Legal Texts Are Now Available in Google Scholar

Often it’s not the scarcity of information but its abundance that is the problem. This is especially true online, the web holds huge amounts of information, yet finding it can be more hassle than it should in some cases. And it's even harder for very specialized information which, while publicly available, can be buried deep enough that it's practically useless. That is why Google is now introducing full legal texts in Google Scholar, making it easier to find legal options on any number of topics albeit limited to the US for now.

“Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in,” Google's Anurag Acharya writes. “We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all.”

Google Scholar enables users to find all manner of academic and research papers. As the name implies, it's not exactly designed to be a thorough research tool, but rather to come to the aid of those doing a school project or just for personal use. Anyone doing serious research is going to have to look elsewhere, but for what it was designed to do it's more than adequate.

The same idea has now been applied to legal documents, the information available in Google Scholar isn't going to be enough for professionals researching for a case; however, it can be very useful in many, less critical instances. Users can browse the information available by case, general topics or by doing a good old-fashioned keyword search. There are a number of filters available to narrow the search and Google also displays related documents along with the legal options themselves. It isn't perfect, but, for a first step, it's surprisingly useful and Google will add more info in time and maybe even launch it in other countries at some point.