Free the Law: all U.S. case law online • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by gamblor956 » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 6:34 AM UTC

thinkcomp wrote: post #15

No response. --- To: Erik Eckholm From: Aaron Greenspan Date: October 30, 2015 at 1:31 PM Subject: Concerns over Ravel/HLS Deal Mr. Eckholm, We just briefly spoke on the phone about your article ( http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/harvard-law-library-sac... ). I am a Harvard College ’04-’05 alum, one of Professor Zittrain’s former students (I actually had to fight the administration to be permitted entry into his…

It's unfortunate that Aaron's (thinkcomp's?) Harvard Law and Stanford Law educations did not include proper instruction on nonprofit tax law, or he would have known that this is a permissible activity for a nonprofit to engage in.

Though I guess I'm not surprised by this post. After all, Aaron does claim to be the co-founder of Facebook and in the past filed a number of nuisance lawsuits against more than a dozen companies...

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

#42

Post by thinkcomp » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 7:58 AM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #41

thinkcomp wrote: post #15

No response. --- To: Erik Eckholm From: Aaron Greenspan Date: October 30, 2015 at 1:31 PM Subject: Concerns over Ravel/HLS Deal Mr. Eckholm, We just briefly spoke on the phone about your article ( http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/harvard-law-library-sac... ). I am a Harvard College ’04-’05 alum, one of Professor Zittrain’s former students (I actually had to fight the administration to be permitted entry into his…

It's unfortunate that Aaron's (thinkcomp's?) Harvard Law and Stanford Law educations did not include proper instruction on nonprofit tax law, or he would have known that this is a permissible activity for a nonprofit to engage in. Though I guess I'm not surprised by this post. After all, Aaron does claim to be the co-founder of Facebook and in the past filed a number of nuisance lawsuits against more than a dozen com…

You know, at this point I'm hardly surprised by ignorant and mis-informed comments on the internet such as this one, but just for the record, I have never filed a "nuisance lawsuit."

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

#43

Post by rayiner » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 4:08 PM UTC

zekevermillion wrote: post #33

wtvanhest wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fu…

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!

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.

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.

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

#44

Post by kemitchell » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

kemitchell wrote: post #39

DannyBee wrote: post #20

They have to digitize, in part, because all of the states have exclusive publication/etc agreements with westlaw or lexis or .... So you can't get a feed of cases from pretty much anywhere, and often, you aren't allowed to bulk download, etc. Plenty of folks have digitized all the data harvard is talking about here. They are not first. Carl malamud, for example, has scanned all the federal reporters and tons and tons…

I also tried and failed to "buy out" existing scans for permissive public licensing about five years ago. I actually approached the Law Library Microsoft Consortium, which none of the librarians I knew were even aware of, and couldn't get anywhere. Frankly, even now, with Harvard announcement in hand, I doubt I could. It just wasn't a thing the institution knew how to do. "Does not compute." I'm sorry to hear things…

Autocorrection changed "Microfilm" to "Microsoft".

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

#45

Post by zekevermillion » Mon, Jan 25, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #36

zekevermillion wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> 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 ow…

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.