
Free the Law: all U.S. case law online - fitzwatermellow
http://librarylab.law.harvard.edu/projects/free-the-law
======
Animats
No, not "freely accessable online", not until the 8 year exclusivity agreement
with Ravel expires. It's a pay service with a free tier.[1]

 _" Under the Harvard-Ravel agreement, Ravel is paying all of the costs of
digitizing case law. HLS owns the resulting data, and Ravel has an obligation
to offer free public access to all of the digitized case law on its site and
to provide non-profit developers with free ongoing API access (Ravel may
charge for-profit developers). Ravel will have a temporary exclusive
commercial license for a maximum of eight years."_

 _" For the duration of that commercial license, there will be a restriction
on bulk download of the case law, with some notable exceptions. Harvard may
provide bulk access to members of the Harvard community and to outside
research scholars (so long as they accept contractual prohibitions on
redistribution)."_[2]

[1] [https://www.ravellaw.com/plans](https://www.ravellaw.com/plans)

[2] [http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/12/oa/harvard-launches-
fre...](http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/12/oa/harvard-launches-free-the-law-
digitization-project)

~~~
wtvanhest
If you want free access to all the law, YC's Casetext.com provides it and they
provide it for free for everyone right now.

Try searching for cases that interest you, and you can read about them and
lots of comments from attorneys.

Disclaimer - I know most of the team, but I think anyone would agree after
reviewing casetext.com, ravel and the other companies trying to do this that
casetext is by far the most open and the only real free option for everyone.

~~~
smallreader
There's actually several others. "Free the Law" is not even the first Ivy
League entry in this space. Cornell has the Legal Information Institute
([https://www.law.cornell.edu/](https://www.law.cornell.edu/)) which is
entirely free.

In the for-profit space, FindLaw has been around forever.

There's still nothing yet that really competes with Westlaw or LexisNexis for
professionals though. It's not simply a matter of indexing all the decisions
and adding a few hyperlinks. The stuff they are redacting for copyright
reasons is stuff that you want when you are doing real research.

~~~
wtvanhest
> There's still nothing yet that really competes with Westlaw or LexisNexis
> for professionals though.

I have a few friends at big law and they have 100% access to Westlaw or Lexis
which means they do not need any of the alternatives at this point. That said,
many, many, many small to mid-sized firms cannot afford access to Westlaw or
Lexis which is why these various initiatives and companies are so important.

At a fundamental level, these services all help improve the odds you will win
a case when hiring a smaller law firm. A lot of people comment here about how
there are not society improving companies anymore (uber for food delivery),
but I am a believer that each of these companies in this space are
fundamentally important to our society.

~~~
zekevermillion
You are missing the point. Why is it that in a "Democracy" we have to purchase
access to the law through a private party? Ignorance of the law is no defense,
but I have to pay to relieve that ignorance? Come on!

~~~
tzs
> Why is it that in a "Democracy" we have to purchase access to the law
> through a private party?

You don't. What you have to purchase through a private party is electronic
access to the annotations that the private party adds to the cases. If you
just want the public domain cases you don't need to purchase anything from a
private party.

First, there is PACER [1]. PACER is not free, but it is pretty cheap and it is
owned and operated by government, not by a private party. The documents
retrieved through PACER are usually public domain, and so once someone gets a
particular case they can legally share it. I don't have a link handy, but I
believe there are startups that gather together cases contributed this way to
build a growing body of PACER material that you can get without having to pay
even the small PACER fees.

You can also get the material for free at government and school law libraries
that are generally open to the public.

[1] [https://www.pacer.gov](https://www.pacer.gov)

~~~
toomuchtodo
RECAP: [https://www.recapthelaw.org/](https://www.recapthelaw.org/)

Scraps PACER when you use it, injects the docs into the Internet Archive.

------
DannyBee
They have to digitize, in part, because all of the states have exclusive
publication/etc agreements with westlaw or lexis or ....

So you can't get a feed of cases from pretty much anywhere, and often, you
aren't allowed to bulk download, etc.

