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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.l

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
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      RECAP: https://www.recapthelaw.org/ https://www.recapthelaw.org/ Scraps PACER when you use it, injects the docs into the Internet Archive.
    - zekevermillion 11y ago
      PACER is not cheap, nor is it comprehensive. Furthermore, it is not feasible to find out what the law is on PACER. If you already know what cases are important, then you can look them up on PACER I suppose. Or you could go to your local law library (presumably you are a member for a couple hundred bucks a year, right?) and look them up on paper. Why should we need a comprehensive electronically searchable database of casetext or legislation when paper will do just fine? Frankly as a small-time lawyer, your argument that PACER is sufficient or cheap just does not ring true for me. If it did, I wouldn't pay so much for Lexis / Westlaw.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    The laws and legal opinions are public domain. The issue is distribution. Pre-Internet, courts were not in the business of publishing books of their opinions. Making the opinions available at the court house was deemed to be sufficient public access. That treatment was consistent with pretty much every other kind of public record (you had to go into the county clerk's office to view deeds, etc). Post-Internet, many courts publish their opinions online. E.g. the Virginia Supreme Court and Court of Appeals has opinions going back to 1995: http://www.courts.state.va.us/opinions/home.html http://www.courts.state.va.us/opinions/home.html. What private parties provide is a value-add. That's what you purchase access to. They spend the money and go to the effort of digitizing, indexing, and annotating, case law and statutes going back a couple of hundred years. No single public entity can do that, because the 51 individual federal and state court systems are part of 51 distinct sovereign entities, and as a practical matter individual courts even within a single sovereign operate largely autonomously of each other.

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
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    RECAP: https://www.recapthelaw.org/ https://www.recapthelaw.org/ Scraps PACER when you use it, injects the docs into the Internet Archive.
  - zekevermillion 11y ago
    PACER is not cheap, nor is it comprehensive. Furthermore, it is not feasible to find out what the law is on PACER. If you already know what cases are important, then you can look them up on PACER I suppose. Or you could go to your local law library (presumably you are a member for a couple hundred bucks a year, right?) and look them up on paper. Why should we need a comprehensive electronically searchable database of casetext or legislation when paper will do just fine? Frankly as a small-time lawyer, your argument that PACER is sufficient or cheap just does not ring true for me. If it did, I wouldn't pay so much for Lexis / Westlaw.
- rayiner 11y ago
  The laws and legal opinions are public domain. The issue is distribution. Pre-Internet, courts were not in the business of publishing books of their opinions. Making the opinions available at the court house was deemed to be sufficient public access. That treatment was consistent with pretty much every other kind of public record (you had to go into the county clerk's office to view deeds, etc). Post-Internet, many courts publish their opinions online. E.g. the Virginia Supreme Court and Court of Appeals has opinions going back to 1995: http://www.courts.state.va.us/opinions/home.html http://www.courts.state.va.us/opinions/home.html. What private parties provide is a value-add. That's what you purchase access to. They spend the money and go to the effort of digitizing, indexing, and annotating, case law and statutes going back a couple of hundred years. No single public entity can do that, because the 51 individual federal and state court systems are part of 51 distinct sovereign entities, and as a practical matter individual courts even within a single sovereign operate largely autonomously of each other.