Ok maybe not, but has anyone used Google Scholar to search for legal opinions? It's still quite primitive, but it has "how cited" similar to shepard's and keycite, all of the cites within the texts are conveniently hyperlinked, and a search for libel and public figure in New York cases brought up most of the same cases I found using Westlaw for my moot court brief. Did I mention it's completely free?

If this type of technology gets better and stays as readily accessible, why will we need to pay high fees for Westlaw and Lexis Nexis? Someone asked in class how we can cover costs working on our own, but I think it will only get easier and cheaper to do the kind of work lawyers do, and this is one example of how this will happen.

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@Art - I don't know if you've looked at LoisLaw - but it is a low cost system for legal research. It doesn't have the bells and whistles of Lexis or Westlaw and still isn't free, but from what I understand, it is more and more of a challenger to Lexis/Westlaw. I'm not super familiar with it, but I figured I'd at least bring it up on this thread. People who are familiar, feel free to comment about it.

-- DavidGoldin 21 Apr 2010

so I thought I'd try a search on LOISLAW after con law today after seeing this post. First one that I did was HAMDI, since that is what we were talking about. The case that came up was entitled Hamdi v Runsfeld. I sent an email to customer service (I was feeling a little bored and had a minute), who promptly emailed me back, confirming the typo and stating that they were changing it to RumsFIELD. I decided not to reply regarding their second spelling.

-- PeterWade - 22 Apr 2010

@Art - Thanks for the link. You probably know that when you use Lexis or Westlaw with a non-student account (e.g., at a firm) you are charged either by the search (several hundreds of dollars each time you click "SEARCH," with some exceptions) or by the minute. Either way, it would certainly save money to do some preliminary searching for free using Google to get a rough idea of search terms, etc.

IMO, two reasons why the marginal cost of maintaining the Lexis and Westlaw databases won't approach zero anytime soon: (1) maintaining the Key Cite-type system requires lots of trained labor (legally training people need to skim opinions, figure out how each case fits into the earlier cases, etc.) and (2) the licensing cost for all the treatises that are available (Warren's Weed, etc.). I can see the cost of (1) diminishing fairly rapidly (due to outsourcing, lots of out-of-work lawyers, etc.), but the cost of (2) remaining high for the foreseeable future.

Bloomberg is also coming out with a (commercial) Lexis / Westlaw competitor that may help to lower prices among all three services...[1]

-- SaswatMisra 22 Apr 2010