An upstart challenges legal information heavyweights
The New York Times recently featured an article about an Internet entrepreneur who has embarked on an effort to make legal decisions available online. This may seem like small news, but the relevance comes from the fact that for decades, this kind of information has been virtually the exclusive domain of two publishing giants: West (still part of Thomson; it was not sold along with Thomson Learning) and LexisNexis. Previous challengers to their dominance first had to fight legal battles to ensure that case law decisions were public domain, but in most cases the challengers have fallen by the wayside or lack the resources to pose much of a threat to the big boys. The new effort is led by Carl Malamud, who has long argued that government information should be available free on the Internet, not locked away and available only to subscription users. I happen to agree with him, and it’s interesting that West and LexisNexis have maintained this monopoly for so long, especially in this age of Wikipedia. One would think that those 2 companies add enough other value to their databases that their livelihoods are not threatened. The NYT article requires registration, but it’s an interesting read.
August 28th, 2007 at 7:39 am
I applaud this effort! As someone who does case searches every month, I know the difficulties involved in finding these court opinions. These days a fairly large amount of recent caselaw is freely available, much of it on LexisOne, a subset of the LexisNexis juggernaut. But they don’t publish everything - U.S. District Court cases are the big exception that I find most inconvenient. For the cases LexisOne doesn’t provide for free, I can sometimes find them through alternate routes - some states publish some fraction of their decisions - but there are many cases that the ordinary user unwilling to pay exorbitant fees just can’t turn up for free. I think that’s unfortunate and unfair. Case law forms a substantial part of actual observed law in the U.S., and every citizen should have access to all of it without having to pay a fee. Yes, one can visit a law library at a local courthouse, but they don’t have everything and paper research is becoming a lost art. Online is the standard now, and that’s where all court decisions belong.