Legal Research

An exciting week for legal research, PreCYdent, Public Library of Law, and more

By Jason

February 11th through February 15th turned out to be a very exciting week (work week) for legal research.

I had originally been skeptical of the Public.Resource.Org move to make cases freely available. But in November I became a little more hopeful as I recognized how these public releases could be used to create new legal search engines.

Last week those hopes became a reality as a slew of  legal research tools were released, built on publicly available cases released by Fastcase and Public.Resource.Org.

Bonnie at WisBlawg has a good post detailing some of the new tools, focusing on Justia’s release.

AbsTracked points to the collection put together on the resource.org website.

Another new legal research tool, PreCYdent, is making some waves also. I like the way PreCYdent has focused on searching the legal opinions based on some simple criteria like date, court, or justice.

But by far, my favorite new tool is the Public Library of Law. The PLOL is powered by Fastcase and includes some great searching functionality on the newly released public documents, similar to those included in PreCYdent. In addition, they have used some of the features they already had available, like linking to the code, regulations, and court rules for all 50 states, and created a really nice starting place for all legal research.

Abovethelaw and Search Engine Watch had some good posts about these new tools.

Anyway you slice it, this was an exciting week for legal research and I look forward to digging into these new tools. This looks like it will be an exciting time for law librarians with much to discusss in the coming year.

Full post as published by Jason the Content Librarian on February 18, 2008 (boomark / email).