Professor Tom Smith, my esteemed former colleague at the University of San Diego School of Law, writes:

You might be interested in this, a new legal search engine my co-author Antonio Tomarchio and I have developed with a team of engineers in Italy; our scientific advisors and several of our engineers are from the Polytechnic of Milan, one of Europe’s biggest and most prestigious technical universities.

You may be particularly interested because it gives us a much, much more sophisticated way to measure the authority of cases, and when we get the data, legal scholarship, than mere counting of citations.  The same methodology could be applied to any citation network, so just about any academic field.  So for example, if your article has been cited 20 times, but never in the last 10 years, we pick that up, we call it "aging of authority."  If it has been cited 5 times in the Harv L Rev. compared to another article cited 10 times in the Arkansas J of Law & Animals, it will pick that up too. 

Here’s the link:  www.precydent.com

It is just an early beta.  The graphics will be improved.  The data is limited and we’re working on getting more.

Professor Smith and his partners in this project would welcome feedback.