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Is caselaw data an artifact originating from the public dollars which funded the whole show to begin with? Why isn't this data available for free to any Americ

Is caselaw data an artifact originating from the public dollars which funded the whole show to begin with? Why isn't this data available for free to any American Citizen who pays taxes? In the form of a torrent, the distribution cost is negligible. A reasonable duplication fee seemed reasonable back when replicating vast amounts of information involved massive amounts of paper and toner. But today.. I don't understand. I'm curious enough to have asked this same question on Quora [0]. YMMV. [0] https://www.quora.com/unanswered/How-can-LexisNexis-own-the-data-originating-from-the-publicly-funded-legal-system https://www.quora.com/unanswered/How-can-LexisNexis-own-the-...

codingdave 8y ago
It is available. Go to any law school library, look on the shelves. But that doesn't mean that private entities who via their own labor, digitize it, are required to give your their resulting digital datasets. All the more reason to be thankful that these folk are doing exactly that, and giving us tools to get at the data.
JackC 8y ago
Caselaw data is public domain, but it's very expensive to digitize -- partly because it's mostly stored on paper, and partly because it's mixed together with copyrighted material. For this project we had to scan 40,000 volumes of caselaw. We used a high speed scanner at the Harvard Law Library, and went through about 40 million pages at a rate of 500,000 pages a week over a couple of years. The pages then had to be redacted of copyrighted material like headnotes inserted by private publishers, since courts typically don't publish the cases themselves, and those redactions had to be checked by humans. That work was funded by a startup, Ravel, which is why we ended up with temporary limits on commercial use of the data. No later than March 2024, however, it will all be fully available for bulk download by anyone in the world. If necessary we'll set up a torrent. :) (Hopefully earlier! For any state that starts officially publishing its caselaw in digital form, we can immediately release their caselaw back to the beginning, as we have already for Illinois and Arkansas.)
- extortionist 8y ago
  One note that seems relevant to the grandparent comment, Ravel is now owned by LexisNexis.
RNCTX 8y ago
I worked for one of the first few web based services. West Law was the defacto then (2000/2001). They even sued us and claimed that page numbers used in citations were proprietary information. To answer your question re: its origins being publicly funded, no. When there was no internet database to connect to people bought the books from a print publisher (either at huge maintenance cost or sparingly at the expense of not knowing what was current). The print publishers bore the cost and reaped the profits of consolidating all of this data. To answer the next obvious question: yes, there are probably people in prison or not depending on whether a small town law library bought the updates from West Law in a timely fashion 20 years ago.
rayiner 8y ago
> Is caselaw data an artifact originating from the public dollars which funded the whole show to begin with? Yes and no. It’s important to realize that the US courts (1) are a distributed system comprising hundreds of autonomous courts; and (2) predate the internet, photocopiers, telephones, telegraph, a large centralized federal government, and indeed the federal government itself. Today court opinions are published as PDFs on courts’ websites. But back in the day, they were published as slip opinions stored in the clerk’ office of each individual court. Private companies like West undertook to collect cases from all these hundreds of courts and publish them in books called “reporters.” Back then (and even today) that meant sending someone out to hundreds of courts to collect and copy the decisions. They not only published the opinions, they organized everything within a comprehensive ontology of their own creation, and added their own annotations. When computers were invented a century later, these publishers were well placed to digitize their collections and offer access to them over pre-internet electronic systems. Then, of course, those moved to the Internet. Even collecting these cases together on a going forward basis is no easy task. As noted above, the courts are decentralized, by design, even within the federal system. Just getting the decisions from hundreds of courts and uploading them would be an expensive endeavor. Nothing stops someone from undertaking this—court decisions themselves cannot be copyrighted and you’re free to go to and court and ask to copy published decisions.
deleted 8y ago
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codingdave 8y ago

It is available. Go to any law school library, look on the shelves. But that doesn't mean that private entities who via their own labor, digitize it, are required to give your their resulting digital datasets. All the more reason to be thankful that these folk are doing exactly that, and giving us tools to get at the data.

JackC 8y ago

Caselaw data is public domain, but it's very expensive to digitize -- partly because it's mostly stored on paper, and partly because it's mixed together with copyrighted material. For this project we had to scan 40,000 volumes of caselaw. We used a high speed scanner at the Harvard Law Library, and went through about 40 million pages at a rate of 500,000 pages a week over a couple of years. The pages then had to be redacted of copyrighted material like headnotes inserted by private publishers, since courts typically don't publish the cases themselves, and those redactions had to be checked by humans. That work was funded by a startup, Ravel, which is why we ended up with temporary limits on commercial use of the data. No later than March 2024, however, it will all be fully available for bulk download by anyone in the world. If necessary we'll set up a torrent. :) (Hopefully earlier! For any state that starts officially publishing its caselaw in digital form, we can immediately release their caselaw back to the beginning, as we have already for Illinois and Arkansas.)

extortionist 8y ago
One note that seems relevant to the grandparent comment, Ravel is now owned by LexisNexis.

RNCTX 8y ago

I worked for one of the first few web based services. West Law was the defacto then (2000/2001). They even sued us and claimed that page numbers used in citations were proprietary information. To answer your question re: its origins being publicly funded, no. When there was no internet database to connect to people bought the books from a print publisher (either at huge maintenance cost or sparingly at the expense of not knowing what was current). The print publishers bore the cost and reaped the profits of consolidating all of this data. To answer the next obvious question: yes, there are probably people in prison or not depending on whether a small town law library bought the updates from West Law in a timely fashion 20 years ago.

rayiner 8y ago

> Is caselaw data an artifact originating from the public dollars which funded the whole show to begin with? Yes and no. It’s important to realize that the US courts (1) are a distributed system comprising hundreds of autonomous courts; and (2) predate the internet, photocopiers, telephones, telegraph, a large centralized federal government, and indeed the federal government itself. Today court opinions are published as PDFs on courts’ websites. But back in the day, they were published as slip opinions stored in the clerk’ office of each individual court. Private companies like West undertook to collect cases from all these hundreds of courts and publish them in books called “reporters.” Back then (and even today) that meant sending someone out to hundreds of courts to collect and copy the decisions. They not only published the opinions, they organized everything within a comprehensive ontology of their own creation, and added their own annotations. When computers were invented a century later, these publishers were well placed to digitize their collections and offer access to them over pre-internet electronic systems. Then, of course, those moved to the Internet. Even collecting these cases together on a going forward basis is no easy task. As noted above, the courts are decentralized, by design, even within the federal system. Just getting the decisions from hundreds of courts and uploading them would be an expensive endeavor. Nothing stops someone from undertaking this—court decisions themselves cannot be copyrighted and you’re free to go to and court and ask to copy published decisions.

deleted 8y ago

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