The ability to find relevant materials in large document collections is a fundamental component of legal research. The emergence of large machine-readable collections of legal materials has stimulated research aimed at improving the quality of the tools used to access these collections. Important research has been conducted within the traditional information retrieval, the artificial intelligence, and the legal communities with varying degrees of interaction between these groups. This article provides an introduction to text retrieval and surveys the main research related (...) to the retrieval of legal materials. (shrink)