Coming Soon: More Publishers of Court Rulings?
The NYT reports today on the efforts to make court rulings more widely accessible. The story focuses on Carl Malamud, a “self-styled Robin Hood for the Internet age” who is challenging the two dominant publishers of federal and state court decisions — Westlaw and Lexis. (Editor’s Note: LexisNexis and WSJ.com have a marketing agreement in the North American legal market.)
Malamud runs public.resource.org, a new Web site whose goal is to make government information more publicly accessible. Malamud has placed the first batch of 1,000 pages of court decisions from the 1880s online, using a Thomson microfiche, reports the Times. (Thomson bought Westlaw in 1996.)
Last week, Malamud sent this letter to Thomson arguing that the control of publishing court rulings subverts the original intent of the framers of the Constitution by making the nation’s laws difficult to obtain by those outside the legal profession. A Thomson spokesman said: We have received the letter from Public Resource and Mr. Malamud raises a number of interesting but complex points. We are looking at them now and then will be in touch directly with Mr. Malamud.
In addition to Public Resource, other groups working on similar projects are AltLaw, a JV of Columbia Law’s Program on Law and Technology and the Silicon Flatirons program at Colorado Law, and Justia, a provider of online legal information.
The internet availability of all legal issues is a “sine qua non” of the current age.
We are a society of free speech and the “right to know”. The legal services that choose to charge will have to adapt their services to market in a manner the market will desire.
If a free net service such as public resource desires to put in the time and expense to make public items Public, it would be a crime against the Citizens of the United States to endeavor to stifle such needed service.
let Freedom Reign!
almost all of the courts of appeals have their decisions available on-line already, as does the USSC, without the need for LEXIS or Westlaw
Free state and federal case law and statutes are available now on www.FindLaw.com and www.ChessLaw.com.
What is Mr. Malamud smoking? At the time of the Framers, court decisions were hard enough for judges and lawyers to obtain, let alone the general public. While his view of the present and future deserves applause, his view of history is anachronistic.
Beware of all who bark that there is no need for further pursuits of freedom of speech and knowledge.
Findlaw, Westlaw, Lexis all charge at fee’s only hundreds of dollars in billable hours can afford.
With the recent ruling that there is no such thing as an “unpublished” Opinion it is readily apparent that the Public’s need to know is now greater than ever.
Private data bases are controlled by private directive’s
Public court websites do NOT list all items, inherently guilded toward protective protocols.
As stated
Late Freedom reign.
That demonic-looking seal is scary.
I’m not sure about state courts, but the e-Government Act (of 1995?), require all federal courts to publish their written opinions available online. So while a judge’s opinion is available via the court’s website or CM/ECF, a person is not able to utilize the same researching options available through sites like Lexis and Westlaw.
anyone ever wonder about authenticity? where will this data come from and how will anyone know it actually conforms to what was filed and reported by courts?
anyone ever wonder about authenticity? where will this data come from and how will anyone know it actually conforms to what was filed and reported by courts?
vLex.com is a group based in Spain that’s building a collection of cases, statutes, and journal articles. My old journal gave them pdfs of our contents to make it easier for foreign scholars to get our articles.
Lawyers will have to rely on Lexis and West so long as they produce proprietary headnotes that organize cases and allow you to search for cases by searching the headnotes…Putting everything online is great and a good first step, but we need ways to organize that info. that doesn’t force us to pay a fortune to Lexis and West. Perhaps the law schools, instead of publishing increasingly worthless law journals and reviews, should be creating some of this meta-commentary for free as a service to the public and the profession.
LOL 2:35, IMO the seal looks stoned. I too, wonder about the authenticity issue brought up by contrarian.
As “ex-ed” already posted, our company, vLex.com is also working in bringing US cases to the public for free.
Legal content commoditization is a clear trend, and I am confident that in the not-so-far future both lawyers and the general public will have free access to primary materials.
The issues of the future are quality, research tools, and integration with both secondary content and the user’s worfklow.
Oh, yeah, Thompson’ll be in touch Mr. Malamud, alright. It’ll be their legal department with a cease-and-desist letter.
Oh, yeah, Thompson’ll be in touch with Mr. Malamud, alright. It’ll be their legal department with a cease-and-desist letter.
As Wythe alluded to, the value in Lexis and Westlaw goes far beyond the availability of cases themselves. Headnotes are one example, the ability to shepherdize is another. They also provide a wealth of secondary sources. Electronic access to cases is only a start in providing a useful resource for practicing attorneys.
As has been mentioned, the public may already access opinions of nearly all courts. Thus, Mr. Malamud’s efforts appear intended to overthrow the primacy of Westlaw and Lexis in an attorney’s practice, and that effort is frankly naive. Access to case law is not the issue; having the case law in a searchable, useable format is, and that requires significant post-publication effort. Even searchable cases, standing alone, could not challenge the utility of Westlaw and Lexis’s services; opinions must be cross-linked to other opinions, statutes, and legal journals and other publications to meet a lawyer’s needs. Mr. Malamud is a decade late in his efforts to bring law to the masses, and lawyers will always need more than what he envisions.
