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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/
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.
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
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."
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.