Continuously opining, intermittently publishing.

Archive for November, 2009

Google has made federal and state trial level and appellate level opinions searchable on Google Scholar.

Laypersons may not understand how significant this is. Currently, unless a legal researcher (lawyer) is using public resources, which have not been easily organized or easily searchable until now, he must rely on licenses to services provided by Westlaw and LexisNexis, which are extraordinarily expensive.

I foresee Westlaw and LexisNexis continuing to provide value to cases with analysis and connective organization, but for general purpose legal research, they are being disintermediated, and it’s about time.

This new feature of Google Scholar will allow legal research to proceed more efficiently, more inexpensively, and makes the common law, most importantly, more accessible to the public by taking it out of the hands of the guild guardians and putting it into the hands of anyone who needs to see the common law.

This gives me great pride. Kudos to the knowledge workers outside of Google who helped the engineers create this search function. Kudos to the engineers. Kudos to Larry & Sergey and all Googlers, who continue to gather the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

16
November

Someone somewhere undoubtedly has already made this recipe.  But it came to me out of the blue this evening, and I enjoyed it very much:

3 large scoops of chocolate ice cream
1 cup of milk, give or take
1 very heaping teaspoon of Ghirardelli cocoa powder
1-2 shots of 18 year scotch (I prefer Glenlivet), to taste*

*The key is not to overpower the milkshake but to accent it.

Blend.
Serves 1-2 people.