A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free | NYT | 8.20.07
The domination of two legal research services over the publication of federal and state court decisions is being challenged by an Internet gadfly who has embarked on an ambitious project to make more than 10 million pages of case law available free online.
The project is the latest effort of Carl Malamud, an activist who founded public.resource.org in March, with the broad intent of building “public works” accessible via the network, and with the specific plan to force the federal government to make information more publicly accessible.
The unifying vision of all of the challengers to the current system is a Wikipedia-like effort to make the nation’s laws freely searchable by Internet search engines. They believe this will lead to a public system of annotation of the laws by legal scholars as well as bloggers, giving the American public much richer access to the nation’s laws.
Public.Resource.Org’s letter (PDF) to West | 8.14.07
One of the joys of the Internet is to see information previously considered the domain of a few specialists reenter the public domain and become once again relevant to all people.
Excellent!