Supreme Court of California cases – free resource

SCOCAL provides free access to opinions, annotations, and related documents from the Supreme Court of California. It’s a joint project between Stanford Law School and Justia. SCOCAL’s interface is clean and easy-to-use. I encourage you to give it a try if you’re doing California legal research!

One especially interesting note about the SCOCAL system (for legal research aficionados) is its editorial staff. SCOCAL takes a novel approach to creating the kind of editorial enhancements that are usually only found in expensive commercial resources.  In SCOCAL’s system, annotations are written by SLS students who take Advanced Legal Research. From the the Spring 2011 Stanford Lawyer:

The most interesting part for me was realizing that all the resources we use are created by people who invest time and effort in researching and analyzing cases, statutes, and other materials. It’s so easy to just go online and think that things appear there by magic. But in creating some annotations myself, I realized that every link, every insight, every connection is put there by a researcher,” says Amy Burns ’12, who took the class. (emphasis added)

You can read a bit more about the process at Stanford’s Law Library Blog.