The NYT has an interesting article about the most recent effort. It is quite amazing how walled off supposedly public legal information is, including statutes and cases, as evidenced by the subscription prices that both Westlaw and Lexis/Nexis are able to command. Their services are in fact indispensable. There is no decent free search engine for statutes. For case law, thanks to FindLaw, the situation is somewhat better, however, since none of the free collections can be trusted to be comprehensive, they are only good for linking, not for research. Creating a comprehensive repository of the entire legal code of a nation sure seems like a small but tremendously valuable public service that the government should undertake. What’s required? A server hosting the materials, a simple citation convention (e.g., new page after x words or y characters), and a standard API. Next thing you see is a thriving legal search engine market, network theory applied to cases, graphical links and backlinks, etc. Legal information is almost ideally suited for computerized searches, because of the highly developed citation and linking conventions. I can only imagine how cool Google Law would be. No more “ALLFEDS” and “JLR”. The NYT article quotes Tim Wu:

I’m a legal academic and I woke up one day and thought, “Why can’t I get cases the same way I get stuff on Google?” People should be able to get cases easily. This is a big exception to the way information has opened up over the past decade.

That said, the current incarnation of the public.resource.org project is, well, somewhat underwhelming, unless you happen to look for a case from the 1880s and have a microfiche reader at hand.

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