With little fanfare, Google today took a big swing at the legal establishment, by giving the world free access to its own database of case law. This is very big news. In fact, it is so massively big I'm not sure we can quite appreciate it just yet, but I will certainly try.
Yesterday, there were three major methods of reading a case. You could look at a printed court reporter at a law library, or search through the online database of rivals Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis. As you might imagine, using the online databases is significantly easier, but they came with a price. As a current law student, I am paying for unlimited access to Westlaw and Lexis as a part of my tuition, but it is very expensive for lawyers or the common citizen (Lexis rates; Westlaw's lack of advertised rates). This means that even if a common citizen had the knowledge to interpret the law, he could not afford timely access to it. These factors together made it unlikely that a common citizen could represent himself pro ce in court in any reasonable manner. That changed today. The current stories are focusing on this, as it was the general gist of Google's press release.
But this change is just as significant, if not more significant, for lawyers and their clients. Because together Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis have a monopoly, they could charge lawyers exorbitant amounts to access these databases. These charges were passed onto the clients, increasing the cost of legal counsel. This also means that pro-bono (public interest; no charge to client) legal work suffered. The only way for a lawyer or a law firm to conduct pro-bono work was to pay Westlaw or Lexis out of pocket, or to go to the library and use books - an unappetizing prospect for any busy lawyer. Because of these two reasons, pro-bono work has been limited in the past. That changed today as well.
But without comparative analysis, this is all just speculation. As an example, I was recently assigned to research a false imprisonment case in New York. (example used with permission). The case hinged upon whether the detention was done in a "reasonable manner" or a "reasonable time." If you do a search in New York jurisdiction for - "false imprisonment" "reasonable manner" and "reasonable time" - you get 15 results, all cases that I had previously read in Lexis-Nexis or Westlaw as a part of my research. However, at present there are at least three ways in which Google Scholar - Law is currently inferior to Westlaw and Lexis. It does not currently contain state or federal statutes, it does not contain summaries of the cases, and it does not say if the case has been overruled (although it does give links to all the cases that cited it so that you could do the work yourself). I imagine that these oversights will be amended by the time that it is removed from "beta" status, hopefully by the time I join the job market as a lawyer.
Today Google changed the way that Americans will practice law. Even if Google Scholar - Law is currently somewhat inferior to its rivals, its low price will mean that it will be swiftly adopted, which will likely force Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis to push down their own prices, or become obsolete. Today is a good day for the public, for lawyers and for our democracy. And on a more personal note, I am very happy to say that my summer pro-bono work just got much easier.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Google Scholar - Law: One small step that changed the world
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4 comments:
Notably, statutes are already publicly available online. It's generally a pain to find and read through them, but they are available.
Many statutes are indeed online, but it is important to find them quickly, and it is crucial to use a reputable source and to ensure they are up to date. I'd be happy if they linked directly to the legislature webpage when typing in the name of a law, but that doesn't happen either in Google Scholar, or [greater] Google.
Seems to be a realy big step - I'm not sure if this would be possible in Germany or other European Countrys.
I think it would be possible, but very unlikely to happen in Germany or other European countries, because in Europe, such a database would be largely irrelevant to the common litigant. I'm certainly no expert in European law, but I do know of one big difference between American law and European law: European law does not rely upon precedent the way American law does.
American law is based on "common law" which means that every case in a jurisdiction - say New York in the example above - is a prescient in that jurisdiction, unless it's overruled by a higher court in that jurisdiction. This means that you can have a statute (law from the legislature) whose true legal definition is unclear until you read the relevant cases which define the specifics. Case in point, how do you define "reasonable time"? The legislature wasn't kind enough to [usefully] define it. This gives the owners of the databases and publishers of the books a strangle-hold on our judicial system. You simply can't practice law without them.
"Common law" is the cornerstone of our legal system, and is what makes the judicial a "co-equal" branch of government, together with the legislature and the judicial. It even applies to the constitution. Does the forth amendment (protection from unreasonable search and seizure) give Americans a right to privacy? Yes. Does the second amendment (allowing militia to bear arms) include a personal right to own a gun? Yes. Political personalities on both sides will disagree on certain decisions and call some of these decisions "legislating from the bench," but like it or not, that's our system and it would take a constitutional amendment to change it.
However, European law is different (with the exception of England which is where we got our system). The European system is called "civil law" and does not rely on precedent, but rather statutes and codifications of preexisting case law. This means at court, assuming it's not strictly defined, you would have to argue the definition of "reasonable time" without being able to rely on the hypothetical case from last week where they said reasonable time is unequivocally two weeks - no more, no less. (As if it were ever that simple in American law). The upshot of this is that you don't need a database of cases - either from Westlaw, LexisNexis or Google, in order to work in their system.
So without the rules of prescient in European law, a free database of cases just wouldn't be as groundbreaking as it is here.
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Post script: A small bit of trivia, there is one American state - Louisiana - which uses the European system of civil law. This makes it a pain for non-Louisiana lawyers to practice there.
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