Government websites can be useful resources on a wide array of topics. Many legislative materials, judicial decisions, and administrative law documents can be found at no cost on government websites. Looking at the website of any particular governmental entity your research focuses on may provide helpful information.
FDsys provides a wealth of authenticated government documents that are full-text searchable.
If you know the specific document you are looking for, you can pull it up by using the "Retrieve by Citation" link to the right of the search bar. Basic and advanced searching is also available.
To acquaint yourself with FDsys's collection, click on "Browse Government Publications" near the top of the left-hand column.
After you have found the resource you are interested in, you can bring up the text of the document itself, or you can learn more about the document by clicking the "More" link.
For example, you can discover the sponsors of congressional resolutions and the committees the resolutions were referred to.
Congress.gov is another source for many legislative documents. The website provides an alphabetical list of resources available either on Congress.gov itself or through links to external websites (such as FDsys). To see only information available on Congress.gov, click on the "Browse" link at the top of the page.
If you are going to want to save searches or set up alerts, create a free account by clicking on "Sign In" in the upper right corner.
Also at the top of the page are links to "Legislation," "Congressional Record," "Committees," and "Members." The Committees and Members sections will help you find information on specific congressional committees or individual members. For more information on the Legislation and Congressional Record sections, keep reading.
The Legislation page provides the search function for congressional bills introduced from 1973 to the present. Once you click on a search result, you are given a summary of the bill, how far it has progressed in the legislative process, text versions, and committee and sponsor information. To view all of the information (except the bill text) on one page, click the "All Bill Information" link.
The Congressional Record section of Congress.gov holds issues of the Congressional Record from 1995 to the present. The text will be provided in html if you scroll down, but there is a lot of useful information in the header. From here, you can sign up to get alerts, download the entire issue as a pdf, search by date or by year and page, or move to a different section of the issue.
Court websites may provide a lot of useful information, such as judicial opinions, dockets, court rules, and oral argument recordings or transcripts.
For example, the Supreme Court website provides all of these resources in tabs on the main page.
This list of federal court websites will help you locate the web page of any federal court at any level.
The United States Courts website, which maintains this list, also provides useful information for anyone practicing before a federal court, such as rules, policies, forms, and fee schedules. There is also a link to information for legal professionals.
Finding federal information doesn't have to be hard. In fact, USA.gov's tagline is "Government Made Easy." From the USA.gov homepage, hover over "Government Agencies and Elected Officials," and then you can go to an alphabetical list of government agencies or, if you don't know the name of the agency you're looking for, you can select "Contact Information by Topic" to find the appropriate agency.
The website and contact information for each agency is provided.
The Judicial Branch of Indiana has an excellent website.
The "Decisons & Case Records" tab provides links to orders, opinions, dockets, and even oral argument videos. Trial court and tax court docket information is located at mycase.in.gov. Supreme court and court of appeals cases are searchable here.
Also note the other tabs, which provide a lot of useful information, such as court information for Indiana's 92 counties under the "Courts & Clerks' Offices" tab and local rules under the "Forms & Court Rules" tab.
Finally, at the top of the page there is a link for "Information for Attorneys," which compiles a lot of resources attorneys practicing in Indiana will need, such as CLE information, documents on forming a PC, LLC, or LLP, and child support calculators, as well as most of the case and court information available in the tabs.
The Indiana General Assembly's website provides a lot of information about Indiana legislation.
There is a search box on the top right of the page, which lets you search everything, the code, bills, or legislators. There is also an advanced search option.
The tabs near the top of the page let you browse different topic areas, such as committees, legislation, laws, or publications. The Indiana Administrative Code and the Indiana Register are linked under the "Publications" tab.
The Legislation tab lets you look at bills or resolutions in order of introduction, or you can look for legislation by legislator or by topic. Once you select a piece of legislation, a lot of useful information is available, such as amendments in either chamber, roll call votes, bill versions, and committee reports.
To find an Indiana agency's web presence, you can look at this directory. The most visited agency websites appear when you first bring up the page. You can also look at an alphabetical listing of agencies or browse by category.
Agency home pages, directors, and contact information is provided.
