Finding the laws that govern us
11/17/2009 09:05:00 AM
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. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query 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.
Phi Beta Iota: This addition to Google Scholar is a good one. However, it also represents the common problem with Google–it excels at the 2% of the data it can process, but still has no clue about the human in the loop. In this instance, Google lacks the context of the Republic in which the jury of citizens can not only reject any prosecution regardless of the alleged facts, but can also overturn the law upon which the prosecution is based. This will happen more and more often at first with marijuana, then with other “feeder crimes” into the prison-slavery complex.
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