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If you want free access to all the law, YC's Casetext.com provides it and they provide it for free for everyone right now. Try searching for cases that interes

If you want free access to all the law, YC's Casetext.com provides it and they provide it for free for everyone right now. Try searching for cases that interest you, and you can read about them and lots of comments from attorneys. Disclaimer - I know most of the team, but I think anyone would agree after reviewing casetext.com, ravel and the other companies trying to do this that casetext is by far the most open and the only real free option for everyone.

smallreader 11y ago
There's actually several others. "Free the Law" is not even the first Ivy League entry in this space. Cornell has the Legal Information Institute (https://www.law.cornell.edu/ https://www.law.cornell.edu/) which is entirely free. In the for-profit space, FindLaw has been around forever. There's still nothing yet that really competes with Westlaw or LexisNexis for professionals though. It's not simply a matter of indexing all the decisions and adding a few hyperlinks. The stuff they are redacting for copyright reasons is stuff that you want when you are doing real research.
- wtvanhest 11y ago
  > There's still nothing yet that really competes with Westlaw or LexisNexis for professionals though. I have a few friends at big law and they have 100% access to Westlaw or Lexis which means they do not need any of the alternatives at this point. That said, many, many, many small to mid-sized firms cannot afford access to Westlaw or Lexis which is why these various initiatives and companies are so important. At a fundamental level, these services all help improve the odds you will win a case when hiring a smaller law firm. A lot of people comment here about how there are not society improving companies anymore (uber for food delivery), but I am a believer that each of these companies in this space are fundamentally important to our society.
  - zekevermillion 11y ago
    You are missing the point. Why is it that in a "Democracy" we have to purchase access to the law through a private party? Ignorance of the law is no defense, but I have to pay to relieve that ignorance? Come on!
    - wtvanhest 11y ago
      Casetext makes the law 100% free...
      - kemitchell 11y ago
        Big fan of Jake and his team. Pretty sure they're stuck licensing case data, like everybody else. That means no unrestricted bulk downloads of permissively licensed case data for end users. That data is "free" insofar as you can read it on Casetext without payment. That's great---I do it a lot---but it's a far cry from what Public Resource aimed to do and what Harvard has now promised to do. In some situations, like Lexis Nexis' relationship to the State of California, there were are are already "walled garden" interfaces where you can go to read and download case law one case at a time. That hasn't opened the playing field for viable, comprehensive alternatives to Wexis, which is probably why Wexis can be convinced to offer them. If and when the data become truly open, I can't wait to see where Casetext goes.
    - tzs 11y ago
      > Why is it that in a "Democracy" we have to purchase access to the law through a private party? You don't. What you have to purchase through a private party is electronic access to the annotations that the private party adds to the cases. If you just want the public domain cases you don't need to purchase anything from a private party. First, there is PACER [1]. PACER is not free, but it is pretty cheap and it is owned and operated by government, not by a private party. The documents retrieved through PACER are usually public domain, and so once someone gets a particular case they can legally share it. I don't have a link handy, but I believe there are startups that gather together cases contributed this way to build a growing body of PACER material that you can get without having to pay even the small PACER fees. You can also get the material for free at government and school law libraries that are generally open to the public. [1] https://www.pacer.gov https://www.pacer.gov

smallreader 11y ago

There's actually several others. "Free the Law" is not even the first Ivy League entry in this space. Cornell has the Legal Information Institute (https://www.law.cornell.edu/ https://www.law.cornell.edu/) which is entirely free. In the for-profit space, FindLaw has been around forever. There's still nothing yet that really competes with Westlaw or LexisNexis for professionals though. It's not simply a matter of indexing all the decisions and adding a few hyperlinks. The stuff they are redacting for copyright reasons is stuff that you want when you are doing real research.

wtvanhest 11y ago
> There's still nothing yet that really competes with Westlaw or LexisNexis for professionals though. I have a few friends at big law and they have 100% access to Westlaw or Lexis which means they do not need any of the alternatives at this point. That said, many, many, many small to mid-sized firms cannot afford access to Westlaw or Lexis which is why these various initiatives and companies are so important. At a fundamental level, these services all help improve the odds you will win a case when hiring a smaller law firm. A lot of people comment here about how there are not society improving companies anymore (uber for food delivery), but I am a believer that each of these companies in this space are fundamentally important to our society.
- zekevermillion 11y ago
  You are missing the point. Why is it that in a "Democracy" we have to purchase access to the law through a private party? Ignorance of the law is no defense, but I have to pay to relieve that ignorance? Come on!
  - wtvanhest 11y ago
    Casetext makes the law 100% free...
    - kemitchell 11y ago
      Big fan of Jake and his team. Pretty sure they're stuck licensing case data, like everybody else. That means no unrestricted bulk downloads of permissively licensed case data for end users. That data is "free" insofar as you can read it on Casetext without payment. That's great---I do it a lot---but it's a far cry from what Public Resource aimed to do and what Harvard has now promised to do. In some situations, like Lexis Nexis' relationship to the State of California, there were are are already "walled garden" interfaces where you can go to read and download case law one case at a time. That hasn't opened the playing field for viable, comprehensive alternatives to Wexis, which is probably why Wexis can be convinced to offer them. If and when the data become truly open, I can't wait to see where Casetext goes.
  - tzs 11y ago
    > Why is it that in a "Democracy" we have to purchase access to the law through a private party? You don't. What you have to purchase through a private party is electronic access to the annotations that the private party adds to the cases. If you just want the public domain cases you don't need to purchase anything from a private party. First, there is PACER [1]. PACER is not free, but it is pretty cheap and it is owned and operated by government, not by a private party. The documents retrieved through PACER are usually public domain, and so once someone gets a particular case they can legally share it. I don't have a link handy, but I believe there are startups that gather together cases contributed this way to build a growing body of PACER material that you can get without having to pay even the small PACER fees. You can also get the material for free at government and school law libraries that are generally open to the public. [1] https://www.pacer.gov https://www.pacer.gov