Entries in the Category "FreeSearch"
Even more on Google Scholar and cases... | November 18, 2009
A lot of virtual ink has been spilled this week about Google's inclusion of judicial decisions in Google Scholar. Here are some highlights of the discussion:
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 18, 2009 03:42 PM
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More sources on Google Scholar case law... | November 17, 2009
Update Weds. - Monica Bay at American Lawyer Media's Common Scold quotes Rick Klau with more detail about Google's sourcing, and has statements from Lexis Nexis and Thomson Reuters.
By way of updates to my own initial take on Google Scholar's inclusion of cases, here are other early sources about the product launch:
The Official Google Blog now has an announcement and description of the service.
Duke Law Library's The Goodson Blogson has a nice write-up, includes important notes about Google Scholar's links to materials available only through library-based subscriptions, and also points out the limitations of this model of searching when compared to the nuance possible (but not always achieved) with Lexis' or Westlaw's boolean Terms & Connectors searching. (They also link the Duke Law Library's useful research guide to Legal Research on the Web.)
The Supreme Court of Texas Blog has a nice illustrated walk-through.
The University of Nebraska's Richard Leiter has a self-described 'mini-review' on his The Life of Books.
Laura Bergus at Social Media Law Student provides a (social-media savvy) 1L's perspective on Google Scholar's case law searching. While her critique of Westlaw/Lexis usability is informative and illustrative, I hope she and her readers do understand the limitations of the Google/ranking approach to the high-recall-required search often required in thorough legal research.
Greg Lambert uses the Google Scholar launch as a springboard for discussing the broader potential for new competition in the legal research marketplace.
Jim Calloway notes the inclusion of Hein Online material in results.
Internet for Lawyers' cites Tim Stanley's and Carl Malamud's Twitter comments for likely database scope:
While there is no documentation on the Scholar site yet regarding coverage of the database, a number of other tweets form reliable sources (including Tim Stanley and Carl Malamud) indicate that it includes:* 1 US 1 (pre 1776)
* 1 F 2d 1 (1924 +)
* F Supp Cases
* US State Cases (1950+)
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 17, 2009 01:56 PM
Case Law in Google Scholar | November 17, 2009
Google Scholar has a new radio-button selection on its front page to search for "Legal opinions and journals." This development is at least a useful new free way to quickly obtain the (cut-and-past-able, html) text of known opinions with cited opinions conveniently hyperlinked -- it remains to be seen what, if any, deeper research value the tool will have.
Based on a few minutes of tinkering, the legal opinions that turn up in searches are full-text, hosted by Google, while journal article results tend to be hosted by third parties and/or have only a "citation" result turning up from the Google Scholar search. The 'Advanced Scholar Search' interface also allows the user to limit the search to opinions only from either federal courts or from individual states. The Google-hosted Scholar results do not seem to show up in regular web-search Google results.
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 17, 2009 10:05 AM
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More about West and legal information competition... | November 10, 2009
This isn't the forum for yet more extended discussion on this issue, but Tom Bruce has another valuable post on the Berring-video kerfuffle. (Teasingly addressing only one of three points that "need serious attention from the library profession," with the other two left unspecified.) In the post, Prof. Bruce describes West as operating in a very distorted market. I think the most critical observation in this regard may be that the combination of bulk availability of 'raw materials' and the baseline service levels of free tools like LII's may ultimately create a much more fertile environment for smaller, entrepreneurial, commercial services than has previously existed -- and that this may play a role in the sensitivity Bruce sees West displaying in regards to free/bulk legal information. It is certainly true that West (to a greater degree than large commercial competitors Lexis and Bloomberg) has occupied a privileged position in terms of official legal publication, citation systems, and the certification of authenticity.
Andrew Plumb-Larrick
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 10, 2009 10:00 AM
Tempest in a legal-information teapot? | November 04, 2009
The posting on a Thomson Reuters blog of videotaped comments by Bob Berring, U.C. Berkeley's long-time law librarian, distinguished professor, and former interim dean, have created something of a stir among followers of the legal-information marketplace. In the comments featured on LegalCurrent, a blog by West's parent company Thomson Reuters, Berring expresses measured but profound skepticism of the viability of both directly government-hosted free legal information and of free legal-information efforts based on "volunteer" efforts (i.e. not based on a commercial vendor's model). There has been a fair amount of online commentary in response to this video, and I've tried to articulate a few of my thoughts about the role of the emerging free sources, below.
Posted by Carl Plumb-Larrick at November 4, 2009 04:00 PM
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FreeSearch: First in a Series | December 10, 2008
This is the first entry in a series entitled “Free Search.” The most frequent legal research questions we receive from practitioners is, “Don’t you teach law students about searching for freely available information on the internet?” Those law students in our legal research sessions know that we do, but the goal of this series is to update what you already know about searching on the “freely available” internet, including relevant search engine developments.
Today’s News: You can now search popular magazines on Google Book Search.
The Official Google Blog today reports the inception of an initiative to “ bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony.”
Anything law-related yet? Using the Advanced Search templatein Google Books, you can limit your search terms to magazines. I ran some test searches that yielded results, though, of course, not in scholarly legal publications:
+copyright +DMCA +”fair use”
resulted in 11 hits, most from Maximum PC and i-Pod Hand Book;
+homicide +statistics
yielded 101 articles, most in the context I was hoping for, that is,demographic information on homicides from such magazines as New York Magazine, Cincinnati Magazine, The Detroit Connection, Atlanta Magazine, and Jet. Several articles were surveys in various cities and included such information as crime by neighborhood. Many referenced more official sources, such as the FBI Uniform Crime Reports.
So far, coverage seems to range from city magazines, Jet, MaximumPC, Mother Jones, Baseball Digest and other newsstand magazines to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and CIO. Notably absent, Time/Life publications.
Posted by Judith Kaul at December 10, 2008 06:19 PM