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Democracy in the Dark?
scubacuda writes "Melissa Bar has written an insightful article on how Westlaw and Lexis Nexis restrict public access to case law databases. She writes, '[T]he courts and the court's words belong to us. In more ways than one, the American people have already paid for the case law produced by our courts. Commercial vendors must not be allowed to highjack our law or dictate who may have access to it. By refusing to allow public libraries to purchase electronic subscriptions that can serve their patrons, Westlaw and LexisNexis are closing the door on information.' Individually purchasing the documents over credit card is incredibly expensive, making it virtually inaccessible to most library patrons."
It isn't like Lexus Nexus and Westlaw have a monopoly on the information. You can still look it up on your own. All these services do is provide convienence via their search engines.
If you don't want to pay for it, look up the information yourself...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
www.findlaw.com
My roomate who is a corp lier in NYC uses findlaw.com when he is doing casual research, since he normally has to bill his Lexus time out to a client at a huge fee.
Google Law anyone?
"The only thing I enjoy more than doing the crossword puzzel, is actually finishing it."
http://www.findlaw.com
http://www.law.cornell.edu/
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/law/
When I went to college, the entire school was eligible for the university's Lexis-Nexis site license. This didn't mean just the law school... this meant everybody. Software was available that I could have loaded on my PC, and I could have searched from my dorm room.
The university's library computers (and computer labs) had the software on them as well.
Now here's the interesting part -- if you were a resident of the surrounding towns (not affiliated with the university in any other way!), you were eligible to use the library -- and all its' resources.
Yes, that included Lexis-Nexis. (And JAMA, and The Lancet, and a hundred other publications that cost more than some cars.)
I have no illusions -- Lexis-Nexis was getting a considerable amount of money for allowing such use... far more than they'd ever be able to wring out of a public library. The university needed the subscription, it was just a happy circumstance that everyone else benefited.
Here's to libraries with deep pockets.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Water distribution is rolled into your rent, so the vast majority of poor people do not directly pay for it. If their rent is too high, there are plenty of assistance programs available.
So basically, everyone gets water.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
VersusLaw is $8.95 per month for a basic subscription, is fairly comprehensive for case law (although not entirely), and offers boolean searching. IAAL, and I find it to be a useful tool. Of course, any law library should have regional reporters as well as federal and its own state's stuff. You can find these libraries at law schools and courthouses.
Having worked for a now defunct company that -did- want to try to provide a lowcost alternative to Westlaw and LexisNexis, I have a pretty good idea how expensive it'd be.
Anyone have a few tens of millions dollars laying around?
You have hardware (which is comparatively cheap).
You have scanning and OCR work (which is the most labor and time intensive part).
You have the delivery of information costs (which can get expensive with millions of hits a month)
You have the software development costs (which aren't as expensive as any of the aforementioned, except maybe hardware).
You're talking about many millions of bucks to get something even rudimentary up and running.
it sucks.
Without a Westlaw page number, it is very difficult to cite a case in a court. Our law librarian used to rage on about this.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
...wow, you don't think you can charge a $100/hour in IT?
what do you do?
boy, I'm certainly not going to jump on the GNU/Linux bandwagon if it means lowering my rates...
That's not a good response. While it's nice that there's some spotty availability of publicly reported caselaw online, you'll find you can't actually use any of the information you find this way, because West blocks everyone else from providing the official citation. Courts require any citations to provide the West Publishing volume and page number, so once you found something useful, you'd have to look it up again in Westlaw, Lexis, or the bound volume. West claims a copyright on the page numbers, even though the information is public. While they've worked out a deal with Lexis to provide the page numbers, the public is left twisting in the wind. See "West's Copyright Claim."
Only $100 an hour? Most IT consultants I know already get more than that. I've never met a lawyer that billed less than $150, and even that is ridiculously low. A first year associate, two months out of law school, is billed out at around $200 an hour by large firms.
I'm a lawyer with excellent karma. Something's gotta be wrong.
I am a former employee of a Lexis-Nexis subsidiary called Lexis Document Services. I know getting information from any level of the government is not free. You either pay by taxes or user fees.
For example, if look up information at the US District and US Bankruptcy courts they charge fees.
LDS performs hard copy searches of court records in municiple, county, state, and federal jurisdications across the US. The customers paid for someone to physically to go to clerk offices and request documents on pending suits, pending judgements, UCC filings, bankruptcies, etc.. The customer could have done this themselves. They would have to know which clerk to search and still have to pay a fee to the jurisdication for the documents.
Heinlein would say TNSTAAFL
I rely on Westlaw and Lexis on a day to day basis to research case and statutory law. Legal research is indeed possible without them, but it takes a lot more legwork. Your local courthouse law library likely has all of the reporters for your jurisidiction as well as the more recent volumes for others. With old-fasioned digests and headnotes you can locate the law you are looking for - law students are still forced to learn this method before accessing the online services.
There is a great deal of law available online - see www.findlaw.com for a good example. What Westlaw and Lexis do is collect it all, substantively categorize it (by headnotes or key numbers which are West's legal work product) and make it available for searching at a level much more advanced than Google etc.
While I am sympathetic to the library's plight, West has a right to run a business and the cry for "freedom of information" cannot change that.
There is a law that states that non-classified government documents fall under the public domain. This means that anyone can request the information, and cannot be charged for it (though a processing/handling fee may be applied). Some courts aren't happy about this (and have signed illegal exclusivity agreements with companies like Lexis and WestLaw, but VersusLaw's owner has been pretty good about reminding them of the legalities), but most courts are have web pages and post their daily proceedings for anyone to grab (and grab they do). The trick is finding the web pages, and then getting around things like image-based pdf's with no actual text in them, etc.
When you pay for access at places like VersusLaw, WestLaw, etc., you are not paying for the case data (most of these places offer free searching, and Lexis even offers free recent case data for many federal jurisdictions), you're paying for the value-addition of the search engine, formatting, spell checking, etc - things that hard-working, relatively low-paid data entry people have laboriously checked, typed, scanned, etc.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
I am often struck by how the same issues come up again and again in history, and how often past struggles for liberty have to be repeated. This struggle has a pretty long history going back at least to 450 BC. In Rome at that time there was no publicly accessable writen law. Instead the law was preserved by the an upper class (the Patricians) mostly as an oral tradition. Needless to say this put the lower class (the Plebians) at a considerable disadvantage when they went into court. They had no ready way of knowing what the law actually said.
In about 450 BC the Plebians won one of the earliest and most significant victories for equality in the western legal tradition. They forced the publication of the laws. The laws were inscribed on twelve tablets and made accessable to all citizens. This established a pinciple which, has survived to this day, that the law ought to be published. (Twelve Tablets)
Even so there are several new and non-so-new developments that have really undermined this ancient victory for equality. The law has become so complex that no one really knows what all of it says, and only a privileged class of experts really know what any small part of it says. So we are again in a position where most people have no direct access to the law, and where there is a privileged class that serve as intermediaries between the people and the law. This new development of effectively copyrighting parts of the law, or limiting access to legal databases, is really just a continuation of this trend. It stengthens the hold that the wealthy have over access to the legal system.
Moron, he just said this would pruposefully limit professional access, did you even read what he said. They don't want professionals getting it from the library,they want you to pay for it, since you'll then use their information to make money for yourself.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Your own Municipal Code is probably copyrighted. What's more it may be copyrighted by a private firm that sold it to your city (and several others). What this means is that the city and its citizens cannot copy their own municipal code without permission.
With all the copyright extensions lately, we better check if we are still allowed to copy the Constitution.
...omphaloskepsis often...