ZiefBrief

Law Review Articles on Google Scholar and HeinOnline — A Comparison

No sooner had we posted our comparison of Google and Lexis/Westlaw case law searching than we find, on the HeinOnline Blog, a post comparing law review searching on HeinOnline and Google Scholar. The conclusion: if you have HeinOnline (and at USF, we do), start there to take advantage of the full range of content and features.

Google Case Law Searching: Pros & Cons

In this post, the Zief reference librarians,  Amy Wright, Lee Ryan, and John Shafer, summarize Google Scholar's case law search functions, pointing out its strengths and weaknesses for legal research.

Pros

Google Scholar conveniently brings together free internet case law from diverse sources. It does not appear to include all of the free case law that might exist, but it is one of the most extensive collections.  Current coverage is as follows:  state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923, and US Supreme Court cases since 1791. 

Google's case law search interface is user-friendly, making it a good option for novice researchers. Even the Advanced Search page  is intuitive and approachable. And for the more experienced user, there are some less well-known Google search features that add a fair amount of flexibility. These features include the ability to search for synonyms or to specify the "OR" operator.

Google's natural language search engine is quite powerful, and it appears to be fairly effective at retrieving leading cases and bubbling them up in the relevance-ranked search results.  So while you can't be assured with a Google Scholar search that you have identified all of the relevant cases, you are relatively likely to come up with one decent case that you can use as a springboard for your research. Of course, Lexis and Westlaw, with their interlinking of all types of materials, make it much easier to use one good case as a springboard because you can link from that case directly to a variety of secondary authorities, high-end cite-checking, annotated statutes, digests, etc.

The price: nothing is less expensive than free!

But... we in the information business have a saying:  "your research can be fast, cheap, and accurate; pick two." ... Which brings us to the cons...

Cons

As some USF researchers have already noticed, Google Scholar case law offers only natural language searching.  "Power users" are likely to miss the flexibility of "Terms & Connectors" ("Boolean") searching, and especially its ability to specify that terms appear within a certain proximity of one another.

Google Scholar case law search also does not offer the full range of field searching that Lexis and Westlaw offer. So, for example, it is not possible to specify that you want your search terms to appear only in the majority opinion, or to specify that you want to retrieve only the opinions authored by a certain judge. Google Scholar's date restriction options are also not as powerful as those found on Lexis and Westlaw — or even those on the free Justia Federal District Court Opinions & Orders search engine.

As far as primary authority goes, Google Scholar is strictly a case-law research tool. It does not offer searching of statutes, regulations, administrative agency opinions, and other crucial components of the law.

Google Scholar and Google Books do furnish access to a very limited range of secondary sources, including some law review articles, books, and practice materials.  These materials show up when you click on the "Cited By" links in your Google Scholar case law search results. However, if material is under copyright, you cannot obtain access to the full-text of the material.  Also, crucial secondary sources, such as American Law Reports, the Witkin publications, California Jurisprudence, Matthew Bender and Rutter Group practice guides, and treatises (McCarthy on Trademark; Bassett on California Community Property, etc.) are not available on Google.

There is no equivalent to the West Digest system or the Lexis headnote system on Google Scholar. 

While Google Scholar case law search results have a "How Cited" link that allows you to view a list of subsequent opinions that cite to a particular case, it does not have a sophisticated citator service like Westlaw's KeyCite or Shepard's on Lexis.  The "How Cited" feature on Google Scholar cannot tell you at a glance if a case has negative or positive history or if at least one holding in the case has been overturned.  Google Scholar cannot provide the prior or subsequent appellate history of the case.

Unlike Lexis and Westlaw, Google Scholar does not have all published U.S. case law. For example, coverage of state cases appears to begin in 1950  — even though there are free sources of California case law that have more coverage, including one source that extends back to 1850. Likewise, coverage of federal appellate cases begins only in 1924.

Our Conclusion —

Google Scholar is a welcome addition to the world of free online legal resources.  Consider using it when you need a "quick and dirty" case law search tool.  But we have a long way to go before Google supplants Lexis and Westlaw as a "one-stop shopping" legal research option.

SF Chronicle Praises Leo's Work

A San Francisco Chronicle article praised Professor Richard Leo's "easy to read" book, Police Interrogation and American Justice, noting that "Leo writes as clearly as he talks on a witness stand as an expert."  Congratulations, Professor Leo!

Google Scholar Has Case Law

There are already tons of tweets and posts about Google Scholar's new case law content, so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel.  Yes, Google Scholar has case law now! 

Here's a roundup of posts about this exciting new development:

Google's official announcement;
Review of case law on Google Scholar over at Internet for Lawyers;
Librarian reviews over at Resource Shelf;
More librarian reviews at the Law Librarian Blog;
Another lawyer review over at Ernie the Attorney.