Plenty of folks have digitized all the data harvard is talking about here.
They are not first. Carl malamud, for example, has scanned all the federal
reporters and tons and tons of other cases.
[http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/08/carl-malamud-takes-on-
westl...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/08/carl-malamud-takes-on-westlaw.html)

and

[https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/](https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/)

(My experience here is from back in the early 2000's working on getting
pacer/states/etc to open up all of this data, so we could get it into google
scholar and elsewhere. Often, they were willing to sell it to us, but they
would not let us pay them pretty much any amount of money to make it just open
and freely available, which is what we really wanted. Things have not gotten
better, sadly, and in fact, have gotten worse)

~~~
kemitchell
I also tried and failed to "buy out" existing scans for permissive public
licensing about five years ago. I actually approached the Law Library
Microsoft Consortium, which none of the librarians I knew were even aware of,
and couldn't get anywhere.

Frankly, even now, with Harvard announcement in hand, I doubt I could. It just
wasn't a thing the institution knew how to do. "Does not compute."

I'm sorry to hear things have gotten worse.

~~~
kemitchell
Autocorrection changed "Microfilm" to "Microsoft".

------
tzs
They are projecting to have Federal and CA, NY, MA, IL, TX done in 2016, and
the rest of the states in 2017. I'm curious why those particular states are
being done first.

In particular, I'd have expected Delaware to be in the first group, because so
many public companies are incorporated there, and so the decisions of its
courts on corporate and stockholder issues have major national importance.

Offhand, I can't think of why MA or TX would worked on ahead of DE. Of course
it is possible that the volume of material from each state is a factor...it
could be that DE is being done in the first group but has a lot of material so
won't finish in 2016. I've never taken a look at the volume of each state's
output and so have no idea which state courts handle the most cases.

~~~
stonemetal
There is quite a bit of IP law handled in Texas thanks to patent trolls in
East Texas. So I can see there being some interest in getting it covered. MA?
Maybe it is interesting from a historical perspective since it is one of the
older areas of the US.

~~~
tzs
Those patent cases are in federal court and so will be part of the Federal
collection, not the Texas collection. The Texas collection is decisions of the
Texas state courts, not Federal courts that are located in Texas.

------
achow
Ravellaw ([https://www.ravellaw.com/](https://www.ravellaw.com/)) has built
interesting knowledge graph visualization tool for the court cases.

[https://vimeo.com/127559698](https://vimeo.com/127559698)

 _So one truly fascinating aspect of legal practice is that we tend to operate
in the gray areas. However, the traditional way of researching case law –
reviewing a list of cases returned based on your query – does little to help
you sort through the mess.

With data visualization, you not only see the cases, but you see the
relationship between cases, and how the cases work together. Among the most
significant benefits, the data visualization elements of Ravel Law will help
you narrow your research to the most relevant cases more quickly, while also
helping you find those cases and arguments that, for whatever reason, didn’t
rank in the top of your search._

[http://www.thecyberadvocate.com/2015/09/30/data-
visualizatio...](http://www.thecyberadvocate.com/2015/09/30/data-
visualization-ravel-law/)

 _The value in this appears to relate concepts from one case to others through
the visuals on the graph. The larger the circle, the more important the case
will be. Lines connect one circle to another circle and it’s very easy to see
which major cases are connected to other major cases. This is like a citator
on steroids in my opinion as one can get to this point with a simple search.
That means multiple steps in developing the analysis that finds the value and
use of related cases. The snippets help immensely in determining which related
cases are of value._

[http://llb2.com/2014/02/04/a-very-brief-look-at-ravel-
law/](http://llb2.com/2014/02/04/a-very-brief-look-at-ravel-law/)

------
kevin_thibedeau
I'm curious how LexisNexis is going to attack this breach of their monopoly.
Do they have patents on case law search?

~~~
rayiner
LexisNexis doesn't have a monopoly. First, Thompson West's database is just as
comprehensive. Second, most of the decisions are indexed online elsewhere
(Justia, Google Scholar). Third, almost all the underlying opinions are
available elsewhere.

Contrary to popular belief, the dominance of Lexis/West doesn't come from
having access to information other people don't. It comes from decades of
experience in how to index, annotate, categorize, and cross-link case law,
along with value-add services like being able to grab the actual scan of the
printed page (OCR sometimes has errors!) or have a runner physically pull a
document from a court docket.

