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."

And the response...

[daveschroeder (516195)]

...from Thomson, the provider of Westlaw services:

http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/letter_to_west_response.pdf [resource.org]

Seems a pretty reasonable response to his initial query:

http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/letter_to_west.pdf [resource.org]

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.

So....

[fictionpuss (1136565)]

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?

Re:So....

[CRCulver (715279)]

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.

Re:So....

[spiritraveller (641174)]

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.

This is very true. In my solo practice, I tried so hard to make use of the free materials that my state bar makes available online. The system is called Casemaker, and it's actually quite good. But as good as it is, it doesn't come close to what Westlaw provides.

With Westlaw (and Lexis as well), every case has a little symbol in the top left corner. If it is green, it is probably good law. If it is red, then the case is no longer good for at least one point of law. Considering the amount of time that this feature saves, it is well worth the $120 a month that I pay to another law firm to use one of their Westlaw passwords. In fact, if I were to deal directly with West, I would pay at least $200 a month and they would lock me in to a 12 month contract. Other lawyers gladly sign up.

When you think about how much energy it takes to categorize and flag every single case that comes out and cross-reference it with a semi-subjective interpretation of how it treats all the cases that it cites, and to categorize every single paragraph in a case for the specific legal question that it covers, these services are well worth the cost.

If it were just the text of the cases and statutes, then it would be a rip-off. But the text of the cases and statutes are almost always available for free from other sources. Every state government should provide its statutes and caselaw online for free. As far as I know, most of them do. The same is true of the Federal system. But it's hard to make significant use of that if you don't have any of the tools that are available in a good law library. Westlaw and Lexis are like a law library at your fingertips.

Re:So....

[MaceyHW (832021)]

You get what you pay for -just look at the quality of the free editing of that summary. lexisnexis; "any serious law students"; "free online copies . . . for free".

No search feature

[lib3rtarian (1050840)]

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.

Re:No search feature

[Foobar of Borg (690622)]

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.

True, but this is just the beginning. A way to search court documents, track the legal history of the case itself and whether or not all or part of the decision was overturned would make a great open source project.

Re:No search feature

[layer3switch (783864)]

search for keyword...
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abulk.resource.org%2Fcourts.gov%2F+Google [google.com]

or search PDF file...
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abulk.resource.org%2Fcourts.gov%2F+filetype%3Apdf+Google [google.com]

I think, it's a compromise until there is a better way.

New Court Ruling

[Wandering Wombat (531833)]

I wonder how fast he's going to get sued by the legal publishers that the article refers to as "more expensive", and thus quite successful and profitable?

Re:New Court Ruling

[Improv (2467)]

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.

Re:New Court Ruling

[Improv (2467)]

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.

yay

[pak9rabid (1011935)]

Now I can pretend to be a real lawyer, as opposed to a slashdot lawyer.

Now IANAL

[techpawn (969834)]

But I know how to thumb though copies!

I don't see this being used in court, but it's a great resource as much as the public law library is. Law students, people who wish to defend themselves, or just with a strong curiosity can now have a better starting point, if not a better understanding

FindLaw?

[Napoleon The Pig (228548)]

So how is this different than http://www.findlaw.com/ [findlaw.com] ? I've been using that free site to look through cases ranging from the Supreme Court to individual State courts.

If they are . . .

[arizwebfoot (1228544)]

Simply copies of the decisions which were published by the aforementioned courts, then they are as valid as those published by either West or Thompson and can be used in court. Of course you don't get the luxury of the Key Notes, or cross references, but hey, most of the time you only want specific quotes and positions from the body of the decision anyway.

Sorry, I already patented this process

[WillAffleckUW (858324)]

And now electronic publication of all legal rulings online is mine!

My, the USPTO is gullible.

not to nitpick, but...

[to_kallon (778547)]

paid services like LexusNexis

it's actually LexisNexis [lexisnexis.com].

Legal Research the Free Way

[ruggerboy (553525)]

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?

Similar Canadian database

[fishwallop (792972)]

Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis have similar subscription case reporters in Canada, where they cooexist peacefully with this free site [canlii.ca], 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.

Good to hear, but...

[ChePibe (882378)]

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 admit it - I tried a case using Google

[Christoph (17845)]

I got the verdict last Friday in a case I tried myself in federal court: Verdict, Gregerson v. Vilana Financial, Inc. [cgstock.com]

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 [cgstock.com]))

Datamining for Lawyer Batting Averges

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

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?

