Harvard Project Aims To Put Every Court Decision Online, For Free (google.com) 66
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.
What? (Score:1)
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?
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Never take advice (even if it looks good) from someone who doesn't understand the difference between freedoms and rights or liberties. I have the freedom to build and use a nuclear device (up until they catch me) but I do not have the right to do so. When they catch me, they'll take away my freedom. There are many Socialist countries where the citizens have different rights affording varied degrees of liberty. There you go.
Re: What? (Score:1)
You typically have to pay to get the information. You're paying administrative / clerical fees for the information to be released to you.
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Precedence
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Common law (kinda sorta minus Louisiana. Maybe.)
A pretty map [wikimedia.org]
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Which is frankly completely fucked up. Mean while here in the United Kingdom I can just head on down to
https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/j... [judiciary.gov.uk]
And see all judgements in England and Wales. The Scottish courts however seem to be hiding behind the times.
Duopoly (Score:3, Informative)
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 val
Re: Duopoly (Score:2)
Kind of like Microsoft and Adobe software then. The problem is that there is no open or alternative market for these products which is why the prices are so high. I've used lexisnexis and I've found its search functions to be largely underwhelming.
Re: Duopoly (Score:1)
I haven't used Lexis-Nexis or Westlaw in years, but I remember that one of the pricing models was that you paid *by the number of results returned by your query* which was absolutely insane (and thus also made people start with an extremely too narrow, complex initial query.)
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And trial transcripts belong to the court reporters, who have to be paid if you want a transcript. That seems even wronger.
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Anyone can go out and get the decisions from public records and state law libraries, but with millions of pages of case law just among the major Federal and State courts; obtaining, formatting, and publishing all that data fro
Privacy (Score:2)
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You don't even know what the law is unless you have read all cases, and that will take you the better part of your life.
Case law sucks.
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If you are so concerned about privacy, how about don't break the fucking law in the first place.
You don't need to break the law to get sued by a patent troll or some other wacko.
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Re:Privacy (Score:4, Informative)
Court decisions are a matter of public record (if not explicitly sealed), doesn't matter if the involved object.
Redaction (Score:1)
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.
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One additional resource is the local universities. They will not, obviously, have all the varied cases - at least not up to date, but they may have access to thinks like LexisNexis and Westlaw. Even private universities may have access and allow you, a resident, to access this. Some State universities offer cards for no fee or for a nominal fee which may even allow remote access. And, as you stated, one can always shlep to the local court house, find their way to the moldy basement, and read the records the
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On what basis? Court decisions are part of the public record; none of the participants have any right or expectation of privacy. Any information with a legal reason not to be made public will be redacted before the decision is publicized and it would be the redacted version that the Harvard Project would put online.
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Will they censor names from the cases? If not depending on the case, some of the involved might object...
No, they're public records. Unless a judge had ordered that someone's name wasn't revealed (e.g. if a witness was a special forces soldier or spy or something) the names are available for anyone to see already.
Re:What's a ton? (Score:4, Informative)
Someone tell us what the "ton" is that Westlaw and LexisNexis charge.
For a small practice it is in the order of magnitude of $10-20k per year. That only comes from two lawyer friends who I have helped set up IT systems for. They both have very small practices of 2 & 3 lawyers respectively, and this was about 5 years ago. The pricing is hardly a flat and easy to calculate price, however, so different law firms probably pay wildly different amounts based on how they use it.
Think of these companies like Oracle if there was no MySQL for the little guy to use instead.
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The price I gave was per user per year, not per organization.
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What you're missing is that WL/Lexis charge PER HOUR (hundreds of dollars an hour) to search the system. So what it means is that you usually can't do more than a cursory search because of the cost. Very few court cases are the kinds of multi-mega-million cases where large companies will pay anything for their defense.
Honestly at this point Google does a good enough job for most purposes. I literally don't use WL or Lexis for months at a time. It's very rare that you're looking for the needle in the haystac
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Someone tell us what the "ton" is that Westlaw and LexisNexis charge.
The currency in the UK is called the "Pound". (The UK wisely stayed out of the Euro mess). If UK "barristers" and "solicitors" (the Old English term for lawyers) are anything like American lawyers, if you just walk into their offices for a quick chat, you will need to bring a ton of pounds with you.
However, being a barrister or solicitor in the UK is a much more stressful job as the one of a lawyer in the US. Whenever I see UK barristers and solicitors on television, they all have prematurely grey hair.
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That's not really true. Initial consultations are typically a few hundred dollars, not in the thousands. Some lawyers provide initial consultations for free as a gimmick.
Without Citations, Not Useful (Score:2)
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Which is why Aaron Swartz, who was arrested for abusing PACER and trying to republish it entirely, followed up with attempting to download all of JSTOR. Replicating the indexed content could work well, in the short term, but, would eliminate the fees that make organizing and publishing the indexed information possible. He was eventually arrested for that, as well, partly because he kept breaking JSTOR and breaking MIT's access to JSTOR with his abuse.
First example (Score:2)
A lot of wrong information in this thread (Score:2)
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 eithe