~~~
will_brown
No doubt LexisNexis and WestLaw have certain value added services that have
certainly been developed through the years based on their positions as
industry leaders, but you can't deny certain business practices that box out
any potential free competitor.

Reflect back on your law school days. I bet you received a free student
account to either or both LexisNexis and WestLaw (accounts worth thousands of
dollars given for free through 3 years to train students on their programs);
probably free training to your class from certified company representatives;
donations to your school/creation of computer labs for exclusive rights to the
students; etc...

I recognize your point about not being a monopoly, but that is in the Google -
competition is only a click away - sense of the word, there are all kinds of
anti-competitive practices and the marketplace reflects them.

If you want further indication of West willingness to engage in anti-
trust/anti-competitive behavior take a look at Rodriquez v. West Publishing
Corporation and Kaplan, Inc., where West for found to collude with Kaplan to
create monopolies in Bar prep and LSAT review classes.

~~~
massysett
My agency just dumped Westlaw for cost reasons and now we are exclusively
Lexis. Lexis is inferior in many ways. The subject indexes are not nearly as
comprehensive or usable (makes sense, since West has a huge head start with
this with its Key Number System.) The case summaries are too wordy.

Westlaw and Lexis both get big bucks to invest in their databases but then
they are not at parity. So I doubt that some free (beer or speech) competitor
is going to come along without those same resources and mount a serious
challenge in the Lexis or Westlaw strongholds.

However, there is a reason Westlaw and Lexis are both going to Google-like
interfaces with their next generation products (Westlaw Next and Lexis
Advance). Attorneys are just going into Google now. Certainly if I'm looking
for a news article I'm going to Google first, where years ago one might have
done LexisNexis first. Even having to type my Lexis password is too big an
impediment when I can get stuff on Google.

Also, when I don't need the firepower of Lexis I often go elsewhere. A lot of
my work is just the CFR or US Code and the government has those for free,
though the search capability is not as good.

So overall I doubt anti-competitive behavior explains much what dominance
Westlaw and Lexis still do have (and I do think it's shrinking.) They have
invested lots of money and these are professional tools that need lots of
investment. The free (beer or speech) competitors aren't going to compete on
the elements that need lots of investment, but they will nibble away at the
things that Westlaw and Lexis were overkill for.

~~~
will_brown
Sure statutes and the USC are easier on Google. In fact I have never used
Lexis or Westlaw to look those up. I disagree about articles, you can
certainly find legal articles on google on various topics, but the results are
a shadow of Westlaw and Lexis.

But try search for a case on Google - not by citation, not by case style - by
natural language or connectors like Lexis or Westlaw. Results are worse than
useless, because you just lost time. Any startup could do case law search 10
times better than Google, but they could never compete in the market because
lawyers were trained on Lexis and/or Westlaw are entrenched in law schools
training the next generation of lawyers.

------
thinkcomp
No response.

\---

To: Erik Eckholm <eckholm@nytimes.com>

From: Aaron Greenspan

Date: October 30, 2015 at 1:31 PM

Subject: Concerns over Ravel/HLS Deal

Mr. Eckholm,

We just briefly spoke on the phone about your article
([http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/harvard-law-library-
sac...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/harvard-law-library-sacrifices-a-
trove-for-the-sake-of-a-free-database.html)). I am a Harvard College ’04-’05
alum, one of Professor Zittrain’s former students (I actually had to fight the
administration to be permitted entry into his Law School course in 2001), and
one of the first people Ravel tried to hire, because I am a programmer and I
run a legal database called PlainSite
([http://www.plainsite.org](http://www.plainsite.org)), which competes with
them and receives about 16,000 unique hits daily worldwide. I was also a CodeX
Fellow at Stanford Law School in 2012-2013, which is a program at Stanford
that Daniel Lewis and Nik Reed are now also affiliated with. I tell you all of
this only to point out that I am generally quite familiar with the principles,
technologies and individuals involved here.

