‘Free the Law’ will provide open access to all | Harvard Gazette

peter.suber's bookmarks 2015-10-31

Summary:

"Harvard Law School announced today that, with the support of Ravel Law, a legal research and analytics platform, it is digitizing its entire collection of U.S. case law, one of the largest collections of legal materials in the world, and will make the collection available online, for free, to anyone with an Internet connection. The 'Free the Law' initiative will provide open, wide-ranging access to American case law for the first time in U.S. history. “Driving this effort is a shared belief that the law should be free and open to all,' said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow. 'Using technology to create broad access to legal information will help create a more transparent and more just legal system.' Harvard Law School’s collection comprises 40,000 books containing approximately 40 million pages of court decisions, including original materials from cases that predate the U.S. Constitution. It is the most comprehensive and authoritative database of American law available anywhere except the Library of Congress, containing binding judicial decisions from the federal government and each of the 50 states, since the founding of each respective jurisdiction. The Harvard Law School Library — the largest academic law library in the world — has been collecting these decisions for the past 200 years ..."

Link:

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/10/free-the-law-will-provide-open-access-to-all/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.harvard.u oa.law oa.usa oa.digitization hu.oa oa.announcements

Date tagged:

10/31/2015, 09:02

Date published:

10/31/2015, 08:25