It’s official: All you budding legal scholars out there have a powerful new research tool, and it comes from Google. In a move that probably takes it off the Christmas card mailing list of Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw, Google has given its research portal Google Scholar the capability to search through American case law. The official Google Blog proudly announces the search giant’s foray into legal scholarship:

“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.”

This is a powerful research tool for those without access to the mainstays of the legal research market. Although still in beta, this iteration of Google Scholar allows users to access not only the federal and state opinions but also scholarly journal articles. A preliminary test drive reveals that searching for legal content is quick and easy. Journal article searches yield results from Heinonline and SSRN. Case law searches deliver the opinions themselves as well as further citations and related documents that cast a little light on the long term impact of the case. It’s not as information dense as the colorful shapes and symbols familiar to Shepardizers, but it gets the job done.

Another useful feature for legal researchers with an eye toward intellectual property is the ability to research patents. A radio button adds millions of filed patents from the U.S. PTO to Google Patents as a source for any search and allows the user to ferret out individual patents, a great tool for legal geeks everywhere.

Law students won’t make the migration to the new free service as long as they enjoy the unfettered access to the more robust legal research tools that law schools provide during their three years. But the features will only grow richer over time and opening up the vaults of binding precedent to everyone is a huge and important step toward creating a more open system.

Related posts:

1. PA Votes Tomorrow to Eliminate All Funding for Civil Legal Services
2. The Anti-Google Bill And An Apology from LG
3. Privacy from Street View Photos? — Boring v. Google
4. Why Law Students Should Adopt Twitter En Masse