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!

U.S. Court of Appeals For The 1st Circuit Implements RSS

United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit announced the implementation of RSS feed on their official website. The audio recordings of the court's oral arguments and electronic versions of the court's opinions are now available via RSS (Real Simple Syndication).

Until now, electronic versions of the court's opinions were available only through e-mail with an opinion attached. We will soon be phasing out this method and strongly encourage current subscribers to convert to RSS, which will allow you to search, sort, and filter information.

Please click here to read the full announcement of the court and to learn how to set up your RSS reader that collects the information for you. Standard web browsers, such are FireFox, Safari, Opera, or Internet Explorer have RSS readers embedded within, or you can set up other readers such as Google Reader. Once you have your reader set up, add the URL for desired RSS feed to your reader which will automatically deliver the information without cluttering your email inbox.

This is the RSS feed URL for the U.S. Court of Appeals 1st Circuit opinions: http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/

The site also offers news updates under What's New.