Slashdot Mirror
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.
Now that lawyers can access without charge documents created from the public purse, when should we expect to see these savings trickle down to the public as reduced legal fees?
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.
Now I can pretend to be a real lawyer, as opposed to a slashdot lawyer.
So how is this different than http://www.findlaw.com/ ? I've been using that free site to look through cases ranging from the Supreme Court to individual State courts.
Probably never Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw are mainly used for the additional value they provide beyond the plain content of each case. Until and unless he determines a way to provide something similar and duplicate the effort of all the people working for LN and Westlaw that do that work, there's not a lot of real competition.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
And now electronic publication of all legal rulings online is mine!
My, the USPTO is gullible.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
paid services like LexusNexis
it's actually LexisNexis.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
Most courts have law libraries that are open to the public, including free (albiet limited) access to Lexis and/or Westlaw. Seems a better option that perusing thousands of pages of unsearchable data. Still, I applaud the effort to make this stuff accessible from anywhere. Can a legal search engine be the next bit open source project?
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.
As a law student, I'm glad to hear these things are now public. They've always been in the public domain - just never published like this, at least that I'm aware of.
But Lexis and Westlaw will remain exceedingly important and worth their fees. Publishing cases is one thing - publishing the proprietary information that Lexis and Westlaw add (headnotes, the West Key system, Shepard's citations, treatises, and countless other secondary sources) would truly make this useful for attorneys. Of course, maintaining all of these sources requires a huge effort - and is one of the reasons these databases cost as much as they do. (There are, I'm sure, less savory reasons as well, of course.)
I wouldn't count on seeing Lexis and Westlaw go belly up soon - an attorney needs much more than the raw cases. But, like I said, this is very positive for the public.
I got the verdict last Friday in a case I tried myself in federal court: Verdict, Gregerson v. Vilana Financial, Inc.
I'm not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed, but I did all my legal research using Google. The only paid service I used was Pacer, and that only for 2-3 cases. I bought one case from LexisNexis (Pinkham v. Sara Lee, 8th US Circuit), which cost $9.00. In the end, I was awarded $19,462 in damages (and I defeated six claims against me).
I found most of what I needed at Findlaw.com, www.law.cornell.edu. Specific state cases for Minnesota were at state.mn.us/lawlibrary/. I went to a law library only one time, and they didn't have what I needed, and I never went back.
I did get advice from an attorney on legal procedure (stuff not in any book). I would have used LexisNexis or West Law if it wasn't so overpriced ($9.00 for one webpage? All because the case was too old to be on Pacer, where it would cost about 18 cents). I'm going to try out this guy's service in the future.
(a full chronology of my case is here http://www.cgstock.com/essays/vilana))
www.cgstock.com
Since all these cases are now up, is there enough data in there to finally make a directory of lawyers with batting averages , so I can check whether one is actually any good at my kind of case before I hire them?
--
make install -not war
He should get in contact with Project Gutenberg, that would make a nice volunteer and resource center for this project. Both have the same end goal; to get public domain knowledge freely available.
IANAL, but I'm about to sound a lot more like one.
That would be interesting, although there may be a cost - just as Wikipedia is presumably injuring traditional encyclopedia efforts, such a summary "by the masses" may injure LN and Westlaw - not that these companies are good in themselves, but the possibility of unqualified opinion and wikiculture impacting law may be an unpleasant risk. LN and Westlaw have a huge impact on the practice of law today (even as they are largely invisible to those outside the field). Wiki technology is great, and given an appropriate cultural setting and controls it can produce wonderful results (MediaWiki, for example, is widely deployed in various businesses as a tool for knowledge retention/content creation). If there were a way to get qualified people to lead content creation as you suggest and produce quality at least as high as LN or Westlaw, that would be positive, but given that it would be open, anything created (good or bad) would likely kill the commercial industry when it got big enough. If the same cultural struggles present on Wikipedia (particularly the anti-elitism) were to take place on what eventually is to be the primary source of legal interpretation (and fact) for most law in the United States, the US legal system will have a time of troubles. If it were to do better than Wikipedia (and LN and Westlaw) to enough of an extent, it would be fantastic.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
People sue each other. 1.8 million over a period of 58 years comes to about 31,000 year from a whole lot of courts - not too bad, and not unheard of. If you want to cut down on case law, people will need to stop suing each other. That's not going to happen - and I'm not sure it should. The courts provide a vital means for people to settle disputes without resorting to self-help (i.e. theft, assault, etc.). This isn't even including criminal cases - if you've got a way to stop people committing crimes and appealing their sentences, that's great. Also keep in mind that many of these opinions are as short as a sentence.
There have been, actually, numerous attempts lately to simplify the common law - the restatements of torts, contracts, property, etc. The restatements, however, aren't created by elected officials but a group of law professors, academics, lawyers, and judges. Some states like the restatements and follow them. Some don't - and some legislatures (elected officials) have taken steps to change the common law as in the restatement.
Then there are other areas - the Uniform Commercial code, for example - that have helped to simplify the law. But legislatures still want to tweak these (and with reason).
Then there are other codes, such as the Model Penal Code, for criminal law. The MPC is great and all, but it has its problems as well.
A big problem with these "simplifications" of law, however, are the time required to create them. It can take decades for the ALI to come to a decision on matters and publish a restatement. A legislature can do the same job much more quickly.
I found a group of highly knowledgable legal experts who don't mind sharing their expertise online for free.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Maybe if an attorney had to look at the raw cases all the time there would be a grass roots legal movement to simplify law rather than constantly add to it.
I propose a new amendment to the Constitution of the USA, all laws have to be written so the average person can read and understand it in 5 minutes.
FalconShould there be a Law?