Google Puts Supreme Court Opinions Online

This has already been done for the US Supreme Court, and very well, at oyez.org. Oyez is easy to use, has lots of addi­tion­al con­tent, includ­ing sum­maries and audio of oral argu­ments, and is ad-free and Cre­ative Com­mons licensed for its orig­i­nal con­tent. Plus, you can search by court term, Jus­tice, and the name of the legal coun­sel.

So I’m not sure what’s so great about Google search­ing pub­lic domain con­tent and adding adver­tise­ments to it. Maybe this is use­ful because most peo­ple go to Google first, but it’s not new.

While I applaud open gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives, there is a down­side to pro­vid­ing court opin­ions through Google Search; the unex­pect­ed loss of per­son­al pri­va­cy and poten­tial seri­ous dam­age to the rep­u­ta­tion and employ­ment prospects of an indi­vid­ual seek­ing redress in the courts.

It appears that you do not need to us Google Schol­ar to find court opin­ions through Google. Google your name the same way as a poten­tial employ­er typ­i­cal­ly does these days. If you’ve been named in a court opin­ion, chances it will be at or near the top of the results. 

File an appeal to denial of unem­ploy­ment or work­ers com­pen­sa­tion ben­e­fits by an admin­is­tra­tive body and you might as well for­get about ever get­ting job with an orga­ni­za­tion that finds the court opin­ion regard­ing it. Any nasty state­ments from your past or present employ­er are there. Even if you win the appeal, the con­tent an opin­ion may present you in a bad light. Worse yet, if some­one else shar­ing your name is iden­ti­fied in a court opin­ion you can suf­fer harm from opin­ions on cas­es that have noth­ing at all to do with you per­son­al­ly. The major­i­ty of employ­ers will pass on an oth­er­wise excit­ing job can­di­date sim­ply because they  filed a com­plaint in the past, even if the con­tent of the opin­ion shows you in a pos­i­tive or neu­tral light.

Indi­vid­ual names must be redact­ed or anonymized in court opin­ions avail­able out­side of the offi­cial court records to pro­tect the inno­cent for irrepara­ble harm to their rep­u­ta­tions and liveli­hoods.