I’m very pleased to see that Google Scholar now allows searches of a very broad range of caselaw, plus many law review articles. This should make law much more accessible to people who don’t have Lexis and Westlaw (which is also good for us privileged free Lexis and Westlaw users, when we want to link to old cases that had earlier been unavailable).
Still, I’m assuming that this is just (in keeping with Google Scholar’s beta status) an early phase of the project, with much more still to come; and I’m a bit surprised that some pretty obvious features were omitted. For instance, as best I can tell one can’t easily search only court opinions (federal and from all states); the advanced mode let one select “all legal opinions and journals,” or “only US federal court opinions,” or “only court opinions from the following states.” Searching all federal and state cases in one search is impossible; searching all state cases seems to require checking 50 boxes.
Likewise, the search feature yields mysterious results; a search for “volokh” in all federal cases yields lots of cases that never mention “volokh,” nor anything that seems similar to volokh. And Google’s famous metadata glitches make date searching iffy, since some very new articles end up having old dates. Check out, for instance, the prescient 1761 source on computer file-sharing yielded by this query.
But again, I assume there are many more improvements to come in the coming years, and perhaps even one day support for Lexis– or Westlaw-like queries, with good proximity searching, segment searching, and more. And even for now, searching for (and linking to) caselaw is much easier today, at least to those without Lexis and Westlaw, then it was before the new Google features.
Mikhail Koulikov says:
As with almost everything that Google does beyond the main page, this is very much a work-in-progress. As far as the ‘much more still to come’ bit goes, there is a very strong possibility that by early next year, Google will be providing or at least facilitating online access to NY Court of Appeals and NY Supreme Court, Appellate Division records and briefs for cases through most of the last century.
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November 18, 2009, 12:28 amyankee says:
I doubt Google will ever offer support for Lexis/Westlaw-style boolean queries; that’s not what Google does. With Lexis and Westlaw, you have to construct your query extremely carefully or you’ll either find nothing or be buried in a mass of irrelevant results. Where Google has the potential to add value is to produce an algorithm that gets you the most relevant results at the top without needing a to construct a query with such precision, the way it does with web search. If Google Scholar can do that it will blow Lexis and Westlaw out of the water.
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November 18, 2009, 12:43 am» “Google Scholar Gets Smarter: Now Features Legal Opinions” and related posts - 756th Edition Www.composition4u.info says:
[...] Google Case Law and Law Review Article Search - The Volokh Conspiracy [...]
David Welker says:
This is very nice. Thanks for the info. I really like your posts on cool electronic tools, law related or not.
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November 18, 2009, 3:15 amTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Google Case Law and Law Review Article Search -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Legal Lawyer, Sydney Law. Sydney Law said: The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Google Case Law and Law ... http://bit.ly/3U9VEc [...]
Justin says:
The 1761 error is pretty obvious on first glance, as that is the page number the article begins on.
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November 18, 2009, 8:38 amCrackmonkeyjr says:
I for one welcome our benevolent Google overlords.
BTW what’s with the apparent spam?
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November 18, 2009, 10:11 amEugene Volokh says:
I just deleted a spam trackback that had gotten through. I took David Welker’s comment as an absurdist reference to spam, not actually as spam, since it didn’t have spammy links, and since he has posted substantive comments here in the past.
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November 18, 2009, 1:07 pmADF Alliance Alert » Google Case Law and Law Review Article Search says:
[...] Volokh reports on the latest developments at Google Scholar which could eventually prove to be invaluable resources for the legal [...]
Dangerous mentality in Pakistan :slashingtongue says:
[...] “Google Case Law and Law Review Article Search” and related posts (volokh.com) [...]
Google wades into free legal research (for Texas, too!) says:
[...] post by Professor Eugene Volokh praising the new service, but noting some of its early blemishes (including some strange metadata [...]
Carolyn Elefant says:
I am curious — as a law professor with unlimited LEXIS/Westlaw access, would you see yourself converting if Google offered better search functionality but lacked the equivalent of Shepards? How long do you think it would take academia to make the shift?
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November 18, 2009, 3:04 pmthe_buff says:
I’m not sure if Westlaw “unlimited” Faculty accounts differ from “unlimited” student accounts, but West student accounts aren’t “unlimited.”
I inquired recently because I started getting a warning screen everytime I tried to log into Westlaw.
I was told West limits student accounts to 180 hours of usage and 600,000 lines of printing per month. Thankfully, it was only a week until the end of the month, so I didn’t have to go elsewhere for my legal research fix.
I’m still leery of Google’s business model once they reach overlord status. How much is it going to cost in 10 years is the better question. Nothings free.
“I got my eye on you Google!”
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November 18, 2009, 3:50 pmthecabbage says:
Its a whole lot faster.
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November 19, 2009, 11:55 amIurisprudentia » Blog Archive » Google Académico incorpora numerosas fuentes legales. Abogados norteamericanos bailan de júbilo says:
[...] en Volokh Conspiracy no se olvidan de que Google Scholar todavía está en Beta, por lo que se aprecian algunos errores [...]
Toby says:
Google is more based on folksonomy than on raw indexing. That is, an article is important on the subject “volokh” because thinks interest in “volokh” also reference this article. There is also some evidence these rankings are not limited to the public web. Google relevance rankings are thought to include messages in Gmail as if they were web pages, although the messages themselves do not get appear through search result links. Some claim to have brought pages into Google rankings with no cross linkings solely with an email distribution campaign.
One thing that Google has always eschewed is formal metadata, at least any they would have to create. Cross-referencing a law document by material not formally in the document itself would seem contrary to their usual approach. The1761 article is an example of inferred rather than entered metadata.
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November 21, 2009, 10:00 amGoogle Provides Free Access to Caselaw Text - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine says:
[...] law professor and blogospherian legal guru Eugene Volokh says the service is a decent start, but needs some obvious improvements, and is still a far cry from replacing Lexis or Westlaw. More feedback over at the Wall Street [...]
Google Provides Free Access to Full Text of Court Opinions | The Agitator says:
[...] law professor and blogospherian legal guru Eugene Volokh says the service is a decent start, but needs some obvious improvements, and is still a far cry from replacing Lexis or Westlaw. More feedback over at the Wall Street [...]
Google Provides Free Access to Full Text of Court Opinions « Big Bear Observation Post says:
[...] law professor and blogospherian legal guru Eugene Volokh says the service is a decent start, but needs some obvious improvements, and is still a far cry from replacing Lexis or Westlaw. More feedback over at the Wall Street [...]
Magazzino » Google legal search - from My Shingle.com says:
[...] — for more extensive functionality analysis, see Don Cruse’s Scotx Blog and Volokh (describing his vanity [...]