http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/2009/11/you-can-now-use-google-scholar-to-find-case-law/ The ways law rules creativity and creativity informs the practice of law Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:03:51 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/2009/11/you-can-now-use-google-scholar-to-find-case-law/comment-page-1/#comment-3029 Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity » Blog Archive » The inexorable trend toward free access to court documents Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:43:31 +0000 http://blogs.geniocity.com/friedman/2009/11/you-can-now-use-google-scholar-to-find-case-law/#comment-3029 [...] I mentioned last week that Google Scholar can now be used to find case law. It’s real progress.Court documents, after all, are public documents, so it sometimes seems a bit frustrating that the only reliable way to do legal research is through private systems. As Wired’s Threat Level explains, “West [Publishing], and its competitor, Lexis Nexis, buy court data in bulk, reformat it and add proprietary citation codes. They then license the database of public documents at high rates to libraries, law firms and government agencies. Even the U.S. Court system pays West’s high license fees to access public court documents that West purchased from it.” [...] [...] I mentioned last week that Google Scholar can now be used to find case law. It’s real progress.Court documents, after all, are public documents, so it sometimes seems a bit frustrating that the only reliable way to do legal research is through private systems. As Wired’s Threat Level explains, “West [Publishing], and its competitor, Lexis Nexis, buy court data in bulk, reformat it and add proprietary citation codes. They then license the database of public documents at high rates to libraries, law firms and government agencies. Even the U.S. Court system pays West’s high license fees to access public court documents that West purchased from it.” [...]

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