Wiki legal dictionary and encyclopedia

Thanks to Tom Mighell at Inter Alia, for pointing out Wex, a new collaborative legal dictionary/encyclopedia from the Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute, in and of itself, one of the greatest free legal research tools available.

As the folks at Cornell describe it, Wex is:

an ambitious effort to construct a collaboratively-created, public-access law dictionary and encyclopedia. It is sponsored and hosted by the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School. Much of the material that appears in Wex was originally developed for the LII's "Law about..." pages, to which Wex is the successor.

As Mighell points out, the contents are currently small, but this has the potential to become a great resource to the legal community.  The site is not open to editing by the public, as Wikipedia is, but they are looking for editors.

I tried out a few different searches, and got this nice summary under Admiralty.