Open Resources

"Use this portal to discover online learning materials, MERLOT members, journals, professional organizations, and news in your discipline."

Choose "Case Law" under the search box to search Federal and State court cases.

This guide provides access to the HCC Library's physical and digital resources for the Criminal Justice Program at Houston Community College.

"Find plain-English definitions for legal terms by browsing Nolo's Plain-English Law Dictionary."

This is an extensive list of linked journals from SUNY Canton.

Undergraduate and graduate level course materials from MIT.

Undergraduate and graduate course materials from MIT.

This police training course focuses the following: police administrative report; police crime report; police intelligence report; police situational report; aims and objectives of police; community and democratic policing; insignia of the police; aims and objectives of police service; police training; criminal procedure.

At this link, you will find over a dozen law-related open textbooks. These include titles on -

-Criminal Law
-Evidence
-Federal Rules

At this link, you will find several textbooks that can be used in community college - level courses. These are -

-Criminal Justice: An Overview of the System
-Criminal Law
-Ethics in Law Enforcement

From the University of Minnesota Open Textbook Library.

Author: Steve McCartney, Justice Institute of British Columbia, Rick Parent, Simon Fraser University
"In this book, you will examine the moral and ethical issues that exist within law enforcement. This book will also familiarize you with the basic history, principles, and theories of ethics. These concepts will then be applied to the major components of the criminal justice system: policing, the courts, and corrections."

Author: Rod Gehl, Justice Institute of British Columbia, Darryl Plecas, University of the Fraser Valley
" Introduction to Criminal Investigation, Processes, Practices, and Thinking, as the title suggests, is a teaching text describing and segmenting criminal investigations into its component parts to illustrate the craft of criminal investigation. Delineating criminal investigation within the components of task-skills and thinking-skills, this book describes task-skills such incident response, crime scene management, evidence management, witness management, and forensic analysis, as essential foundations supporting the critical thinking-skills of offence validation and theory development for the creation of effective investigative plans aimed at forming reasonable grounds for belief."

This link goes to more open textbook options related to law, criminal justice, and forensic science.

This link goes to the open textbook, The Outline of the U.S. Legal System authored by the U.S. Department of State.