Education Law

Case law and Article Searches on Google Scholar

The good news of the week for my education school professor colleagues, and for practitioners in the field who do not have unlimited access to Westlaw or Lexis, is that Google Scholar now allows you to search for both case law (federal and state) and articles through the familiar Google interface.

I tried it out by doing a search with the terms, "school finance" (no connectors).  Sure enough, all of the familar cases (state and federal) came up, beginning with Rodriguez and including Serrano, Rose, and the rest.  If you click on an opinion, the interface allows you to read it as a web document, but unlike other web documents, which frustratingly do not include page numbers (big problem when you are using the Bluebook), the Google Scholar version has the correct pagination for the regional reporters in which the cases appear. 

I doubt that I will shift all of my legal research from Westlaw to this search engine, as Westlaw still affords many advantages over the broader Google search interface, but this will be a great tool to universalize access to the law and save many people huge amounts of time. 

Full post as published by Edjurist on November 19, 2009 (boomark / email).