The Free Law Reporter – Open Access to the Law and Beyond
From the post:
Like many projects, the Free Law Reporter (FLR) started out as way to scratch an itch for ourselves. As a publisher of legal education materials and developer of legal education resources, CALI finds itself doing things with the text of the law all the time. Our open casebook project, eLangdell, is the most obvious example.
The theme of the 2006 Conference for Law School Computing was “Rip, Mix, Learn” and first introduced the idea of open access casebooks and what later became the eLangdell project. At the keynote talk I laid out a path to open access electronic casebooks using public domain case law as a starting point. On the ebook front, I was a couple of years early.
The basic idea was that casebooks were made up of cases (mostly) and that it was a fairly obvious idea to give the full text of cases to law faculty so that they could write their own casebooks and deliver them to their students electronically via the Web or as PDF files. This was before the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad legitimized the ebook marketplace.
The Free Law Reporter is currently working on a Solr-based application to handle searching of all the case law they publish.
It has always seemed to me that the law is one of those areas that just crys out for the use of topic maps. The main problem being finding territory that isn’t already mostly occupied with current solutions. Such as linking law to case files (done). Linking depositions together and firms to do the encoding/indexing (done). Linking work to billing department (probably came first).
Sharing data/legal analysis? Across systems? That might be of interest in public interest or large class action suits.