Mobile Offline Law

I am the kind of law librarian who likes to read legislation.  I know, it is weird.  It is particularly nice to have frequently needed legislation sources in my pocket.  I have posted before about the keeping your rules of court handy on your eReader.  Today’s Tip includes steps for putting statutes on your mobile device.

John Papadoupoulos wrote about the Canadian Law app that is available through Apple’s App Store. This app sounds neat, and it might work very well for you. I prefer law from the source and thought it would be good to outline the alternative for getting offline law for this Tip.

Using your mobile device online, navigate to the Justice Laws website.  The site has a new PDF page layout that makes downloading PDFs very simple.

Navigate to the pdf of act you want access to offline.  If you are viewing this on your iPhone or iPad, touch the screen at the top until you see the black download bar.  Choose your pdf viewer, and voila, PDF downloaded to your device.  I like iAnnotate ($9.99) for marking up PDFs, but iBooks is free and works great too.

On a Blackberry, BeamReader gets decent reviews as a PDF viewer. eReaders like the Kindle, Kobo, and Sony Reader will store PDFs as well, though you may need to do the original download on your desktop and connect from there.

My favourite download from the DOJ Laws website is the Table of Public Statutes.