Open Access (OA) and Open Educational Resources (OER) put legal scholarship, statutes, case law, treaties and human-rights instruments within reach of every African student, researcher and librarian — no paywall, freely reusable. This guide curates the best free, stable legal resources across the discipline.
Subdisciplines — jump in
- Law (General) · OER course
- Human Rights & International Law · OER course
- Governance & Public Policy · OER course
- Constitutional & Comparative Law · OER course
New here? start with these courses
- Law & Legal Studies OER (Course 27) (this subject's open course)
- Navigating Research Guides (15)
- Accessing Open Access Journals (16)
- Using VuFind Discovery Search (14)
Search everything
Search all FRELIP collections at once via search.frelip.org.
Start here for definitions, terminology and authoritative overviews of legal concepts.
Law (General)
- Wex Legal Dictionary & Encyclopedia (free, collaboratively-built legal reference from Cornell LII)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Law entries (peer-reviewed essays on philosophy of law)
- Oxford Bibliographies (free entries) (curated annotated reading lists in law)
Human Rights & International Law
- Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (free entries) (leading reference in international law)
- International Court of Justice (case law, judgments and advisory opinions)
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights (foundational instrument, all languages)
Governance & Public Policy
- OECD Public Governance (terminology, indicators and reference reports)
- Transparency International — Glossary & CPI (anti-corruption and governance terms)
Constitutional & Comparative Law
- Constitute Project (searchable, comparable texts of the world's constitutions)
- Oxford Constitutions of the World (free entries) (comparative constitutional reference)
Freely downloadable scholarly books and openly-licensed textbooks for legal study.
OA book libraries (general)
- Directory of Open Access Books — Law (peer-reviewed OA legal monographs)
- OAPEN Library — Law (full-text OA academic books)
- Open Library — Law (Internet Archive lending and public-domain texts)
- Project Gutenberg — Law (public-domain classic legal texts)
Open textbooks & OER
- Open Textbook Library — Law (peer-reviewed, openly-licensed law textbooks)
- LibreTexts — Civil Law / Business Law (open law texts under the Business bookshelf)
- OER Commons — Law (searchable open law course materials)
Per subdiscipline
Peer-reviewed open-access law journals and full-text article repositories.
Law (General)
- DOAJ — Law journals (vetted OA journal directory)
- SSRN Legal Scholarship Network (open working-paper and preprint repository for law)
- Google Scholar (locate free PDFs of legal articles)
Human Rights & International Law
- African Human Rights Law Journal (leading OA journal, University of Pretoria)
- DOAJ — Human Rights journals
- European Journal of International Law (open issues)
Governance & Public Policy
- DOAJ — Governance journals
- CODESRIA journals (Africa Development & more) (African social-science and governance research)
Constitutional & Comparative Law
- DOAJ — Constitutional Law journals
- SciELO — Law collection (OA journals incl. Latin American & African comparative law)
Scholarly discovery engines, citation indexes and free legal databases.
Discovery & bibliographic
- BASE — Law (one of the largest OA scholarly search engines)
- CORE — Law (aggregated OA full-text articles)
- OpenAIRE Explore — Law
- OpenAlex — Law (open scholarly metadata graph)
- Semantic Scholar — Law
- The Lens (scholarly & patent search, incl. legal informatics)
Citation indexes
- OpenCitations (open citation data)
- Dimensions — Law (free version)
Subject-specific legal databases
- WorldLII (World Legal Information Institute — free global case law & legislation)
- AfricanLII (free African legislation, case law & gazettes)
- Refworld (UNHCR) (human-rights, refugee & international law documents)
Open datasets, legal corpora and primary-source archives for empirical and doctrinal legal research.
General data repositories
- Zenodo — Law datasets
- OSF — Law projects & data
- Figshare — Law
- re3data — Law data repositories (registry of research-data repositories)
Subject-specific data & primary sources
- V-Dem — Varieties of Democracy (governance & democracy indicators)
- World Bank Governance & UNESCO data (Worldwide Governance Indicators)
- Constitute Project (constitutional corpus) (machine-readable constitution texts)
- OHCHR — International Human Rights Instruments (treaty texts & ratification data)
- African Union Treaties (primary regional legal instruments)
Open lectures, courseware, images and visual primary sources for legal learning.
Video & courseware
- MIT OpenCourseWare — Law & policy (free course materials)
- Yale Open Courses (full recorded lecture series incl. politics & ethics)
- Coursera — Law (audit free) (university law courses, free to audit)
- UN Audiovisual Library of International Law (lectures by leading international jurists)
Images & visual primary sources
- Wikimedia Commons — Law (freely-licensed images, courts, legal documents)
- Library of Congress — Free to Use Sets (public-domain legal & historical images)
Maps & data visualisation
- Constitute — comparative constitution maps
- Our World in Data — Democracy & Rule of Law (interactive governance charts)
Free tools to manage references, find open versions of paywalled articles, and build your scholarly identity.
Reference managers
- Zotero (free reference manager with legal citation styles, OSCOLA/Bluebook)
- JabRef (open-source BibTeX reference manager)
- ZoteroBib (instant bibliographies, no install)
Find full text
- Unpaywall (browser extension finding legal OA versions)
- CORE Discovery (one-click access to free full text)
Identity & writing
- ORCID (persistent researcher identifier)
- Cornell Introduction to Basic Legal Citation (free legal citation guide)
Keep learning
Understand copyright licensing, OA mandates, repository policies and accessibility standards.
Creative Commons & licensing
- Creative Commons Licenses (the six CC licences explained)
- CC License Chooser (pick the right licence for your work)
OA repository & journal policies
- Sherpa Romeo (publisher self-archiving / copyright policies)
- OpenDOAR (directory of OA repositories)
- ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories)
Open-science mandates & assessment
- Plan S / cOAlition S (OA funder mandate)
- DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment)
Metadata & accessibility
- Dublin Core Metadata Terms (standard descriptive metadata)
- WCAG Accessibility Guidelines (make content usable for all)
Keep learning
Connect with legal scholarly communities and keep building your research skills.
Learned societies & associations
- Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria (leading African human-rights institution)
- CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa)
- International Law Association (global international-law society)
- International Commission of Jurists (rule of law & human rights)
- International Association of Constitutional Law (comparative constitutional scholarship)