Google and Legal Research

Someone else may have caught this before him, but my hat tip on Google's entry into legal research goes to Eugene Lee at California Labor Law, Google Offers Caselaw ... for FREE. Google comes out with tons of new offerings and not all of them last, so who knows about this project, but given what they have accomplished in other areas, probably worth keeping an eye on.

I went over to check it out and since I have been interested in the "mixed motive" issue as a follow up to my testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the bill to overturn Gross v. FBL Services, thought I would try out "mixed motive." Here are the first five entries with that search on the Google scholar page, with the radio button for "Legal opinions and journals" checked:

Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins

Desert Palace, Inc. v. Costa

Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle

NLRB v. Transportation Management Corp. and

Rachid v. Jack in the Box, Inc.

Although that's not a very sophisticated search term, the first four cases are the key Supreme Cases in determining the history of "mixed motive." I would have thought Gross would have shown up high but it doesn't appear until the 8th page. Interestingly, the Rachid case is a 5th Circuit case which extended mixed motive to the ADEA without a lot of discussion, and has been sub silentio overruled on that point by Gross.

I doubt that many are canceling their Westlaw or Lexis accounts today, but it is an interesting development.