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The Changing Nature of Online Legal Research

By Justin Bathon

I am working on a few different projects on educational law research. As mentioned before I am working on rebuilding the Edjurist. But, I am also working on a survey of educational law related folks and their online legal research needs with Kevin Brady, a professor at North Carolina State. Kevin found an article with some cool new online legal research tools that I wanted to pass along.

The New Tools:

Public.Resource.Org - The latest project from Carl Malamud, it seeks (eventually) to put all federal and state caselaw online for free (they already have 1.8 million pages up - all Supreme Court and Court of Appeals cases). Here is a link to the case law directory. You can use case citations to navigate (first by the volume number and then by the page number).

Public.Resource.Org doesn't seek to have the search power or additional features that West or Lexis have, but it wants to put the cases in a source where other folks (such as myself with the Edjurist) can begin to classify them and make sense of them. I found his letter to Thompson-West particularly interesting ... as is West's response that seems to admit that the actual text of the case in their database is not copyright protected. Presumably, if you could find a way to clean out all of West's workproduct in a case, you could then put that case online for free. Here is Tim Stanley (of Justia now, but a founder of Findlaw) on the project with some more information. Also WisBlawg. 

AltLaw - This is a searchable (advanced & boolean) database of over 750,000 cases. It is a joint project of Columbia Law and Colorado Law Schools. It covers all Supreme Court decisions as well as a good deal of Federal Appellate Court decisions from 1950 forward. It also has some cool features such as a Bluebook copy and paste generator as well as a Shepardizing feature where it links to all other cases in their database that cite the case. This is a tool we can be using in our educational leadership law classes right now.

PreCYdent - Here is the co-founder explaining it himself.

PreCydent has just short of a million case law opinions and over 50,000 statutes it searches. It offers a pretty good search page where you can search by title, jurisdiction, justice, date and citation and have your results ranked in different ways. You can also create a free account where it tracks your searches and allows users to upload new opinions and statutes. It is still in beta testing, but you can use it now. Again, this is another resource we can start using immediately in our classes.

There are other resources too, but I don't want to overwhelm you. The sense you should get, however, is that there are now large, increasingly coordinated efforts to get legal information online for free. That is an extremely positive development.

Full post as published by Edjurist on July 01, 2008 (boomark / email).