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1.8 Million US Court Rulings Now Online
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "For a long time now, lawyers and any serious law students have been bound to paid services like LexusNexis for access to case law, but that is slowly changing. Carl Malamud has posted free electronic copies of every U.S. Supreme Court decision and Court of Appeals ruling since 1950, 1.8 million rulings in all, online for free. While the rulings themselves have long been government works not subject to copyright, courts still charge several cents per page for copies and they're inconvenient to access, so lawyers usually turn to legal publishers which are more expensive but more convenient, providing helpful things like notes about related cases, summaries of the holdings, and information about if and when the case was overturned. This free database is not Carl's first, either. He convinced the SEC to provide EDGAR, and helped get both the Smithsonian and Congressional hearings online."
...from Thomson, the provider of Westlaw services:
http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/letter_to_west_response.pdf
Seems a pretty reasonable response to his initial query:
http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/letter_to_west.pdf
Thus, Thomson is justified in asserting copyright on materials which represent unique, original, or significant contributions to the content, and does not assert any copyright whatever on material which is in the public domain.
And if this work helps provide greater access information which is already publicly, but not easily, available, then it's a Good Thing.
But Westlaw and LexisNexis do a lot more than just make case law available online. There is a lot of editorial work, summarizing, organization, not to mention costs often imposed by the courts themselves, and Carl Malamud correctly acknowledges that.
I think this is a great idea, but from the brief glance at the site that I took, it would appear that is has absolutely no search feature at all. LexusNexxus and the other sites have sophisticated search features. 1.8 million records stored in 1000 pdfs is more or less worthless IMO.
Lawyers will not use these services much, they will continue to use annotated and commented editions. This is more a victory for the common man who wants to better understand the machinery of U.S. law and justice.
Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis have similar subscription case reporters in Canada, where they cooexist peacefully with this free site, where you can freely search and read most "recent" Canadian case law (e.g. from the mid 1990s to date), as well as some older important appellate cases. The paid services have more "editorial content" such as detailed headnotes and cross-referencing to commentary.
The single most important thing lawyers want, other than the case itself, is to know what other cases say about it: which subsequent authorities cite the case, and why? The ability to "note up" a case ("Quickcite" on Lexis-Nexis Canada, "Shepardizing" in Westlaw-speak) to see at a glance if it has been followed, overturned or otherwise commented on is a critical feature for any online repository of case law. Until Malamud's site does this it's not true competition to the subscription sites.