As the co-creator of altlaw.org, I agree with the comment that advanced services like sheparding will not be on the free services for some time to come.
However, there is a real need for a quick, fast and free legal search engine that can be used on the fly, Google style.
That’s the idea of altlaw.
Second, large things have small beginnings; and while the free sources won’t be anything like Westlaw for some time, things will slowly change.
Emory Law School back in 1995 or so began a program hosting searchable versions of US Courts of Appeals opinions. For some courts, Emory hosted web sites in cooperation with the the courts. As the Courts of Appeals became more sophisticated, Emory seems to have backed off in the program in 2001/2002 or so. See: http://www.law.emory.edu/1circuit/. It would be interesting to hear their take.
During that period of time, starting in 1993, HyperLaw was downloading cases from all circuits and publishing these on low cost CD-ROM’s - as many as 10,000 new opinions a year.
One observation: law students and law professors (and Judges and big firm private lawyers) have pretty unlimited access to Westlaw and Lexis - so they have always been hard to motivate. The population whose needs are unmet are those other than the above.
The real issue at the Federal court level is the “independence” of the Courts and Judges. Even though the E-Government Act of 2002 requires all the courts to make their opinions available for free in electronic form, the courts seem to do so in their own individualistic ways. And, some courts hide the opinions behind firewalls in such a way that they are not searchable by Google. Why?
Those foundation who want to support public access to the law would be better to fund public ombudspersons.
My take: we pay a lot of taxes and the courts are bringing in revenue through PACER/ECF. I would like to see the law schools agressively push and, even harass, the federal court system to fix the simple problems that exist. It would not be brain surgery.
Let’s take this little issue: most courts do not list the names of attorneys in the court opinion - but the West reports alway have those names - indeed, it seems that courts historically would provide copies of the docket sheets to West so they could easily add this info. But, the electronic versions published by the courts leave out this info. So, one has to PAY the courts on Pacer to get this info - and this is useful information. There are a bunch of little issues like this - taken together, they establish a huge barrier.
Of course, this attorney information included in the West reports is not subject to their copyright claims after the HyperLaw v. West cases. But, who wants to copy them over.
That is not to say there is no place for law schools - but rather than spend the effort to intermediate the decisions from the court systems, it would IMHO be better for the law schools to lean on the courts. Of course, federal judges do not like to be leaned on.
I used to argue with law schools that their “free” services were enabling the courts to continue the half way job done by the courts. Yes, the glass is half-full, but, the empty half has been too empty for too long. Time to tell the barkeep to “fillerup.”
Let’s hope that Chief Justice Roberts will put some skin into this issue. I hope he will. As a Circuit judge, he headed the committee to end the rule prohibiting citation to unpublished opinions.
Alan Sugarman - Founder, HyperLaw
Emory Law School back in 1995 or so began a program hosting searchable versions of US Courts of Appeals opinions. For some courts, Emory hosted web sites in cooperation with the the courts. As the Courts of Appeals became more sophisticated, Emory seems to have backed off in the program in 2001/2002 or so. See: http://www.law.emory.edu/1circuit/. It would be interesting to hear their take.
During that period of time, starting in 1993, HyperLaw was downloading cases from all circuits and publishing these on low cost CD-ROM’s - as many as 10,000 new opinions a year.
One observation: law students and law professors (and Judges and big firm private lawyers) have pretty unlimited access to Westlaw and Lexis - so they have always been hard to motivate. The population whose needs are unmet are those other than the above.
The real issue at the Federal court level is the “independence” of the Courts and Judges. Even though the E-Government Act of 2002 requires all the courts to make their opinions available for free in electronic form, the courts seem to do so in their own individualistic ways. And, some courts hide the opinions behind firewalls in such a way that they are not searchable by Google. Why?
Those foundation who want to support public access to the law would be better to fund public ombudspersons.
My take: we pay a lot of taxes and the courts are bringing in revenue through PACER/ECF. I would like to see the law schools agressively push and, even harass, the federal court system to fix the simple problems that exist. It would not be brain surgery.
Let’s take this little issue: most courts do not list the names of attorneys in the court opinion - but the West reports alway have those names - indeed, it seems that courts historically would provide copies of the docket sheets to West so they could easily add this info. But, the electronic versions published by the courts leave out this info. So, one has to PAY the courts on Pacer to get this info - and this is useful information. There are a bunch of little issues like this - taken together, they establish a huge barrier.
Of course, this attorney information included in the West reports is not subject to their copyright claims after the HyperLaw v. West cases. But, who wants to copy them over.
That is not to say there is no place for law schools - but rather than spend the effort to intermediate the decisions from the court systems, it would IMHO be better for the law schools to lean on the courts. Of course, federal judges do not like to be leaned on.
I used to argue with law schools that their “free” services were enabling the courts to continue the half way job done by the courts. Yes, the glass is half-full, but, the empty half has been too empty for too long. Time to tell the barkeep to “fillerup.”
Let’s hope that Chief Justice Roberts will put some skin into this issue. I hope he will. As a Circuit judge, he headed the committee to end the rule prohibiting citation to unpublished opinions.
Alan Sugarman - Founder, HyperLaw
