The Free Library

How many of the books on The Mortal Court can I read for free?

269 of the works on the site's reading shelves — 230 books and 39 articles and essays — link to a place where you can read them free: 220 at the Internet Archive alone, the rest at the Online Library of Liberty, university law-school repositories, journal sites that publish full text, and the public-domain collections of Google Books and HathiTrust. Every link below was verified against the source.

How does "free at the Internet Archive" work?

Public-domain works read instantly. Books still in copyright circulate through the Archive's controlled digital lending: create a free account and borrow the scanned book for an hour or fourteen days, exactly like a library — because it is one. No payment, ever.

What about the Court's opinions themselves?

They are all free too — that is the quiet miracle of American law. Every opinion cited on the justices' pages (182 of them) links to full text at the Library of Congress's digitized United States Reports or at Justia. Between the opinions and this shelf, a reader could take a serious Supreme Court education without spending a dollar.

Why isn't every book on the site here?

Because most books still in print are not free, and this site never pretends otherwise. The shelves link each work to the best place to find it — a publisher, a library, a bookstore. This page collects only the ones whose best place happens to cost nothing.

I. The Founding Court (1789–1801) · 11 works

II. The Marshall Court (1801–1835) · 13 works

III. The Taney Court (1836–1864) · 11 works

IV. Reconstruction & the Gilded Age (1864–1910) · 20 works

V. The White & Taft Courts (1910–1930) · 39 works

VI. Hughes, Stone & Vinson Courts (1930–1953) · 39 works

VII. The Warren Court (1953–1969) · 28 works

VIII. Burger & Rehnquist Courts (1969–2005) · 46 works

IX. The Roberts Court (2005–present) · 8 works

Histories of the Court

From the History of the Court reading room — the institution itself, free to read.