6 Goals for Public Access to Case Law by Daniel Lewis and Nik Reed.
From the post:
In March, Mike Lissner wrote for this blog about the troubling state of access to case law – noting with dismay that most of the US corpus is not publicly available. While a few states make official cases available, most still do not, and neither does the federal government. At Ravel Law we’re building a new legal research platform and, like Mike, we’ve spent substantial time troubleshooting access to law issues. Here, we will provide some more detail about how official case law is created and share our recommendations for making it more available and usable. We focus in particular on FDsys – the federal judiciary’s effort in this space – but the ideas apply broadly.
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Goal
Metrics
1. Comprehensive Access to Opinions – Does every federal court release every published and unpublished opinion? – Are the electronic records comprehensive in their historic reach? 2. Opinions that can be Cited in Court – Are the official versions of cases provided, not just the slip opinions? – And/or, can the version released by FDsys be cited in court? 3. Vendor-Neutral Citations – Are the opinions provided with a vendor-neutral citation (using, e.g., paragraph numbers)? 4. Opinions in File Formats that Enable Innovation – Are opinions provided in both human and machine-readable formats? 5. Opinions Marked with Meta-Data – Is a machine-readable language such as XML used to tag information like case date, title, citation, etc? – Is additional markup of information such as sectional breaks, concurrences, etc. provided? 6. Bulk Access to Opinions – Are cases accessible via bulk access methods such as FTP or an API?
OK, but with the exception of bulk access, all of these issues have been solved (past tense) by commercial vendors.
Even bulk access is probably available if you are willing to pay the vendors enough.
But public access does not mean meaningful access.
For example, the goals mentioned above would not enable the average citizen to:
Which experts appear on behalf of which parties, consistently?
Which attorneys appear before particular judges?
What is a judge’s history with particular types of lawsuits?
What are the judge’s past connections with parties or attorneys?
To say nothing of what are the laws, facts, issues and other matters in a case, which are subject to varying identifications?
Public access to case law is a good goal, but not if it only eases the financial burden for existing legal publishers.
And does not provide the public with meaningful access to case law.