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Harvard Project Aims To Put Every Court Decision Online, For Free (google.com)
Techdirt comments approvingly on a new project from Harvard Law School, called Free the Law, which is a joint effort with a company called Ravel to scan and post in nicely searchable format all federal and state court decisions, and put them all online, for free. As Techdirt puts it,
This is pretty huge. While some courts now release most decisions as freely available PDFs, many federal courts still have them hidden behind the ridiculous PACER system, and state court decisions are totally hit or miss. And, of course, tons of historical cases are completely buried. While there are some giant companies like Westlaw and LexisNexis that provide lawyers access to decisions, those cost a ton -- and the public is left out. This new project is designed to give much more widespread access to the public. And it sounds like they're really going above and beyond to make it truly accessible, rather than just dumping PDFs online. ... Harvard "owns" the resulting data (assuming what's ownable), and while there are some initial restrictions that Ravel can put on the corpus of data, that goes away entirely after eight years, and can end earlier if Ravel "does not meet its obligations."
Anything that helps disrupt the stranglehold of the major legal publishers seems like a good thing.
I must not understand. Why wouldn't all decisions be free already? If we paid for them with tax dollars, wouldn't the decisions belong to the public?
Will they censor names from the cases? If not depending on the case, some of the involved might object...
We, as taxpayers have paid for these court cases, it about time someone made the freely available. Harvard just got my vote for institution of higher education for the year!
I feel like whenever there is a grumbling about cost it comes from college students who consider themselves poor yet nonetheless manage to pay $40g a year for school. Someone tell us what the "ton" is that Westlaw and LexisNexis charge.
And someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the small Pacer fee goes toward funding the court system.
If this destroys the legal industry, so much the better.
It's a parasite on humanity.
While it is nice to have all these legal decisions on line, it's really not that useful unless you have a system of linking those decisions and appeals and all the final outcomes of those processes in the form of CITATIONS. That's what people pay the big bucks for to Westlaw, Lexus/Nexus and of course that monstrocity coming from Washington Street in Manhattan, Bloomberg Law.
Hmmm! The brains are the good part!
I must not understand. Why wouldn't all decisions be free already? If we paid for them with tax dollars, wouldn't the decisions belong to the public?
The decisions themselves are public, but finding them online is not.
The major legal publishers--Westlaw and Lexis--charge ridiculous costs to access them, and accessing them through the publishers is the only practical way to do a lot of legal research because of their systems for tracing ideas and the fact that they have collected all of the local court cases that historically were never indexed unless a snippet happened to be printed in a legal periodical, for example. They add billions of dollars of value by indexing the ideas and legal points in the cases (called "Shepardizing") and writing short summaries of what the case decided about each point. Also by showing you where the cases were cited after that for each point. So they are very useful and add value, but their high expense, opaque pricing model, and strong duopoly are well-entrenched and problematic.
These major legal publishers--especially Westlaw--have an even more opaque pricing system than the insurance companies. IIRC they contractually prohibit purchasers from revealing the amount paid for the services, letting them have radically different pricing for different firms depending on what they think they can weasel out of the firm and without allowing anyone to even reasonably study the economics. Meanwhile they basically charge government and law schools nothing, so government and law students use them heavily, reinforcing their structural duopoly.
Mere access through PACER to the federal cases online doesn't cost much (free for small amounts of stuff) and courts are underfunded everywhere, so that's a lot less absurd than what happens with Westlaw and lexis. The cost of using one of them pushes legal research further out of reach of even successful small businesses, to say nothing of the consumer (nonexistent except for the quite wealthy and above, or common problems they have no choice but to pay money to deal with, like domestic violence, divorce, real estate sales, etc...).
Finally, I've heard that especially with westlaw the pricing model tends to be by-the-time-unit-spent or by-the-case, or a flat model per quarter that winds up being computed based on those, so either way law firms teach their lawyers to be thorough but not to make that extra search that costs extra money. So it's like being told to search google for the right answer, but be very sure about every keyword combination and only click on a link if you really need to. The flexibility depends on the client and their wealth, their need, their relationship to the firm, etc..., but ultimately you're talking about incentive structures that wind up with worse client representation for most clients. Despite all those downsides which make people hate them, the major publishers do a good job with their indexing systems and really do add value--when your client can afford them.
Particularly sensitive matters are redacted or are put under seal. For example, if you file your tax returns, you blackout the social security number on every page.
hidden behind the ridiculous PACER system
PACER is what happens when the United States Congress requires an online docketing system be built and used, but also requires it to pay for itself. It is not the court systems fault, it is not PACERs fault, it is squarely a congressional problem, and projects that circumvent the paywall simply increase the amount of money each person that has to use it must pay.
Seriously, tell your congressman that PACER should be federally funded. That's the real solution.
Great idea, but use caution. Take precautions. This is exactly where Aaron Swartz started running into problems. What he did was legal, but the powers that be went after him and murdered him in the process.
Those that claim to have power of law, really do not.
Undiclosed name settled with undisclosed corporation for an undisclosed amount in a matter relating to an undisclosed situation.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I never like the idea of 'precedents' in court. For all sorts of decisions that could go either way, they choose to interpret the law in whatever manner was chosen previously. Like saying, well, the answer is A, because we said it was A before, and we're never wrong.
Despite what other comments say, no one is paying for Westlaw or LexisNexis per hour, and attorneys aren't forced to search as quick as possible. Most firms will have things like all the cases and statutes in their jurisdictions in their subscription, which allows them to search/view them as much as they want, with no additional cost. Occasionally you'll want to view something that isn't part of your subscription, in which case you go "out of plan" and pay to access that content. From there you can either pay per piece of content accessed, or by the hour, but everyone who is cost conscious just pays per piece of content. A lot of junior attorneys don't realize that they can change their settings to pay per piece of content accessed rather than per hour, but that changes once they get their first huge bill for going out of their subscription.
You're not just paying for the cases, you're also getting access to secondary sources like treatises and law review journals. The real value in having Westlaw or Lexis is that they have attorneys summarize the cases, classify them as touching upon different points of law so you can easily find more cases that deal with the same issue, and also let you know if the case has been distinguished or overturned by a newer case.
Source: I'm an attorney who uses Westlaw
Right, and it's a way to punish civil offenders indefinitely, when according to the consitution they have already paid their debt to society in full. Unless a court order is necessary to pull closed cases, the law implies that a civil offender's debt to society is never actually paid in full.