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Finding The Laws That Govern Us
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Finding the laws that govern us
11/17/2009 09:05:00 AM
As many of us recall from our civics lessons in school, the United States is a common law
country. That means when judges issue opinions in legal cases, they often establish
precedents that will guide the rulings of other judges in similar cases and jurisdictions. Over Archives
time, these legal opinions build, refine and clarify the laws that govern our land. For
average citizens, however, it can be difficult to find or even read these landmark opinions. Archives
We think that's a problem: Laws that you don't know about, you can't follow — or make
effective arguments to change.
Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions More Blogs from Google
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 Visit our directory for more
by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to information about Google
Google Scholar, click on the "Legal opinions and journals" radio button, and try the query blogs.
separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in
the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the
acceptablity of "separate but equal" facilities for citizens at two different points in the history
of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less
familiar with, but which have played an important role.
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We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping email. No more than one
everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has
influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and message per day.
Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow
citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have
been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals. Browse these
by clicking on the "How Cited" link next to the case title. See, for example, the frequent
citations for Roe v. Wade, for Miranda v. Arizona (the source of the famous Miranda Subscribe
warning) or for Terry v. Ohio (a case which helped to establish acceptable grounds for an
investigative stop by a police officer).
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As we worked to build this feature, we were struck by how readable and accessible these
opinions are. Court opinions don't just describe a decision but also present the reasons that
support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life
situations. And they often do it in language that is surprisingly straightforward, even for
those of us outside the legal profession. In many cases, judges have gone quite a bit out of
their way to make complex legal issues easy to follow. For example, in Korematsu v. United
States, the Supreme Court justices present a fascinating and easy-to-follow debate on the Recent posts from our
legality of internment of natural born citizens based on their ancestry. And in United States blogs
v. Ramirez-Lopez, Judge Kozinski, in his dissent, illustrates the key issue of the case using
Happy Monday: The
an imagined good-news/bad-news dialogue between the defendant and his attorney.
Importance of Mondays This
We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of several pioneers, who Holiday
have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws
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of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew
Mowbray (AustLII), Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org), Daniel Poulin (LexUM), Tim
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Stanley (Justia), Joe Ury (BAILII), Tim Wu (AltLaw) and many others. It is an honor to follow
in their footsteps. We would also like to acknowledge the judges who have built this Szemináriumok
cathedral of justice brick by brick and have tried to make it accessible to the rest of us. We Magyarországon is
hope Google Scholar will help all of us stand on the shoulders of these giants.
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