I’ve now corresponded with Jonathan Zittrain and Adam Ziegler at HLS, the
latter by phone earlier today. I have brought to their attention a number of
concerns, none of which have been resolved in my mind. They are as follows:

1\. Harvard University is a Massachusetts not-for-profit organization. Its
investment in Ravel, a for-profit corporation, via its XFund venture capital
arm, and its subsequent contract with Ravel to earn "proceeds" (HLS’s term)
from that relationship, involves profit. The University could in theory lose
its tax-exempt status over this deal. This is not the same as the Harvard
Management Corporation investing in for-profit corporations to further the
University’s mission by earning capital gains and/or dividends—this is an
exchange of cash for assets that Harvard claims it owns (even though case
materials are public domain) and a contractual promise to monetize those
assets through a for-profit company on an ongoing basis.

2\. Worse yet, the deal involves profit from the withholding of public access
to legal data, which is the precise ill that this relationship is nominally
supposed to and claims to cure. In reality, it only exacerbates it by
legitimizing, with all of Harvard’s imprimatur, the monopolistic legal
information model that has dominated the nation’s judiciary for the past
century and a half.

3\. Professor Zittrain wrote an entire book on the dangers of internet lock-in
and monopolies, yet his actions here are helping to create exactly the kind of
monopoly he has become well known for warning about. According to Adam
Ziegler’s recent post on the HLS Library blog
([http://etseq.law.harvard.edu](http://etseq.law.harvard.edu)), there are to
be "bulk access limitations" and "contractual prohibitions on redistribution."
This is inconsistent with precedent concerning openness to court records and
First Amendment law. That aside, what will these restrictions look like
exactly? We don’t know, because…

4\. ...Adam Ziegler told me that the contract with Ravel is not available for
public examination and he did not know when it would be (if ever). He did read
me a portion of the contract over the phone, which cited "non-commercial
developers," and challenged me to come up with better wording. That’s easy. I
don’t know what a "non-commercial developer" is, but I do know what a "non-
profit organization" is. As an individual, I am a software developer who is
the CEO of a for-profit corporation in a joint venture with a 501(c)(3) non-
profit organization which together maintain PlainSite. Does that make me a
"non-commercial developer?" Although Mr. Ziegler insisted that the contract
was not subject to interpretation because it is simply clear enough already, I
strongly disagree, as I expect any lawyer would. All contracts are subject to
interpretation. The contract needs to be posted.

5\. One of Ravel’s investors is Cooley LLP, a law firm in the Bay Area. Based
on what Daniel and Nik have told me in the past, Cooley has early access to
Ravel’s software. Essentially this means that Harvard Law School is giving one
particular law firm an advantage, which I imagine must violate a number of its
own policies, and seems wrong on the surface.

6\. Professor Zittrain claims it would have taken 8 years to raise the money
that Ravel is providing for this effort. This is extremely difficult to
believe. Although Mr. Ziegler refused to disclose how much money is actually
involved, we can safely assume it is in the $5 million range given that Ravel
has only raised just under $10 million and has had employees to pay for
several years. Recently, a single donor gave Harvard University’s engineering
school $400 million, as your own newspaper reported
([http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/education/john-paulson-
giv...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/education/john-paulson-
gives-400-million-to-harvard-for-engineering-school.html)). Harvard is also in
the middle of a $6 billion-and-counting capital campaign, as reported by The
Crimson ([http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/9/18/capital-
campaign...](http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/9/18/capital-
campaign-6-bil/)). Are we really to believe that the number one law school in
the country (by some measures, anyway) could not scrape together the cash to
buy its own scanners, or that it does not have scanners already? Are high
speed scanners even that expensive? Here’s one on eBay for $1,450:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/KODAK-i610-PASS-THROUGH-HIGH-
SPEED-D...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/KODAK-i610-PASS-THROUGH-HIGH-SPEED-
DUPLEX-80-PPM-B-W-
Scanner-/271985315247?hash=item3f53968daf:g:XjQAAOSwBahU8oC4)

7\. Mr. Ziegler could not answer my question as to why a consortium of non-
profits was not consulted ahead of time. I know many that would have been
eager to assist, likely including the Internet Archive in San Francisco, which
already has several scanners.

