We recently posted (and added a video demo to boot) about the availability of court opinions and legal periodicals on Google Scholar, Google’s vast and growing online library. As with nearly any online legal research service, though, be aware of potential bugs or limitations. As one blogging law librarian has noted, there appears to be an issue with how Google treats internal footnotes in court opinions, specifically Wisconsin court opinions.  As Chris Wren notes:

In the official version of the case (as in all official versions of Wisconsin cases), the filing of a petition for review in the Wisconsin Supreme Court gets noted in the caption with a footnote placed at the end of the name of the party that filed the petition.  The symbol for this footnote is a dagger, not a number.  Google Scholar, however, designates this footnote with a number (in this instance, the dagger became “1″) and renumbers the remaining footnotes accordingly.  Where there’s more than one footnote attached to the caption – e.g., Ellsworth v. Schelbrock, 229 Wis. 2d 542, 600 N.W.2d 247 (Ct. App. 1999) – Google Scholar shifts the footnote numbers even more:  in Ellsworth, the caption has two footnotes, so the numbered footnotes shifted by two as well, making footnote 1 in the official version into footnote 3 in the Google Scholar version.

No one has said that Google Scholar will replace commercial legal research vendors – at least yet. So, if you rely on it for your Wisconsin cases and citations (or any cases for that matter), double check the citations before you submit your filing to the court. After all, Wisconsin was the state where sloppy citation earned an attorney a $100 sanction.

Posted by Gregory Luce