.
Although Anil Dash’s essay Make Better Documents is primarily addressed to business documents—reports, presentations, project proposals, and the like—most of the advice holds good for any form of writing, especially “Know your audience and your goals.”
As for typography—the craft of arranging words on a page so they look nice and are easy to read—Matthew Butterick’s Typography for Lawyers (2d ed. 2015) is the best short reference in existence. It just happens to be written by a lawyer for other lawyers. It covers everything from how to type accented characters to how to format block quotations nicely.
Some notable conference and workshop series include the following.
In law and computer science:
In intellectual property:
In Internet law:
In privacy law:
In addition, there are numerous regional subject-matter workshops.
Here are some mailing lists that are homes to interesting discussions and announcements:
I use a Mac, so my advice here is Mac-centric.
Legal Research: Ben Eidelson’s Case Viewer is a lightning-fast and delightfully simple macOS for locating freely available cases and statutes.
Word Processing: Word does everything adequately and nothing well. It’s an acceptable default choice, and sometimes the only available choice. Pages is unsuitable for academic writing due to its lack of automatic cross-references, but for everyday usage it is far less frustrating to work with. Google Docs’s low-friction collaboration features are good for early-stage work, but its severe formatting limitations and hard-to-troubleshoot styling are serious drawbacks if you care what your documents look like. If you use LaTeX, Charles Duan’s Hereinafter package for legal citation is deep magic. I am happy to provide a starter template for using it.
Spreadsheets: Excel is the category leader and is a powerful workhorse for sophisticated models. Google Sheets is aa strong alternative; it’s particularly good for collaboration and sharing. For quickly making nice-looking spreadsheets, Numbers is also a decent choice.
Presentations: Everyone rags on PowerPoint, often with good reason. It works well enough much of the time, but it can and will destroy your formatting in frustrating and hard-to-diagnose ways. Google Slides is basically fine, but I find it fiddly and hard to love. If you can, use Keynote instead, which is simply a superlative piece of software.
Design: If you need sophisticated photo editing, graphic design, or desktop publishing, Adobe Creative Cloud is the best-known suite of tools. It is also shockingly expensive. Affinity is a good alternative, and far more affordable. People These Days seem to like Canva, but I die a little every time I have to read a document in its interactive web interface that could just have been a PDF.
Diagrams: If you need to draw some shapes with lines connecting them, OmniGraffle is a fine choice. I’ve used it happily for over a decade.
Calculations: If you need to do the kind of calculations you need to double-check, use a program that lets you show your work. Calca and Soulver are both genius.
Michael Madison maintains an up-to-date list of faculty who study IP property and information law.