ZiefBrief

Professor Freiwald Guest Blogging at Concurring Opinions

Professor Susan Freiwald will be a guest blogger with the popular law professor blog, Concurring Opinions, for the next month. 

Kindle Textbook Rental Service Now Available

Tired of carrying heavy textbooks around?  Now some law textbooks are available for rent through Amazon’s Kindle rental service.  You don’t even have to own a Kindle to use the service. You can simply download a free Kindle reading app for any of the following: PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android Windows Phone 7, Blackberry or Kindle. 

According to Amazon, you can save up to 80% off the list price of the printed version of the textbook.  Further, you can typically rent a textbook for between 30 and 360 days.  If you begin with the minimum you can always extend your rental for additional days if you’d like and you pay only for the time you need to rent the book.  You also get to keep any highlights or notes you make even after the rental period expires. 

To find a book, you just search in Amazon’s Textbooks Store and search for the book you want, either by title or by browsing the Law section.  Then look in the Formats section to see if a Kindle edition is available for rent and specify your rental dates.  Be careful, though, as some Kindle editions are only available for purchase.  Make sure you don’t accidentally buy something.  Also, before renting, be sure to compare the price of the Kindle rental to that of a new or used print version of the casebook just to make sure you’re getting the best deal. 

So far many legal textbooks do not have an electronic version available. However, Amazon’s Kindle rental program is a good start.  Hopefully, Amazon will offer more electronic versions of textbooks in the future.  For more details about the Kindle rental service, visit Amazon. 

Bluebook Pet Peeves

Over at The Faculty Lounge, Professor David Cohen vents about the Bluebook's requirements for statutory citation. To cite to a statute correctly, authors are supposed to include in parentheses "the year that appears on the spine of the volume, the year that appears on the title page, or the latest copyright year -- in that order of preference." I agree that this is one of those Bluebook rules that qualifies as baffling.  It's not particularly useful information in an age when most of us view statutes online and very rarely in print. It creates busy work since authors have to physically check the print volumes to correctly cite each statute.  Alas, the chances that we will soon see the end of this rule are slim since the Bluebook was just updated last year.

ALM Media Content Switches to Lexis

ALM Media just signed a deal with LexisNexis and, starting May 1, ALM publications will be available exclusively on Lexis. Search popular ALM publications, such as The Recorder (San Francisco's legal newspaper), American Lawyer, National Law Journal, Corporate Counsel and Law Technology News on Lexis.

The Bluebook Slammed by Richard Posner

I think it's safe to say that Judge Posner hasn't been particularly fond of the Bluebook for quite some time (he called the 16th edition a "grotesque 255 pages long"), and that is especially true for the new 511-page 19th edition.  Here are a few choice quotes from his review of the 19th edition in Yale Law Review:

The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation exemplifies hypertrophy in the
anthropological sense. It is a monstrous growth, remote from the functional
need for legal citation forms, that serves obscure needs of the legal culture and
its student subculture.

[N]eedless to say, I have not read the nineteenth edition. I have dipped into it, much as one might dip one’s toes in a pail of freezing water. I am put in mind of Mr. Kurtz’s dying words in Heart of Darkness — ‘The horror! The horror!’ — and am tempted to end there.

The basic rule of abbreviating, ignored by the authors of The Bluebook, is to avoid nonobvious abbreviations: don’t make the reader puzzle over an abbreviation, as The Bluebook does routinely. . . . It’s as if there were a heavy tax on letters, making it costly to write out Coast Guard Court of Criminal Appeals instead of abbreviating it “C.G. Ct. Crim. App.”

I imagine Judge Posner would have similar harsh words for ALWD, which has now grown to a monstrous and unwieldy 661 pages. 

 

Free Electronic Copies of Casebooks

A few professors have decided to create their own electronic versions of casebooks for their classes, which they are willing to share with others at no charge. Eric Johnson just posted the first volume of the Torts casebook that he has created on PrawfsBlawg.  Another example of the free electronic casebook, Thomas Field (Intellectual Property).  If you are a law professor interested in creating your own electronic casebook, check out CALI's eLangdell Stimulus Project, which includes some small financial incentives for publishing your own electronic casebook with CALI (conditions and restrictions apply).

Rent a Casebook from West

If your professor assigns a West-published casebook for your class, you may have the option of renting the casebook and saving a bit of money.  According to West, you can write and highlight in your rented casebook, and you won't be penalized for doing so.  Renting the casebook also gives you access to an electronic version of the casebook for the duration of the semester.  BUT you can only access the electronic version on a PC or Mac - no Kindle, iPad, or Nook access exists at this time. To find out more, visit the West FAQ page on the rental program.

New Bluebook Edition

The 19th edition of the Bluebook is out!  We expect to receive our new copies at Zief any day now.  In the meantime, if you're just dying to know what has changed from the 18th edition to the 19th edition, check out Pace Law Library's list of the 19th edition changes (PDF).

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.

[Update: December 13, 2009] The HeinOnline/Google Scholar conversation continues in the HeinOnline Blog with a post responding to communications from Google Scholar about updates to its indexing and content. HeinOnline's conclusion comes as no surprise: those with access to HeinOnline still would do well to start there.

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.