- The goal of making court records more accessible is shared by RECAP, a software extension that permits users to “liberate” records from the federal judiciary’s fee-based PACER service and make them available for free on the Internet Archive.[1]
The movement to make primary legal source materials freely accessible experienced what may one day prove to have been a transformative moment on November 17, 2009, when search-engine giant Google announced that it had made several recent decades’ worth of state and federal appellate, district, tax, and bankruptcy court decisions available for searching via its Google Scholar portal.[2] The site includes a rudimentary citator (accessible by clicking the “How cited” tab from each page) that usefully includes citations to secondary sources, such as articles and treatises online at Google Books.[3] Moreover, by harnessing the market-tested Google search engine, the addition of case law instantly made Google Scholar a “player” in the burgeoning market of alternatives to the traditional proprietary legal database publishers.[4] Google’s entry into the open-access case law world has drawn enthusiastic reactions from open-content advocates,[5] although the near-term effect may be simply that
- ↑ See http://www.recapthelaw.org/ (last visited Nov. 19, 2009).
- ↑ Google Scholar is available at http://scholar.google.com/ (last visited Nov. 19, 2009). For Google’s announcement of its new case law search function, see Anurag Acharya, Finding the laws that govern us, at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-govern-us.html (last visited Nov. 17, 2009). At the time of this writing, Google Scholar includes “US state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, US federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923 and US Supreme Court cases since 1791.” http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html (last visited Nov. 19, 2009).
- ↑ The service, however, works in one direction only; that is, the Google Books treatises do not (yet?) link back to the cases they cite at Google Scholar. Nor is there a citator offered in either direction for statutes, none of which is included among the materials recently added to Google Scholar.
- ↑ See, e.g., John J. DiGilio, Bridging the DiGital Divide: A New Vendor in Town? Google Scholar Now Includes Case Law, LLRX.com, at http://www.llrx.com/featres/googlescholarcaselaw (Nov. 18, 2009) (surveying pros and cons of Google’s new database); Mikhail Koulikov, Indexing and Full-Text Coverage of Law Review Articles in Nonlegal Databases: An Initial Study, 102 Law Libr. J. 39, 52 ¶ 37 (2010) (noting that “the emergence of search engines such as Google Scholar, which are not subscription-based, has presented an entirely new set of issues regarding the relationship bet ween academics and published scholarship”); Eugene Volokh, The Future of Books Related to the Law?, 108 Mich. L. Rev. 823, 826 (2010) (predicting that advent of e-reader technologies, coupled with increasing availability of primary source materials in open-access repositories, will make it easier for reference sources commonly used in legal education, such as casebooks and treatises, to hyperlink directly to the cases and statutes cited therein).
- ↑ See, e.g., Tim Stanley, Free US Case Law from Google!—US Federal + 50 State Case Law, at http://onward.justia.com/useful-tools-web-sites-220-free-us-case-law-from-google-us-federal-50-state-case-law.html
N.Y. Times, Aug. 20, 2007, at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/technology/20westlaw.html (last visited Apr. 16, 2010).
