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.

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.

Free Legal Research: We're Not There Yet

Greg Lambert of 3 Geeks and a Law Blog has a thoughtful post on the future of legal research and the role of "free versus fee" sources:

The good and bad thing about legal research today is the fact that information is a commodity. This has created a conception that all information is online (and free) and can be found if you are a savvy enough researcher. Granted, there is an enormous amount of information available to legal researchers and a lot of it is free. That may be fine if you are writing a blog or even an article for a news organization. But, quick and easy and free information will not necessarily be viewed as authoritative by the courts.

I am emphatically not one of those librarians who gasps in horror at the idea of a legal researcher starting with a search engine. I think free legal research resources have a legitimate and important role in any attorney's legal research strategy, particularly at the beginning of a project.  But as Greg Lambert points out so eloquently, we are not at the point where we can rely on free sources for crucial legal research tasks like obtaining the most up-to-date version of a statute or verifying that a case is still good law.  It's great to be excited about what free resources can do to jumpstart a research project, but if you rely solely on free sources to write a brief or prepare a legal opinion for a client, you're on shaky ground. Like it or not, Lexis or Westlaw will need to be part of the thorough legal researcher's toolkit for awhile longer. 

Students Have Mixed Reaction to E-Book Readers

The Wall Street Journal reported today on several higher education initiatives designed to test student reaction to e-textbooks.  At Northwest Missouri State University, 200 students received the Sony Reader loaded with course texts.  Although some students stuck with the Reader, dozens traded it in for old-fashioned print texts, finding the devices "awkward" and "inconvenient."  University officials quoted in the story said that "students didn’t like that they couldn’t flip through random pages, take notes in the margins or highlight text."  (Sony's latest version of the Reader now has note-taking and highlighting features.)

Will law schools join in the digital text experiment?  The Zief librarians have heard of several publishers that are moving in the direction of digital texts, including the Practising Law Institute, which is now releasing Kindle editions of some of its titles.  But PLI concentrates on practicing attorneys, not the academic market.  West has released at least one digital casebook and plans to release more in the near future.  Some law professors aren't waiting around for the publishers to develop these products.  They're seizing the initiative and creating their own digital casebooks and statutory supplements.  At least one expert predicts in this article that e-textbooks will be the norm in law schools in "3-5 years."  One thing is certain - law students are highlighting and note-taking maniacs, and producers of digital texts and readers must incorporate these tools into their products if they want them to be attractive to the law student market.

Whither Quality in Legal Publishing?

Perhaps it's because ZiefBrief is a cynic, but we weren't at all surprised to learn from the Stanford law librarians' excellent Legal Research Plus blog that two law professors are suing West Publishing Corp. for defamation for daring to claim that the professors actually wrote the latest supplements (a.k.a. pocket parts) to Pennsylvania Criminal Procedure, the treatise that bears their names. Evidently the dispute began when West cut the professors' compensation in half, whereupon the professors ceased providing updates. Nonetheless, pocket parts appeared, and the professors were listed as authors. Worse yet, the pocket parts "were not up to standard," in the words of the judge hearing the case.

This is no less that what ZiefBrief has learned to expect ever since West was acquired by a publicly-held entity in the 1990s. In the ensuing years we've heard rumors of "downsizing of editorial staff, and yet we've seen prices go up and errors increase. We can't fault a publicly-traded company for seeking to maximize shareholder revenue, but we wonder what the long-term outcome will be if West (or any other legal publisher) should get a reputation for doing shoddy work. Lawyers need to trust that the resources they use are accurate, and if publishers betray that trust, will they be able to continue to command the high prices they are getting now?

For more on the Pennsylvania Criminal Procedure dispute, visit Legal Research Plus and read:

• So Who Does Write Those Expensive Supplements and Updates to Big Name Treatises?

and

• Rudovsky v. West Publishing Corp. - Judge writes readers were "not informed that some cases cited in earlier volumes had since been reversed or modified."

Neat Research Tools -- Capitol Words and LOUIS

Just so we are clear on this, ZiefBrief is the alter ego for a crew of dedicated law librarians here at the Dorraine Zief Law Library. After surfing the web for a while, some of the members of the team feel like a spider on Benzedrine. We find cool stuff, which leads to more cool stuff, that links to more… you  get the picture – there_is_SO_MUCH_STUFF!! So we find a little item, you might call it “web candy.” But on closer examination it is so much more.

