In May we wrote about why we publish free legal resources. At the time, our library of state Attorney General opinions had around 6,500 entries. As of this week it has more than 11,800, across 35 jurisdictions: 34 states plus the District of Columbia. The oldest opinion in the library was issued in August 1961. The newest was issued on July 1, 2026 and was on our site within days.
All of it is free at ezel.ai/ag-opinions. No account, no email, no paywall partway down the page.
What an AG opinion actually is
Every state Attorney General runs something like a legal help desk for the state's own government. Agencies, legislators, prosecutors, county boards, and city attorneys send in questions about what state law means, and the AG's office answers in a formal written opinion. Courts are not bound by these opinions, but they cite them and often defer to them, especially where an agency is interpreting a statute it administers.
The questions are more interesting than you might expect, because they come from real disputes. A few from the library:
- Can political party observers film voters inside a North Carolina polling place? (No on video cameras. Cell phones were left to the precinct officials' judgment. This was 1998.)
- Can recalled city council members just keep meeting if they refuse to accept the election results? (California, 2026. Not lawfully.)
- Is a slot-style machine with a skill-based bonus round still an illegal gambling device in Texas? (Yes. If chance plays any role in winning, adding a skill mode does not save it.)
- Can a Mississippi town cut off water service to a homeowner who refuses to connect to a new sewer line? (No.)
- Can a West Virginia county commission hand out gift cards to residents who fill out a public survey? (Yes.)
- When is a long-term hotel guest using the hotel as a "primary residence," which triggers Virginia's tenant protections? (It depends on the full factual picture, and the opinion walks through the factors.)
If your question involves open records, open meetings, who can hold which office, what a county board can spend money on, or how an election rule works, there is a decent chance some state's AG has already answered it in writing.
The problem we are fixing
These opinions are public. Finding them is another matter. They live on each state AG's own website, usually as scanned PDFs, usually indexed by opinion number and nothing else. Search engines rarely surface them in a useful form. Some state sites sit behind bot walls that make the "public" part mostly theoretical. And once you do find the right PDF, it is written in the dense formal register lawyers use with other lawyers.
So we did the boring work. For every opinion in the library, there is one page with:
- The question in plain English, as the headline, so you can tell in two seconds whether it is the one you need
- A short plain-English answer, followed by a longer walkthrough of the AG's reasoning written for someone who has never read a legal opinion
- The full text, not a teaser
- Every statute and case the opinion cites, listed out
- A currency note on older opinions, because a 1985 opinion describes 1985 law and you should verify before relying on it
- A link back to the official source on the state AG's site, so you can check our work
- A "common questions" section that answers what a normal person would ask next
Search that goes through the full text
The search box at /ag-opinions runs full-text search across every opinion in the library, not just titles. Type "constructive eviction" or "dual office holding" or "sheriff transport inmates" and you get matching opinions with the relevant passage highlighted, filterable by state and topic.
The topics themselves tell you what state government actually argues about. The biggest ones in the library right now are statutory construction, public records and FOIA, dual office holding, personnel records, open meetings, initiative petitions, and separation of powers.
What is in the library right now
Coverage is uneven across states, and we would rather show you the real numbers than pretend otherwise. As of this writing, the largest collections are Texas (2,473 opinions), Arkansas (1,350), Tennessee (872), Delaware (861), North Carolina (850), Virginia (695), Florida (597), New York (536), Mississippi (513), and Maryland (483). Other states range from a few dozen to a few hundred. The main page shows the live count for every state, and it grows daily.
Two honest caveats. First, AG opinions are persuasive authority, not binding law. They are a strong signal of how a state reads its own statutes, and they are citable, but a court can disagree. Second, an opinion is a snapshot of the law on the day it was issued. That is why the older pages carry currency notes instead of pretending age does not matter.
Why free, and what is next
The reasoning has not changed since May: we think people should be able to read the law that applies to them, and publishing genuinely useful reference material is how a small software company gets found. The paid part of Ezel is the AI workspace for drafting and researching real legal documents, and it can pull from this same library when you ask it questions. The library itself stays free either way.
Next on the list is more states, since several are still behind bot walls or scanned-image archives we are working through, and deeper back catalogues for the states we already have. The counter on the front page will keep moving.