Free the Law: all U.S. case law online

They are projecting to have Federal and CA, NY, MA, IL, TX done in 2016, and the rest of the states in 2017. I'm curious why those particular states are being done first.

In particular, I'd have expected Delaware to be in the first group, because so many public companies are incorporated there, and so the decisions of its courts on corporate and stockholder issues have major national importance.

Offhand, I can't think of why MA or TX would worked on ahead of DE. Of course it is possible that the volume of material from each state is a factor...it could be that DE is being done in the first group but has a lot of material so won't finish in 2016. I've never taken a look at the volume of each state's output and so have no idea which state courts handle the most cases.

Didn't a Stanford student already do this, posting XML of all federal/state judge opinions on his blog?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7026960 (discussion)

https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/ (free mirror, looks like)

It's a great concept, and more/newer is better, but it seems odd for Harvard to act like they're the first to pull it off.

No, not "freely accessable online", not until the 8 year exclusivity agreement with Ravel expires. It's a pay service with a free tier.[1]

"Under the Harvard-Ravel agreement, Ravel is paying all of the costs of digitizing case law. HLS owns the resulting data, and Ravel has an obligation to offer free public access to all of the digitized case law on its site and to provide non-profit developers with free ongoing API access (Ravel may charge for-profit developers). Ravel will have a temporary exclusive commercial license for a maximum of eight years."

"For the duration of that commercial license, there will be a restriction on bulk download of the case law, with some notable exceptions. Harvard may provide bulk access to members of the Harvard community and to outside research scholars (so long as they accept contractual prohibitions on redistribution)."[2]

[1] https://www.ravellaw.com/plans

[2] http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/12/oa/harvard-launches-fre...

Their value is in categorization, summarization, searching, and "shepardizing." Shepardizing checks to see if a later case mentions, contradicts, conflicts, distinguishes etc. the case.

Currently most of this is actually done by humans. Eventually more and more will be done by computer analysis. But a quick google like algorithm doesn't really work. Google scholar has most case law and its just not effective.

There is quite a bit of IP law handled in Texas thanks to patent trolls in East Texas. So I can see there being some interest in getting it covered. MA? Maybe it is interesting from a historical perspective since it is one of the older areas of the US.