Harvard Launches “Free the Law” Digitization Project

"It took Harvard Law School (HLS) nearly 200 years, since its founding in 1817, to amass its collection of United States case law reporters—one of the world’s largest collections of legal materials. It will take the HLS Library about three years to scan and digitize that collection and, in partnership with legal technology startup Ravel Law, make it freely available to the public online. If all goes according to plan, by early to mid–2017, the 'Free the Law' project will have digitized the 'official print versions of all historical U.S. court decisions,' according to the HLS Library blog. This will encompass the contents of 40,000 books—approximately 40 million pages of law—with publication dates from the 1700s to the present day. The large-scale digitization project is gaining considerable attention in the legal information field, where most case law is organized in expensive commercial databases or, where it is free online, may suffer from considerable gaps in coverage. That the common law is not freely accessible online, according to an overview posted on the HLS Library blog, 'impairs justice and equality and stifles innovation.' Free the Law started with a grant-funded pilot program in 2013: over the course of approximately eight months, the Harvard Library Innovation Lab scanned just under a million pages, honing in on best practices for document processing. The partnership with Ravel, a California-based legal research and analytics company, followed, and at the end of July 2015 Ravel and HLS finalized an agreement setting forth their respective obligations and responsibilities ..."