The Volokh Conspiracy

FYI: members of the Virginia Bar have access to FastCase, which is pretty robust (if buggy).

It looks like a potentially useful site, though the case law is the only part that seems to be provided by PLoL/FastCase itself-- the rest are links to other existing sites like FirstGov and the LII and various state government pages. (Having links to them all in one place is nice, but not all that different from what something like FindLaw or any number of law library resource lists might offer.)

That said, they appear to offer more depth to their free case law collection than others I'm familiar with. The nearest equivalent I know of is Lexis's free LexisOne service, which does the last five years worth of case law. (Lexis's search engine seems to be more powerful and flexible, but PLoL is offering eleven years back instead of five; which is a better free service depends on the user's needs.)

So the only bar I belong to is the one down the street where they still serve pitchers. I never was one for trade associations comingling professional licensing as they aren't free -- either the associations or the cost. So that puts me right out of the Fastcase discussion.

I concede that I'm a partisan of Findlaw since they have been the predominate web resource in providing access to legal decisions since almost the beginning of the web. Their interface with contemporary Supreme court materials including briefs (they used to send somebody in to get copies and they would post the scanned copies and OCR versions until lawyers started submitting electronically and now they post these submissions) really helped on the only case I ever contributed to -- although since we lost 9-0 I suppose that is a relative comment.

Speaking of American Trucking, Eugene, - have you ever considered enlisting Schoenbrod, the spiritual font of the modern non-delegation ideal in the conspiracy? I would love to hear from him more than I do.

So this was about PLOL. Does seem to be easier to get to searchable text of federal appellate decisions and state decisions on PLOL. This is much easier to deal with than PDFs, however, there is no pagination information for citation in any of the decisions, even the supreme court decisions. Also the footnotes are not linked as they are in Findlaw's Supreme Court library -- a pain in the mouse for long decisions, because they are all at the bottom instead of at the bottom of the page.

Ironically, Findlaw's pagination is good for cases before the service began in the mid 90s, but the cases that entered their database directly from electronic versions issued by the court prior to publication and pagination by U.S. reports do not contain any pagination.

Originally, Findlaw published this with placeholders for pagination, so that once a beginning page number had been assigned in a volume of U.S. Reports, I could generally hit the citation right on. Those placeholders have been removed but no permanent pagination has been substituted.

Another oddity of this pagination problem is that the professional tools version of PLOL (I guess that is the same as Fastcase) doesn't list pagination for citation as a 'bene' of the pay service. I'm assuming that it probably is, but they just left it out.

One disappointment with PLOL is that the search engine is a little clunky. You can't restrict to party name in the advanced search function. Although usually a case in which the party is named will come up at the top of the list (presumably because it gets more hits throughout the text) that is not always the case. Try Lochner. Planed Parenthood v. Casey comes up first. Concedely, Lochner is second.

Also, you can't access the advanced search function from a results page. Perhaps if you do search from a results page it uses the same restrictions you put in to start with, but I don't know that for sure. Also, if you want to change restrictions or approach you have to back out to the start page. Minor inconvenience.

While I take no umbrage whatever at them trying to earn some money at this, I'm surprised they won't tell you what the hits are you have to pay for unless you pay. How do I know if its worth paying without knowing the nature of what they found?

Although I have to admit that I hang out at the conspiracy more more than at Findlaw (or the bar at the corner for that matter), Findlaw also put on a fairly good stable of writers for their legal commentary section 'Writ' which I used to peruse regularly.

Brian