8\. Though I do not speak for them, I did notice that Harvard and Ravel seem
to have nearly appropriated the name "Free Law Project," which is actually a
project and non-profit organization at Berkeley that took over from work at
Princeton. See [http://www.freelawproject.org](http://www.freelawproject.org)
and [http://www.courtlistener.com](http://www.courtlistener.com).

9\. The Harvard Gazette has falsely reported, "The 'Free the Law’ initiative
will provide open, wide-ranging access to American case law for the first time
in U.S. history." (See [http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/10/free-
the-law-w...](http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/10/free-the-law-will-
provide-open-access-to-all/.)) I have been in regular contact with Jonathan
Zittrain, Harry Lewis (an XFund Advisor who was Dean during my freshman year)
and others at HLS about PlainSite since I brought the idea to them in 2011
almost immediately as soon as I started working on it. Additionally,
CourtListener (from the group at Berkeley) has also been in operation for
years, offering open, wide-ranging access to American case law. There’s also
Google Scholar, which is free and certainly more wide-ranging than Ravel.

10\. Ravel is, to the best of my knowledge, unprofitable. It remains unclear
why Harvard would place its bets on an unprofitable startup, rather than
solicit donations for a project—as it is so adept at doing—in order to ensure
maximum sustainability.

Mr. Ziegler attempted to dismiss the above concerns on the grounds that we
still both agree in the greater goal of open access to law. I certainly have
done all that I can to promote open access to legal information, including
developing prototypes for digital legal data standards and suing the courts
themselves ([http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-
northe...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-northern-
district-court/think-computer-foundation-et-al-v-administrative-office-of-the-
united-states-courts-et-al/)). But if we both agree on this greater goal, then
why has HLS been almost completely unresponsive to requests for cooperative
assistance for the past four years, while this deal was being negotiated in
secret?

To be clear, Harvard is not the only institution that has made highly
questionable and insincere claims about its legal transparency efforts.
Stanford CodeX claims to support open access to the law, yet it is now
directly sponsored by Thomson Reuters, the parent company of West Publishing,
and its "innovation contests" involve pledges not to redistribute case
materials. But I would expect the Times to be able to distinguish between
academic puffery and genuine efforts to improve the state of our incredibly
broken legal system.

Aaron

PlainSite | [http://www.plainsite.org](http://www.plainsite.org)

~~~
gamblor956
It's unfortunate that Aaron's (thinkcomp's?) Harvard Law and Stanford Law
educations did not include proper instruction on nonprofit tax law, or he
would have known that this is a permissible activity for a nonprofit to engage
in.

Though I guess I'm not surprised by this post. After all, Aaron does claim to
be the co-founder of Facebook and in the past filed a number of nuisance
lawsuits against more than a dozen companies...

~~~
thinkcomp
You know, at this point I'm hardly surprised by ignorant and mis-informed
comments on the internet such as this one, but just for the record, I have
never filed a "nuisance lawsuit."

------
late2part
What would Aaron say?

------
techflare
Didn't a Stanford student already do this, posting XML of all federal/state
judge opinions on his blog?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7026960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7026960)
(discussion)

[https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/](https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/)
(free mirror, looks like)

It's a great concept, and more/newer is better, but it seems odd for Harvard
to act like they're the first to pull it off.

~~~
mappu
I was browsing around the directory listings, and found what looks like
malware -
[https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/govdocs/index.php](https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/govdocs/index.php)
(non-rendered)