Take for example a recent discovery, Capitol Words. To quote the web site: “Capitol Words gives you an at-a-glance view into the daily proceedings of the United States Congress through the simplest lens available-a single word. For every day that Congress is in session, Capitol Words displays the most frequently used word in the Congressional Record.” Here is the latest example:

Fun, not earth shattering and you can add the site to your RSS aggregator and get a daily heads-up on what they are saying in the halls of congress.

"But Wait! (as they say on all the infomercials) There's More!!" Capitol Words is just one project of a group called the Sunshine Foundation (named after the Brandeis quote that "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.") Another interest project they are working on is LOUIS (click here to visit), an acronym for the Library Of Unified Information Sources. Through LOUIS their "ultimate goal is to create a comprehensive, completely indexed and cross-referenced depository of federal documents from the executive and legislative branches of government.... LOUIS currently contains, in fully searchable format, seven sets of federal documents:

• Congressional Reports
• Congressional Record
• Congressional Hearings
• Federal Register
• Presidential Documents
• GAO Reports
• Congressional Bills & Resolutions"

So check out Capitol Words and the other works of the Sunshine Foundation today. Its worth the trip.

Indispensable Practice Guide

The Zief librarians are always on the lookout for the next indispensable, "must have" practice guide, and we think all of our readers will agree that Cheerleading and the Law: Risk Management Strategies is a necessity for all lawyers confronting those pesky, cheerleading and mascot-related legal issues.  There are several handy chapters like:  "Mascots: Background, Court Cases and Other Issues" (this chapter begins with a helpful introductory discussion, "What Is a Mascot?"); "A Brief History of Cheerleading" (find out who qualifies as the first cheerleader!); and "Cheerleading and the Courts" (one of the subtopics in this chapter is entitled "Cheerleading Coach Offered a Plea Deal" -- yikes).  The book has at least one rave review from the President/CEO of Cheer Ltd. Inc., who claims that Cheerleading and the Law "may well be one of the most important books written for the spirit industry."  I never even knew that a "spirit industry" existed, but that's just one of the many, many valuable bits of information that you'll pick up when you read Cheerleading and the Law.

Unlike most treatises and practice guides, Cheerleading and the Law isn't a budget-buster. It can be yours for the low, low price of $22!  Pick it up today.

A Flood of Free Federal Appellate Case Law

Suddenly, after years of doing without any decent free source of federal appellate decisions, legal researchers now have least two excellent options:

• The Public Library of Law (from Fastcase)
• US Court of Appeals Cases and Opinions (from Justia)

Both the Public Library of Law and Justia have federal circuit court cases going back to 1950. Their search engines are user-friendly, and each allows you to limit your search to a particular circuit.

(The Public Library of Law and Justia (via its Supreme Court Center) also have all Supreme Court decisions. In addition, Justia has federal district court opinions from 2004 to the present, and the Public Library of Law has state appellate and high court cases from 1997 to the present.)

Why so much new federal case law all of a sudden? As Robert Ambrogi explains it, in mid-February public.resource.org and the Creative Commons jointly released 18 million pages of public domain federal case law. After that, it was just a matter of days before Justia and the Public Library of Law took this raw data and rolled out search engines for the decisions.

[Thanks to Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites  for the tip about the Public Library of Law, and thanks to Bonnie Shucha of WisBlawg for the tip about Justia!]

New Empirical Legal Studies Bibliography

Researchers who are looking for law-related scholarly articles containing substantive empirical studies -- you're in luck!  The Empirical Legal Studies Bibliography is now open for business.  From the Law Librarian Blog (Dec. 5, 2007):

"Not officially launched, but now live is the fabulous Empirical Legal Studies Bibliography. A joint product of UCLA and Cornell law schools (with much of the indexing and literature review to create the database done by librarians at those two schools, namely Matt Morrison, Jill Fukunaga, and June Kim), users can search for ELS articles by author, title, subject, or year.  For those of us who have grappled with requests for ELS articles in a particular subject, we know how difficult these projects can be.  This new product is much needed and provides an important service in this expanding area of legal scholarship."

For a detailed description of the database, click here.