Its crazy insane that citizens who are expected to follow the law cannot have access to law ? what does that even mean ? Do we at-least know some high level numbers on how many law/opinions/cases texts are not freely available to citizens ?
Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
41–50 of 76 posts
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 e…
Yes and yes. I'm sure there's historical or possibly ethical reasons for it being this way, but I don't understand why it's not the clerk of court's job. Something to figure out!
Over here in Sweden they justify the fees for printed cases by the paper cost. Cheaper than the number you mentioned but still quite costly if you want all nontrivial verdicts. And quite silly when they deliver pdfs..
Then every single case needs to have all PII redacted before it is made searchable, but that is a different story.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#43On a tangential note, this seems ripe for LLM analysis/summarization to digest the legal code down so mere mortals could better understand it.
It would also be great for pointing out all the loopholes that have been built in by our owners.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#44On a tangential note, this seems ripe for LLM analysis/summarization to digest the legal code down so mere mortals could better understand it. It would also be great for pointing out all the loopholes that have been built in by our owners.
There is, but that depends a whole lot on access to content that can be hard to get - both case data and books in law are essential.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#45If you're trying to fix anything relating to public policy, politics, &c., without fixing this you are wasting your time. You will make a bigger difference adopting a local stretch of highway and picking up litter. It is maddening to see generation after generation learn this the hard way. FLP's CourtListener RECAP hits hard, but it has no counterparts either worldwide or within the US. If it goes offline, democracy…
There is little worse action you can take than discouraging others from doing anything. Far worse problems than PACER have been solved. Just because you've been unsuccessful doesn't necessarily mean others will be.
PACER is currently a "lesser concern" because of FLP, compared to state court dockets in backwards states like California and New York (affecting some 60 million people alone), though by no means solved.
And if by discouraging you mean encouraging people to adopt freeways and pick up litter, I definitely intended to set expectations about how much might be achieved without addressing fundamental free law movement issues.
We do need help on Wikipedia though, but that is more ancillary and general.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#46"The fees the federal government charges for court documents are significant. PACER charges users $0.10 for every page users search and access, and $30 per name or item searched plus $0.10 per page per document per month, albeit with a max of $3 per individual document." It's funny how these numbers sound very reasonable on their face, especially if used for human review. But if you consider programmatic searches, 10…
Your point makes sense, but for law-abiding citizens, it’s hard to justify: people are expected to understand and comply with the law, yet the practical record of how it’s enforced (dockets/filings) is paywalled. If the goal is to fund the system or deter abuse, that’s what general taxation and targeted anti-scraping limits are for, metering “public” records mostly punishes ordinary users and small competitors, not heavy institutional users.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#47On a tangential note, this seems ripe for LLM analysis/summarization to digest the legal code down so mere mortals could better understand it. It would also be great for pointing out all the loopholes that have been built in by our owners.
There is, but that depends a whole lot on access to content that can be hard to get - both case data and books in law are essential.
Riches are in the niches.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#48On a tangential note, this seems ripe for LLM analysis/summarization to digest the legal code down so mere mortals could better understand it. It would also be great for pointing out all the loopholes that have been built in by our owners.
One would need the data.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also the states themselves can’t update their own laws. In Nevada the code (NRS) from Nevada’s website is out of date. Very embarrassing imo and hard to get it to work bc AI can’t have a trusted source of data.
Why can't Nevada update its own laws on its own website?
The answer is probaly embedded within the concept of codification of acts. Legislatures pass acts, which are kind of like diffs for statutory law. But there is no base document, just a series of diffs from the beginning. Somewhere along the way, someone did a lot of work to “codify” the law, and when you go look up 18 USC 1001, and then click “next,” you are taking advantage of the codification process.
But the person who did the codification has some rights thereto, meaning that while NV can post every act that passed the legislature, they can’t publish someone else’s codification of the statutes.
This matters very little because everyone just has Westlaw and no one uses the state legislature’s website to cite statutes.
Re: Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
#50I 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…
I assume there's some reason you can't, but it'd be nice if one could simply declare that the civil forfeiture case is invalid when no criminal case exists, and place the burden of proof back where it belongs.