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.

Re:

[urcreepyneighbor (1171755)]

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

Holy crap! A legalese laced letter a mere mortal can comprehend!

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:

[biolitch (1242242)]

And the common man will need access to these if there have already been 1.8 million court cases.

Re:

[Planesdragon (210349)]

And the common man will need access to these if there have already been 1.8 million court cases.

Hmm...

The US Constitution was enacted in 1787 -- 220 years ago.

There are three levels of federal court, including 94 District Courts. Each Court can have more than one judge -- but even if there wasn't, that only leaves each court about 88 cases per year -- that is, one every four days.

And that's not counting the Appellate courts, or SCOTUS itself.

Re:

[treeves (963993)]

FYI, it looks like the database goes back to 1880, not back to 1787. But that means one every other day.
I'd guess that the number of cases per day plotted on a graph over time, since 1787, looks a lot like the infamous hockey stick graph, or at least like a scimitar.

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".

Re:

[somersault (912633)]

Would you want 10 Terabytes of unsorted data? Or would you want 1 Gigabyte of sorted data?

Hmmm.. the internet .. or wikipedia.. PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME CHOOSE!!! :(

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:

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

I expect someone will use something like Nutch [apache.org] to index and make this searchable pretty soon.

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:

[Teancum (67324)]

If this doesn't have "new wiki project" written all over it, I don't know what else could.

While 1.8 million records does seem like quite a bit, Wikipedia (at least the English edition) has close to that many articles.

The real question would be this: What kind of person would be interested in digging into case histories and provide the meta linking information in order to make this sort of information useful?

Next question: What sort of skills would be necessary to make this happen? I know you don't necessa

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.

Re:

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

Don't worry ... the Google spider will crawl his site eventually, if it hasn't already.

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.

Re:

[Actually, I do RTFA (1058596)]

but the possibility of unqualified opinion and wikiculture impacting law may be an unpleasant risk... ). 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...

I found a group of highly knowledgable legal experts [slashdot.org] who don't mind sharing their expertise online for free.

Re:

[falconwolf (725481)]

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?

These businesses already have had some competition for years and it's still available so unless he copies what they offer directly, summaries and such, I don't think it's very likely he'll be sued. Findlaw does this, for instance searching for "John Gilmore" [findlaw.com] has the ruling in his case as well as commentary on it.

Falcon

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

Re:

[KiahZero (610862)]

Perhaps I'm just spoiled by my particular school, but I don't pay for Westlaw or LexisNexis. In fact, vendors from both companies routinely throw themselves at myself and my classmates to convince us to use their service.

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.

Re:

[falconwolf (725481)]

Yea, I've been using Findlaw for years.

Falcon

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].

Re:

[magarity (164372)]

Were you driven to point that out?

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?

Re:

[afidel (530433)]

It's only unsearchable today, give it a few weeks until someone OCR's the whole bunch and creates a searchable index. I'm not sure if there's a suitable open source OCR engine but there are plenty of commercial engines that can take an image PDF and output a PDF with both the image and the results of the OCR process as an additional underlying layer. Those files can easily be indexed by a multitude of open source indexing engines like Lucerne.

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.

Re:

[ebingo (533762)]

Try www.canlii.org [canlii.org] to go to the website.

Re:

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

Until Malamud's site does this it's not true competition to the subscription sites.

Then again, I don't get the impression that that is what Mr. Malamud is trying to be.

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.

It's not micromanagement...

[ChePibe (882378)]

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 a

Yup.

[ChePibe (882378)]

The big problem with the restatements is that they are not the result of legislative input.

On the other hand, the restatements also cover areas that legislatures have often not covered in their own proceedings - areas of law that have traditionally been left to the common law and which the people have, apparently, seen no need to change. But when the people - through the legislature - do change them, the people obviously have the power to overrule the restatements.

simplifying law

[falconwolf (725481)]

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.

Falcon

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]))

Re:

[kidgenius (704962)]

Congrats. I remember reading your story a few months ago.

Re:

[jellie (949898)]

Congratulations! I also remember reading your story a while back. The court opinion is quite a fascinating read too. Just curious - how much money did you spend on lawyer's fees and other costs, and how much time did you spend doing research, preparing motions, and being in court?

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?

Re:

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

That's OK. If they take my case, then I'll fit their stats. So the process would be what I'd already do: start with the best rated ones and find the first who'll take my case. If their batting average is too low, then I'll drop it.

Re:

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

Well, like any opening of info about a mysterious but important and valuable process, especially involving lawyers, it would have many results, some conflicting.

The main motivation for lawyers is a legally enforceable obligation to take cases that meet legal requirements of validity. Lawyers cannot just refuse cases they aren't certain to win, of the case is legally sound (eg. there's evidence they're right, there's less evidence they're wrong, there's precedent in law, they have standing to sue, it's not f

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.

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.