In an admittedly unscientific ABA Journal poll, readers voted on the question: what do you use for legal research? Westlaw was 1st, Lexis 2nd, Other 3rd (presumably including a variety of sources), Google Scholar 4th, and Bloomberg Law 5th. (I'd never even heard of Bloomberg Law until a day ago.)
I'm not shocked by the power of Google Scholar - however poorly it may serve the purposes of legal research. Not only does information want to be free; people want it to be free as well!
H/T Law Librarian Blog
For some tasks, Google Scholar is qualitatively better at enhancing human cognition than most of the alternatives. Google Scholar is an order of magnitude faster than Lexis or Westlaw, and its simple interface puts all its competitors to shame for ease of use. If I need to pull a case from a major reporter and explore the cases it cites, Google Scholar is my tool of choice. It may not have field-based searching or rich results ordering, and its "how cited" feature may not hold a candle to a real citator, but for what it does, it does it exceedingly well. I wouldn't want to live with it as my only legal research tool, but it's also useful for reasons that go beyond the low price tag.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann | August 10, 2011 at 02:03 PM
I know you all are talking about contemporary legal research -- so this is on a parallel point. book.google is my starting point for legal history research.
Posted by: Alfred Brophy | August 10, 2011 at 02:59 PM