Well!

[Quiet_Desperation (858215)]

I see my summer reading plans are set! Woot!

They should get Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney to be the site avatar/host now that he's retired.

Volunteer Resources

[jshriverWVU (810740)]

He should get in contact with Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org], 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

[PhasmatisApparatus (1086395)]

IANAL, but I'm about to sound a lot more like one.

I wonder

[vajaradakini (1209944)]

How much do the other sources of these papers charge? If there isn't a way to search this site and look for one of 1.8 million court rulings then this might be a difficult task.
It also doesn't seem unreasonable to charge a small fee for online publications, I'm pretty sure that ApJ and the like charge at least a little to access their articles (fortunately for me, this is covered for computers on campus).

Thank You Carl!

[TheNinjaroach (878876)]

As someone who tried very hard to study law before attempting to enter law school, I learned that almost all court decisions fall back to previous court decisions, commonly known as case law. It was prohibitively expensive for me to access some (all) of the sites listed in TFS, which was the first step of many that has since caused me to lose faith in the way laws are implemented today.

Thank you Carl Malamud for doing your part in providing public access to crucial knowledge about our laws!

Isn't that redundant?

[Guppy06 (410832)]

If it's just SCOTUS decisions you're after, Cornell's Legal Information Institute [cornell.edu] has been around for years.

Carl Malamud is an information hero

[blair1q (305137)]

Carl Malamud is the best thing since scroll wheels.

If only the CFR or USC was published...

[RecycledElectrons (695206)]

If only the federal government would puclish the Code of Federal Regulations and United States Code.

Of course, they would have to live by them, instead of making shit up when they put someone on trial, which is why the federal laws will never be published.

They claim the laws are online at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/ [gpoaccess.gov] but a search will show that 80% of the CFR and USC are actually missing. This way, a poor schlub is accused of breaking a non-existent law by a para-military storm trooper who is too ignorant to know what the Constitution says. The poor schlub protests his innocence, and is knocked to the floor by the bailiff. A few kicks later, he still protests his innocence. If he's lucky enough to be liked by the gestapo, he'll get a trial. (90% of us who ask for a trial are falsely entered as guilt pleas.) During the show trial, he's refused his right to know what he's accused of. All the defense evidence is suppressed, while the prosecutor grand-stands. (Remember, the prosecutor's office is paying the public defenders. Guess what happens to the ones that actually defend someone.) 90% of jurys convict at this point, but the ones that don't (who will never be called for jury duty again) ask for the law. The prosecutor and judge spend a few days whipping up bullshit to sound like a law, and present it to the jury.

At least this was my experience with the courts in the earl 1990's.

So you see, the CFR & USC will NEVER be published by the federal government.

Andy

LexisNexis and Westlaw

[by Anonymous Coward]

I train LexisNexis and Lexis users. Most of y'all have no idea how powerful and sophisticated the LexisNexis -- and more so, Westlaw -- search engines are. This is a homework problem I used to give: Find several court cases in which the guest of a tenant leaned against a porch rail, fell off the porch when the rail collapsed, and sued the landlord.

This shouldn't take more than 10 minutes.

Online recordings of SCOTUS arguments

[akratic (770961)]

Oyez [oyez.org] has both the text of Supreme Court decisions and audio recordings of oral arguments. And that's not all! Other features of the site:

• Justice interments. "Oyez can pinpoint where your favorite Justice is buried, thanks to Google Maps."
• Oyez baseball. Which major league baseball player is most like Justice Samuel Chase? Take the quiz!

hard to access the information

[Snaffler (311068)]

It is a good thing to give the public access to these materials. Your average citizen is not going to sign up for Lexis or Westlaw just to do some heavy legal reading. I know that depending on the size of the firm we are easily talking about five figures PER MONTH for those services.

But when I looked at the website it is obvious that this is not user friendly at all. From what I could tell, the files are either image pdf files or compressed in a tar.bz2 file. I doubt if more than 5% (I am being real generous here) of lawyers have any idea how to unpack that. (windows BZip2 for those who want a graphic interface)

I presume that somebody will OCR it and load it onto a Google-searchable website so the content can be found. Otherwise, this is just an exercise.