One thing that bothers me about Google Scholar’s Legal Opinions and Journals

When using Google Scholar’s advanced search option for legal opinion and journals, the title of the law review article retrieved is more often than not linked to the version of the article in HeinOnline or another subscription database like JSTOR. Since our Library subscribes to Hein, access on campus is not an issue. However, if you try to access the article from home, you see the first page of the article, with an invitation to purchase it from Hein.

You’ll never know that an article is available for free unless you click the link at bottom of the citation that says "All # versions." Sometimes a link will appear in the column on the right—this represents a free version, but doesn’t consistently appear. Why can’t the free version of the article — from a law review website, an institutional repository, or SSRN — appear first, or appear in a column on the right that is clearly marked?

See the picture above for an illustration of where to click for the free version when you access a law review article via Google Scholar. Keep in mind that the article you want might not be available for free, but as more and more law schools establish repositories of faculty scholarship the likelihood that it is increases every day.

New On LLRX - Google Scholar For Legal Materials

We already blogged about the Google Scholar newest edition - the ability to search for legal decisions and related legal materials, such are legal periodicals. LLRX.com added a review of the Google Scholar: A New Way to Search for Cases and Related Legal Publications, by Courtney Minick and David Tsai. Check it out!

Google Scholar Offers Case Law

It has been talked about, written about on listservs, blogged about, and twittered since the word got out. Google Scholar now offers full text search of legal opinions and journals. Users can perform Google Advanced Search allowing full text searching with optional limits by federal and state jurisdictions intending to provide access to the governing laws of the country. Most opinions display pagination, which is very nice. Google also included a tab "How Cited" that displays subsequent judicial decisions citing the original opinion. Not quite Shepard's, but it can be found very helpful. Judicial opinions are full of citations to other cases and Google hyperlinked all of those that are available at Google, just for our convenience. Happy Searching!