Although US case law is in the public domain, in practice access to it can be very expensive. The AltLaw project is an attempt to provide free access to it.
This is an interview with Stuart Sierra, one of the developers, and current maintainer, of the project.
How much of US case law is already in AltLaw? Would it be feasible for the project as it stands to provide access to all of it, or would more resources be necessary?
Currently, AltLaw contains approximately 800,000 federal court cases. This comprises all U.S. Supreme Court cases from 1754 to the present, and all U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cases from about 1950 to the present. We cannot guarantee 100% coverage of these periods, however, as we lack resources for extensive cross-checking and verification.
Whether AltLaw could ever encompass “all” U.S. case law is a difficult question. All government-published information in the U.S. is, by definition, public domain and uncopyrightable. Since the late 1800s, however, legal information in the U.S. has been in the control of commercial publishers. West Publishing (now a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters) was designated the official Reporter of federal court decisions, and has repeatedly and aggressively used this position to prevent other distributors from entering the market. The only successful competitor to West’s monopoly was LexisNexis, and the two services are now referred to as the “Wexis” duopoly.
Law schools such as Columbia, where AltLaw originated, receive deeply discounted access to West’s and Lexis’ online database services, but the contracts for those services prohibit bulk downloading or redistribution. This is how West and Lexis maintain quasi-ownership of public domain documents.
So the problem of providing access to additional case law becomes a problem of getting access to it in the first place. In 2007, Carl Malamud, of the non-profit public.resource.org, purchased electronic text of about 700,000 federal court cases from FastCase, a smaller competitor to West and Lexis. This collection, which Malamud makes freely available at bulk.resource.org/, forms the core of AltLaw’s database.
Informal estimates put the cost of acquiring all historical federal case law in electronic form at around $10 million. Even if that were possible, however, providing access to new cases as they are released is still problematic. All federal courts below the Supreme Court — and therefore, all practicing lawyers — use a system of case citation keyed to the page numbers in printed volumes of West’s Federal Reporter. When a new decision is released, it does not have a citation until the relevant Reporter is published several months later. West does not share the citation information with anyone else — in fact, they consider it their “copyrighted” property — so other publishers such as Lexis must license it from them.
Furthermore, courts typically do not take editorial responsibility for their own decisions. While the Circuit Appeals courts have published new decisions on their web sites since the late 1990s, these are not “official” documents, and are often not even copy-edited. The “official” version of a court decision is only available from West.
District courts — the lowest federal courts — are even worse. Most of their decisions are only available online through a government-run system called PACER, which charges a fee of $0.08 per page to download documents.
Note that this entire discussion only covers federal case law. State courts represent yet another problem. While federal decisions are, in theory, public domain, states are allowed to copyright their judicial decisions, and some do so.
So the short answer is… no. Amassing free, electronic text of all U.S. case law would be a multi-million dollar project requiring a large staff.
What can people do with AltLaw that was too expensive or impossible in the past? What do you hope they will do, either with the site or with the raw data?
AltLaw enables deep legal research based on primary sources. Previously, this information was only available in a law library or through West/Lexis, for which a commercial subscription costs upwards of $400 per hour.
We have three audiences in mind for AltLaw. One is the practicing lawyer in an organization that cannot afford the major commercial databases, such as a small law firm, public defender’s office, or pro-bono legal service. The second is the researcher who is interested in primary legal sources but is not engaged directly in the study or practice of law, such as a journalist or historian. The third group, which has yet to fully materialize, consists of researchers seeking to apply modern computational techniques to the study of law.
In what ways could case law be data mined or presented in novel ways? How could (or should) AltLaw influence standard judiciary practice in the future?
I have written extensively about this here: http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2009/08/05/tidying-up-the-law/
Additional articles on that blog cover other aspects of judiciary practice: http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/
For more examples of novel data mining applied to legal research, visit: computationallegalstudies.com/
On another note, I should admit that AltLaw is hardly the only player in this arena. The first publisher of free legal information on the Internet was the Cornell Legal Information Institute, which focuses on Supreme Court decisions and federal statutes, and with which AltLaw
collaborates. Since AltLaw launched in late 2006, a number of other services have started providing free access to legal information, including justia.com, plol.org, and precydent.com, all run by for-profit companies with varying business models. In addition, Lexis, West, and other companies provide low-cost services aimed at the small-firm lawyer.
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