The Google N-grams tool (see my recent post and update) has now fostered a new application to search 200 years of US Supreme Court decisions: Legal Language Explorer. It has been developed by Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University College of Law, Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies, and their colleagues.

The tool is lightning fast, and I really like the way that the corpus tool allows you to click through to list of cases and then to see the original text, and to export lists to Excel, for example. I also support the move, of which the authors are part, to make more full-text legal resources openly available to the public.

Click here to see a presentation of the service, given at the conference JURIX 2011 in mid-December. Bommarito has also posted a more technical description of the project on his blog.

You can try out the web-based interface here. Let me know what you think!

Thanks to Rob L. indirectly via Australia, and Robert at Legal Informatics Blog for bringing the project to my attention.