And just to add to all of the excitement, Legal Research Plus posted this week about a new ABA web resource that furnishes "prompt, accurate, unbiased information about newsworthy and legally significant cases pending in and decided by the Federal Courts of Appeals." 

It's been a fabulous week for free legal information on the web! 

The Paperless Law Review? An Experiment at USF

One of ZiefBrief's favorite parts of the job is working with USF four excellent student-edited journals.

This year we're excited to watch the University of San Francisco Law Review move toward an entirely paperless editing cycle. Led by Editor-in-Chief Robin Bennett, the USF Law Review Board is pursuing this goal by aggregating digital article drafts, sources cited, and other information on a SharePoint site accessible to all editors and staff.

As part of this initiative, the Zief Library is advising the Law Review on finding the most stable, reliable digital documents for source collection. This has meant wrestling with the Bluebook and its insistence on official sources and its bias in favor of print.

Our approach includes creating a Google Notebook on Law Review Source Collection with links to the most authoritative and most stable PDF sources for the sorts of documents (law review articles, cases, statutes, regulations, Congressional documents) commonly cited in law review articles — and then training all Law Review staff in tips and techniques for using the top sites, like HeinOnline and GPO Access. There are still times when the Law Review has to pull and scan paper sources, but they're well on the way toward paperless production of their journal.

LexisNexis Releases iPhone App

WisBlawg just posted on the new LexisNexis iPhone app - see Bonnie Shucha's post for reviews and more info!

Blogs and Social Bookmarking

I gave a presentation to the Northern California Association of Law Libraries on getting started with blogs and social bookmarking.  Here's my presentation.

Selling Term Papers Illegal in CA

Above the Law posted today about a recent article in CommonWealth magazine that discusses online term paper trafficking services.  The article alleges that a Massachusetts attorney, employed as a staff attorney for the Massachusetts Appeals Court, responded to the journalist's Craigslist ad and offered to write a paper for $300.  The article's author, Colman Herman, reports that the attorney assured him that such a transaction was not illegal under state or federal law.  Unfortunately for the attorney, a Massachusetts statute specifically bars the sale of "the written results of research, knowing or having reason to know that such theme, term paper, thesis or other paper or research results or substantial material therefrom will be submitted or used by some other person for academic credit and represented as the original work of such person." Mass. Gen. Laws chap. 271, s. 50 (2009).

Does California have a similar statute?  A very quick and easy natural language search revealed that we indeed have a statute containing an almost-identical prohibition. California Education Code Section 66400 states:

No person shall prepare, offer to prepare, cause to be prepared, sell, or otherwise distribute any term paper, thesis, dissertation, or other written material for another person, for a fee or other compensation, with the knowledge, or under circumstances in which he should reasonably have known, that such term paper, thesis, dissertation, or other written material is to be submitted by any other person for academic credit at any public or private college, university, or other institution of higher learning in this state.

It will be interesting to see how the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers responds to this report.  Will they launch a disciplinary investigation?  I would assume so.  At the very least, the Board should investigate whether he has the necessary skills to practice law since his legal research skills don't seem quite up to snuff.

New Search Option on HeinOnline

This week, HeinOnline announced a beta "faceted search" option for its Law Journal Library.  "Faceted search" is just a fancy way of saying that, if you choose this search option, HeinOnline will cluster your law review search results into different categories on the screen, displaying the number of articles that are within a certain date range, from a particular law review, about a particular subject, or articles that fall within a particular document type (book review, student note, etc.).

Why run a faceted search?  To browse search results faster, of course!  Let's say that you're working as a research assistant for a professor, and they want articles on a particular topic, but they don't want to see any student notes or comments.  Faceted searching lets you weed out these kinds of documents really quickly.  Or if you want to see the most recent articles on a topic, faceted searching gives you a nice snapshot of which articles were published between specific date ranges, like 2006 to present.

To see faceted search in action, run either a "Field" search or an "Advanced" search in the HeinOnline Law Journal Library (faceted searching isn't available in other HeinOnline libraries yet).  When you get your search results, click on the link, "Run as Faceted Search - BETA," at the top of the screen, and HeinOnline will reformat the search results into the categories shown below:

I ran a search in the Law Journal Library for law review materials that contain the phrase "battered woman syndrome" in the title.  Here's what the faceted search results look like:

 

 

If you have questions about how to use HeinOnline, contact one of the reference librarians or visit the HeinOnline blog, which has tons of great searching tips.

New/Updated CALI Lessons RSS Feed

If you assign CALI lessons to students or first-year associates, you'll be happy to know that you can now sign up for RSS feeds that will alert you whenever CALI adds a new lesson or updates an existing lesson.  Thank you, CALI!