Golden Rule of Legal Writing: Never, ever cite to anything you haven’t read carefully.
There is a reason law librarians try to drill that rule into the heads of lawyers and law students (and journalists):
“Is it a “Good” Case? Can You Rely on BCite, KeyCite, and Shepard’s to Tell You?,” by Kristina Niedringhaus, JOTWELL (April 22, 2019) (reviewing Paul Hellyer, Evaluating Shepard’s, KeyCite, and BCite for Case Validation Accuracy, 110 Law Libr. J. 449 (2018)).
When you rely on a judicial opinion to support your cause, which version of the case do you carry into court? This is the 21st century law librarian and bench-bar dilemma.
Even if you solve the authenticity and and copyright problems (and we’re nowhere near doing that), what are we going to do about the Supreme Court?
See, “Final Word on U.S. Law Isn’t: Supreme Court Keeps Editing,” by Adam Liptak, May 24, 2014 (re the upcoming article, “The (Non)Finality of Supreme Court Opinions,” by Richard J. Lazarus, 128 HARV. L. REV. ___ (forthcoming 2014)).
If you need a specific article, and have the author or title, you might be able to find it free on the Internet.
(You will need many indexes and a full-service legal research database, and a research strategy, to perform a full legal literature subject search for magazine, journal, law review, newsletter, and newspaper articles.)
1) Use your Internet search engine of choice: enter the article title or keywords from the title and the author(s) name(s).
Oregon Legal Research Blog