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West and Google, start counting your duopoly days. TaxProfBlog reports that Google Scholar now allows you to search legal opinions and law journals.

I just did a couple quick searches, and you can search for cases by case name, and by citation. Extremely quick, efficient, and free. And it doesn’t just link to FindLaw or Cornell. It actually has an original, full text version. I just entered in a few key Supreme Court cases, and a few prominent Circuit cases, and they were all in Google. Pretty cool. Plus, it has a rough Shepardizing feature, called “Cited By.” I am not sure how broad the Shepardizing is, but it seems to know all citations in Supreme and recent Appellate cases.

Coming soon to a law school near you; a Google Table with student representatives handing out cool Google Office supplies and tasty treats.

And the ABA is getting in on the action as well. They just launched Media Alerts on Federal Courts of Appeals.

The website, which officially launches on Wednesday, now covers the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 3rd, 5th and 9th Circuits. The plan is to add eventually all of the circuits.

About 60,000 cases are filed every year in the federal courts of appeals, McKeown told the ABA Journal. “Most courts have very good websites, but there is a lot of information out there, so this provides a special niche,” she says. “There is a certain needle-in-the-haystack element for someone to go through them every day in every jurisdiction of interest to find cases.”

“Our view is that fair and accurate reporting about the courts is important, both for the public and also in order to emphasize judicial independence,” says McKeown, whose three-year term as chair of the ABA Standing Committee on Federal Judicial Improvements ended in August.

Yesterday I blogged about how law school just wasn’t worth the high cost. Today TaxProfBlog reports that a record number of students took the LSAT! Big Law, We Have a Problem:

The numbers are out, and they are huge. On September 26th, more students took the LSAT than have ever taken a single administration of the LSAT in the history of the exam.

There is definitely an asymmetry of information here between those applying to Law School and those suffering with the rising costs and difficult employment situation. Potential applicants should be dropping, not rising.

Check out Alan Gura’s petitioner brief to the Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago

Lyle Denniston has this summary from SCOTUSBlog:

Reflecting the lawyers’ view that their best chance is to rely upon the privileges clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, only seven pages of their 73-page brief are devoted to another provision of that Amendment: the Due Process Clause.

In a bold thrust, the attorneys for the challengers to Chicago’s strict handgun ban asked the Court to strike down three of its prior rulings: the Slaughterhouse Cases in 1873 — the ruling that made the privileges clause a nullity — and two decisions limiting the Second Amendment to a restriction only on federal laws: U.S. v. Cruikshank in 1876 and Presser v. Illinois in 1886.  “Faced with a clear conflict between precedent and the Constitution, this Court should uphold the Constitution,” the brief argued.

The Slaughterhouse precedent, “and its unavoidable progency, Cruikshank and Presser,” the brief said, “established that the States could continue to violate virtually all privileges and immunities of American citizens, including those codified in the Bill of Rights, notwithstanding that [the Fourteenth Amendment] Section One’s clear textual command to the contrary.”

I just skimmed the brief, and I am very, very impressed by Gura’s approach. As Ilya Shapiro and I discuss at great length in our forthcoming article, titled Opening Pandora’s Box? Privileges or Immunities, The Constitution in 2020, and Properly Incorporating the Second Amendment, the Privileges or Immunities Clause is a vastly superior means for incorporating the Second Amendment.

I’ll blog about this some more later.

No surprise here. From USCourts.gov:

A total of 401,576 electronic applications from lawyers seeking jobs as federal court law clerks were received in fiscal year 2009, a 66 percent increase from the 241,529 applications received in 2008 via the Online System for Clerkship Application and Review (OSCAR).

The applications were filed by 10,722 applicants who were competing for the 1,244 clerkship positions that were posted between October 1, 2008 and September 30, 2009.

About two-thirds of all federal judges participate in the OSCAR program, electing to maintain a judge profile, post a clerkship position and accept applications, or advertise that there are not hiring law clerks.

Fifty-two percent of the applicants that used OSCAR during FY 2009 were law school graduates, and 48 percent were third-year law students. But 68 percent of the 401,576 applications were generated by third-year law students.

OSCAR takes what was a paper-heavy – and expensive – process and puts it online. Applicants for law clerk positions can pull together and submit online applications complete with resumes, cover letters, transcripts, and writing samples.

The number of applications filed via OSCAR has increased each year since its introduction in FY 2005, when 94,693 applications were handled. The totals since have been 174,363 in 2006; 180,832 in 2007; 241,529 in 2008; and 401,576 in 2009.

From SSRN:  Formalism and Realism in Ruins (Mapping the Logic of Collapse) (H/T Legal Theory Blog)

After laying out a conventional account of the formalism vs. realism debates, this Article argues that formalism and realism are at once impossible and entrenched. To say they are impossible is to say that they are not as represented – that they cannot deliver their promised goods. To say that they are entrenched is to say that these forms of thought are sedimented as thought and practice throughout law’s empire. We live thus amidst the ruins of formalism and realism. The disputes between these two great determinations of American law continue today, but usually in more localized or circumscribed forms. We see versions of the disputes, for instance, in the stylized disagreements over the desired form of judicial doctrines (rules vs. standards); or the best rendition of key political values like equality (formal vs. substantive); or the proper mode of judicial interpretation (textual vs. purposive). Here too the arguments that comprise the localized variants of the dispute remain inconclusive. The Article concludes by mapping “the logics of collapse” – specifically, some critical moves that undermine the rhetorical and intellectual force of the formalism vs. realism disputes and their localized variants. The aims here are several. First, the ability to deploy the critical moves helps with analysis. The critical moves help show how the arguments are constructed in the first place and how they are rhetorically and intellectually compromised. Second, and relatedly, the critical moves allow us to avoid being taken in by the formalism vs. realism arguments and their localized variants. Third, the aim is to show how our formalist and realist argumentation has already been surpassed by a legal “logic” that undermines the cogency of that argumentation.

I just received Brian Z. Tamanaha, Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging so these two should make for interesting reading.