Google Scholar Legal opinions and journals
Google Scholar introduced a subset that allows us to search for legal journals and court cases. It is in early form but will no doubt grow. In no way does Google Scholar-"Legal opinions and journals" substitute for doing research in a law library. Neither is it any competition for WestLaw or Lexis Nexis, but any tool has its use.
To find it, go to
www.google.com/scholar then click the radio button under the search box. ==> [Legal opinions and journals ] and enter a search term(s) of a case name or legal term.
There is an introductory essay, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-govern-us.html that provides some background on this project. Interestingly enough, Google Legal Opinions and Journals search provides cases that appear to be hosted by Google's servers rather than looking for items on the Web. That means anything found should be available in full text, avoiding the frustration of Google Scholar, which often points to a journal that tantalizes with a great title and abstract but that imposes a per-use charge to read the article.
So far I have not found a use for the law journals, as many are copyrighted. However the court cases are available in full form. Some law schools recognize the value of placing content on the Web free of charge, this Google search service will give them a much wider readership.
So what uses?
The "Cited" function is very welcome. This has been available in Google Scholar, and is now in the legal search subset as well. Looking for later work that cites an earlier landmark article or case is useful in finding similar literature. This works exactly the opposite of a bibliography, which can only cite works older than the one that has been found. Citation indexing has been around in paper form since the 1950s and now electronically by subscription from ISI/Thompson Reuters who produce the Web of Knowledge. ( http://www.isiwebofknowledge.com/ )
So how well does the "cited" search function work? In a word, nicely.
According to the "cited" function in Google, the U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v Wade has been cited 23,074 times in later cases. One could perhaps read through these opinions at about the same rate they are multiplying. Another court case, Marbury v Madison, perhaps the most important federal case of all time, gets cited 15,853 times. (So much for contemporary reproductive policy vs. the original Supreme Court case whose precedent enables U.S. courts to review and invalidate legislation.)
When, for example, the Marbury v Madison case is displayed, a second tab, "How Cited,"can be selected. This "How Cited" tab provides a case name in context within later decisions. That allows a very fast scan of cases to see how Marbury v Madison is being used to construct judicial reasoning.
Advanced search.
In Advanced Search mode, individual states can be selected, thus providing a useful limiting function. Instead of scanning 15,853 cases citing Marbury, one could select US Federal court opinions or any of the 50 states. Selecting California as the jurisdiction reduces our Marbury v Madison results list to 63 California court cases, clearly an easier number to browse through.
The advanced search box has provision for a date limitation, so a searcher could ask for court cases since 2008 citing Roe. Should a searcher want cases between 1990 to 1992, for instance, this date limiter will reduce the number of cases one has to examine.
Some of the search limitations inherent to Google search also limit the court case search.
Field searching, such as "title" or judge's "name" or "counsel" are simply not available. In advanced search mode, I was able to find articles written by Earl Warren since there is a specific line for "author." For court cases, one would have to examine the results to see if a case had been authored by Earl Warren's court, if Earl Warren was the attorney representing California (He was the Attorney General of California for a while) or simply that the case mentioned Earl Warren in the text.
Proximity searching, where two search terms must be within a certain number of words of each other is sadly missed. This is a standard tool in professional databases such as Lexis, Westlaw, Proquest, and Newsbank. Proximity searching can require an upper limit on the number of words apart the search terms can be, and specify that they be in a specific order.
The closest one can come to this functionality in Google is with phrase searching where one uses two search words inside quotation marks with an asterisk between: "firstword * lastword" to signal there are intervening words in the phrase. So for example, “Governor * California” where intervening words might be Warren, Knight, Brown, Reagan, Wilson, Deukmejian, Davis or Schwarzenegger should bring up cases where the governor is named. Because the intervening words are legion, it should not be surprising that the display shows a wide assortment of cases as result of a proximity search such as this. A better example might be “Brown * Education” which leads exactly to the case of Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al.1954 347 U.S. 483.
Wildcard or truncation to find variants with the same word stem does not seem to be available. Google's early decision to ignore the search syntax and boolean logic available in an older search engine such as AltaVista is truly regrettable.
Searching for a legal concept can be daunting, this system works best to retrieve cases by name. For example, searching for the word "estoppel" yields many court cases containing the word, but only a vague sense of its meaning can be inferred from its usage within the cases. By contrast, a search in Wikipedia for the term "estoppel" provides useful, if not authoritative, definitions.
Displaying the results.
So far, I have not encountered scanned original pages, the case language appears to have been re-typed. This may provide opportunity for mistakes introduced during the typing. However, this is an informal search tool, scholars will want to find the historical printed decisions for faithful citation. My personal preference is for the original scanned pages to be displayed, allowing typed or OCR renditions to provide word search functionality. Perhaps there are copyright or publisher PR issues involved that prevent the scanned pages of published decisions from being displayed.
Still, Google Scholar Legal Opinions and Journals search is useful. It is joining my bookmarks for sure.
Just hope it gets a better name. Google Scholar Legal Opinions and Journals is simply too big a mouthful to make it a good name. Acronyms like Google SLOAJ sound much too close to "sludge." Maybe LegalGoogle or LawGoogle or GoogLegal.
Enjoy.
D.E.M.
