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."

Re:No search feature

[Foobar of Borg]

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.

Legal Research the Free Way

[ruggerboy]

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?

Good to hear, but...

[ChePibe]

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]

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]

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?

Volunteer Resources

[jshriverWVU]

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.

Re:New Court Ruling

[Improv]

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:No search feature

[layer3switch]

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:Datamining for Lawyer Batting Averges

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a site that provides close to that info.. http://www.lawyers.com/ [lawyers.com] No batting averages, but there are peer reviews. Thats about as good as you're gonna get with attorneys.. They usually protect their own.

LexisNexis and Westlaw

[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.

Re:No search feature

[Teancum]

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 necessarily need a J.D. in order to understand case law, but this seems to be a bit higher level of knowledge than the typical internet user, or even Wikipedia contributor.