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Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
11–20 of 76 posts
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#12Lexis especially makes even scraping public state laws and admin codes difficult, which is extra frustrating because they are the legal publisher of record in a number of states. 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.
Google scholar tried and gave up
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#13Lexis especially makes even scraping public state laws and admin codes difficult, which is extra frustrating because they are the legal publisher of record in a number of states. 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.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#14I do a lot of IL criminal courts research and it's really, really fucking bad out there. 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…
Family court is even worse. You can't even know what's illegal for your kid to do because the civil standards on things like 'neglect' are incredibly nebulous and left for agencies like CPS and family law judges to review, so to find out how they're actually interpreted you would need to see cases and how they played out. Those are ~all wrapped up in secret court hearings.
So basically you have no fucking idea what the law actually is, how it's being enforced, what will happen to you if you don't follow their interpretation, and god forbid you wind up there they can use a lot of methods to keep you from talking about it.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#15The state of Georgia tried to copyright its public written laws. They lost.
https://www.bfvlaw.com/supreme-court-rules-georgia-cannot-cl...
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#16Free Law project is amazing and the best org to counter this duopoly. Please check them out if you haven’t!
PlainSite is another project worth checking out. I have come across both when exploring in the space.
[1]: https://free.law/
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#17I do a lot of IL criminal courts research and it's really, really fucking bad out there. 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…
Consider reaching out to https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/ if any headway can be made legally on these scenarios. They are aggressive, highly recommend. If the legal scaffolding exists to enable FOIA requests, https://www.muckrock.com/ can then do the rest.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#18Lexis especially makes even scraping public state laws and admin codes difficult, which is extra frustrating because they are the legal publisher of record in a number of states. 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.
https://openlaws.us/ https://public.resource.org/ https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-can-kee... https://blog.archive.org/2022/10/19/2022-internet-archive-he...
Neither openlaws nor public.resource actually let you just pull the laws in a common format (or the scrapers) as far as I can tell?
I was thinking something more along the lines of a git repo per state.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://openlaws.us/ https://public.resource.org/ https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-can-kee... https://blog.archive.org/2022/10/19/2022-internet-archive-he...
Neither openlaws nor public.resource actually let you just pull the laws in a common format (or the scrapers) as far as I can tell? I was thinking something more along the lines of a git repo per state.
Who will maintain the git repo per state [1] [2]? There is value in a pipeline that continually ingests this data from various sources and pushes it into the Internet Archive, but if you wish to treat it as authoritative, it must have a human minding it, because of entropy and decay. Even the Python Software Foundation has a budget of ~$5M/year. Hence my openlaws.us example.
If it was as easy as writing a scraper and dumping it all in a bucket or repo, it'd already be done. It's just the usual thankless hard work over time grind.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#20I do a lot of IL criminal courts research and it's really, really fucking bad out there. 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…
> 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.
Is this because a person has to literally transcribe the stenographer's notes into plain English? Is it expensive because it is labor intensive?