It was only a matter of time before Google turned its attention to the law. So we now have Legal Opinions on Google Scholar and everybody is all aTwitter about it.
Legal Opinions on Google Scholar opens up access to full text legal opinions from US federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts and via a Cited By feature links to other cases and articles on Scholar that cite them. (Though court opinions in the US are not protected by copyright they wre hitherto only readily available for comprehensive searching via services such as Lexis and Westlaw.)
For a good primer on its features, see Don Cruse on the Supreme Court of Texas Blog (hat tip Jason Wilson).
You can also use Google Scholar / Legal Opinions to follow up citations of judgments that are not themselves indexed in full text, including those from other jurisdictions. For example, one will readily find citations of leading cases such as Hedley Byrne and Donoghue v Stevenson, and more recent cases of course.
So it’s going to be useful for (US) legal research, though it will be some time before it challenges the likes of Wexis. Calm … down, says Jason Wilson.
The development is hyped by Anurag Acharya, the Distinguished Engineer (sic) behind the development, on the Official Google Blog, saying:
We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. … we were struck by how readable and accessible these opinions are. Court opinions don’t just describe a decision but also present the reasons that support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations.
I don’t buy this empowerment argument. It’s absolutely right that citizens should have access to the laws that bind them and any initiative that makes them more accessible is to be welcomed. But to empower the average citizen you have to go the extra mile, explaining the law. Lawyers and legal researchers have spent years learning the law and acquiring the skills that enable them to navigate and reliably interpret primary law and precedent.
There does seem to be a bit of a myth about raw information leading to empowerment. If professional lawyers need textbooks to help them analyse and interpret the law, and law reports to make sense of judgments, how are students and lay folk supposed to get what they need just by poking around in a heap of unreported cases? Good to have them accessible, though, not least as an antidote to the overly commercial publishers whose prices seem to rise at the rate of increase of bankers’ bonuses.
I can’t imagine vast demand, but this will ‘empower’ anyone who is interested in a legal point and wants to read the related case law – especially sole practitioners who find it hard to access libraries and services for some reason (like cost). It should also present a new marketing channel for legal texts etc., and might even grow that market.
BTW some cases also have general literary value. The findings of fact in salvage and flood cases, for example, are often a gripping read, as they outline how the wreck or flood occurred.
Best
SDJ
[...] In terms of freedom of information: Nick Holmes of Binary Law has a fund of useful information with infolaw – and deserves recognition for the valuable work he does on infolaw and in promoting the free legal web. [...]