Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly

I've been considering trying to launch an OpenStates style scraper project for US laws and admin codes, but haven't had the time to attack 100 more scrapers. Even with AI help, the volume is significant.

Transcripts: Multiple dollars per pages. Want that expedited? Multiply that amount by four. Don't know the court date? Can't get your transcript. Clerks put in the wrong date? Tough luck. Payment for those transcripts? Over Zelle because the court reporters themselves are contractors and get paid independently.

FOIA: IL Judicial system isn't FOIAable. There's a "data request" process that you can go down, but last time I tried by requesting through the chief judge of Cook County, they told me to request the data from the Clerk of Courts. The Clerk of Courts told me I need to speak to the chief judge's office. That went on for 6 months. The docket-level data I've seen from them is... beyond indecipherable. Literally never seen a dataset so indecipherable in my life -- a combination of esoteric codes, hidden encoding schemes, and length-delimited lines.

Court docs: Gotta go downtown if you're not a lawyer or if you're not a "criminal justice partner" to get any, then you have to print them (don't print past 4 or you'll get yelled at). Some journalists have access, but the IL Supreme Court's policies disallow journalists from getting it. So we have a system where only some journalists get access to court documents and fuck everyone else, I guess.

Civil Asset Forfeiture cases: the courts and state's attorneys do everything in their part to separate it from the initiating criminal case. So peoples' cars are being taken by the cops under dubious constitutional grounds and they can't get it back until the criminal case is over. And I've yet to find a consistent way to figure out the initiating criminal case tied to a civil asset forfeiture. I've yet to find anything like a policy doc that says it's intentional to obfuscate the criminal case from the civil case, but I can't think of any reason why it would be like this if it wasn't intentional. FOIA through the State's Attorney? Nah, they don't respond, or they give nonsense denials that require litigation.

I could go on, but. Fuck. It's bad out there and it hides so much suffering. I highly encourage folk to give court watching a try. You'll be shocked how much you'll learn.