Opening up the Vaults of Binding Precedent*
Good news! Google Scholar has added a vast swath of federal and state opinions, journal articles, and patents to its database. Huzzah!
As a law student, I have free suck-you-in-and-get-you-hooked full access to Lexis and Westlaw, but that will evaporate when I graduate**. Getting access to the pay databases through a firm is expensive and can be touchy, especially if you’re made to feel guilty for every minute you spend logged in and every case you print; the expense can keep smaller firms and solo practitioners out of the easy-online-access game altogether.
I’ve spent a few minutes poking around Google Scholar’s legal offerings by looking up a case we’re discussing tonight in Professional Responsibility: Gaspard v. Beadle, 36 S.W.3d 229. It’s worth a skim, even if you’re not used to reading cases; sex, betrayal, and a UH Law grad in the role of the asshole lawyer make for a juicy story.
Where Westlaw and Lexis are complicated and confusing, Google is intuitive. While it may be true (may!) that a skilled Westlaw wizard could finesse a complex search string and pluck an obscure set of cases out of the void, I don’t have to sit through hours of seminars to learn how to use Google. Heck, all I had to do was use it every day for years. Easy peasy.
Google Scholar doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as Westlaw and Lexis do, but one new thing it has that I like is the “How Cited” link. It brings up, on one page, a list of the propositions in later cases for which the case you’re looking up is cited*^. If you’re trying to find citations to your case for a particular proposition, “How Cited” will save you a lot of clicking over KeyCite or Shepard’s.
Um, and Google’s free. Free in terms of cost, and free in terms of the spirit of the thing.
Suck it, Westlaw.
[Hat tips: Sean McGilvray at Legal Geekery & Laura Bergus at Social Media Law Student]
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* Money quote snagged from the Legal Geekery post.
** I just realized that the Starbucks gift cards*** will probably stop flowing then, too. Damn.
*** Seriously. You would not believe how extravagantly the Lexis and Westlaw folks bribe us just to log in to their sites, not to mention sitting through their seminars or clicking through their tutorials.
Funny thing is, I only use Westlaw. And you know how they won me over? By getting my professors to use TWEN. Who’d have thought that providing an *actual service* would develop stronger brand loyalty than inundating students with freebies?
*^ How d’ya like them nested prepositional phrases?!
Tags: Google, Google Scholar, law school, legal research, Lexis, NaBloPoMo, news, open source, research, Westlaw
