In Custodia Legis, Margaret Wood: “Last week, I had the honor to give a gallery talk on the Library of Congress exhibit, Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom Illustration.  As a co-curator for the exhibit, I had helped in doing legal research for information about the cases portrayed by the drawings in the exhibit.  At the talk, I spoke about the challenge of doing legal research for state and federal trial court cases.  Very few of the opinions from trial courts are published.  Locating information for many of these cases was difficult and in many instances the best source of information was an appeals court decision on a case.  Many of the appellate court decisions I found provide a rich trove of information about the trial court case with a detailed exposition of the issues.  The other challenge in doing legal research for this exhibit was that I only used free online resources.  Luckily, in the last several years there has been an explosion of websites that provide access to published court decisions: Justia, Findlaw, Google Scholar, the Public Library of Law, and Casetext to name a few…”