Archive for November 2009
Google Law – the beginnings
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.
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Free legal information – the Berring strait
Bob Berring is an eminent Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley who has won significant recognition for teaching and law librarianship.
In his time he’s consulted for West. How closely associated he is I do not know; he plays West up substantially in this YouTube clip. (See also this post and the comments thereto on Thomson Reuters blog Legal Current.)
Bob kicks off his vid by saying “I do believe in the market system”. So, he’s not a commie. But what does he mean by “the market system” – it soon becomes clear.
He believes that government efforts in the provision of free legal information have failed because there are no incentives; and that “volunteer efforts”, worthy as they may be, are unlikely to be sustained. He rightly says that legal information is not easily packaged: we need a map and a compass to navigate it; it needs to be organised and value added. I think we all agree with that. But his conclusion appears to be that only Wexis have sufficient incentive and only they can mobilise the necessary army to add sufficient value for it to be useful. That’s clearly preposterous – the talk of someone living in the past.
For Bob the free legal information that’s out there is “a bunch of goo” and the only thing that can sort out the mess is “the market system”. Well I have to tell Bob that it’s more nuanced than that. Sure, people need incentives, but those incentives are not only to turn a profit for shareholders. We live in a mixed economy Bob and we live by differing values:
- government has an incentive to make legal information more accessible
- the legal profession has an incentive to make legal information more accessible
- various non-profits have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
- citizens have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
- and there are many private enterprises short of Wexis who have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
All these are players in the development of better legal information; all these are making a difference.
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