Case Western Reserve Law users owe it to themselves to check out this resource while we have access on a trial basis. Fastcase is a primary source alternative to LexisNexis and Westlaw. Fastcase provides primary legal materials as does Casemaker and Loislaw, both currently available to all Case Law School students. The Fastcase difference is its powerful intuitive search engine, and its robust collection of primary law—currently over 6 million documents.
Added features include Authority Check, its integrated citation analysis tool which provides the text that appears around the cited source. Authority Check identifies the amount of times that citing sources have themselves been subsequently cited, another unique element.
Users may especially value Fastcase’s Forecite feature which identifies additional seminal cases that ordinary keyword searches may miss. For instance, when searching the word busing in federal case law, Forecite will appear in a line above the search results indicating that Fastcase has identified 3 additional decisions that may be relevant to the search. The 3 decisions do not include the word “busing.” These three cases turn out to the seminal cases:
Swann v. Board of Education- Board of Education v. Swann; Brown v. Board of Education; and Washington v. Davis. Forecite found them because they are frequently cited by the other decisions in the search results, which suggests that they may be highly relevant to the topic being searched.
Find more information about “Smarter Legal Research” through Fastcase in the User Guide and the Fastcase Quick Reference Guide.
Connect to Fastcase and its user documentation through the Law Library Services’ Electronic Research Resources page on the School of Law intranet. Find the link to Fastcase under the Trial Subscriptions category.
Access: Law School Campus Only; VPN. Trial lasts until March 2, 2012.