Who had Access to JURIS?: A Failed Case of Open Access

Abstract: In the early 1990s, public interest groups and small legal publishers attempted to push for the public access to federal court decisions contained in JURIS, a legal information retrieval system used for in-house searching by government employees. This early open access effort to free the law not only failed, but eventually led to the shutdown of the JURIS system. This paper presents the findings of a historical investigation into the shutdown of the JURIS system. It argues that the open access movement involves complicated social negotiations—many factors were involved in shaping access rights to primary legal information in digital format. The factors leading to the failure of the open access request included relevant government agencies’ indifference about information dissemination, the involvement of commercial information providers’ interests, and the ambiguity of the copyrightability of case law information. This study contributes to the broader OA/OK debates by presenting a failed case in the early stage of open access movement and by summarizing the lessons learned from this failed case.