Legal Research With Google Scholar - Finding Significance In The Cloud

Finding significant citations for legal opinions - Google Scholar Blog.

Google Scholar is a wonderful legal research tool. It provides access to the primary case law of all 50 States and all Federal Courts. It is free. Now, Google is starting to make improvements to its legal research skills; you can actually use the Google engines to parse the significance of particular cases, and to identify them in the search results. I remember the old days of legal research when we relied on human editors to do such significance searching and to identify the results in paper code. We called the books and pocket parts, Shepard's Citations, and there were entire law school classes devoted to teaching us how to navigate the magic pages. Don't tell this old lawyer that we haven't made a lot of progress in legal research. Of course, I hope that the lawyers and Judges themselves aren't replaced in some distant future by intelligent computers that can assess significance to legal argument and case citations. Humans still have a function, don't we?