Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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."