Non-Profit “Free Law Project” Provides Open Access to U.S. Case Law | School of Information

"Although case law is technically public domain, the legal decisions that interpret and apply statutory law are often scattered across the Internet, locked up in proprietary systems, and only available by paying exorbitant fees. A new non-profit launching this week aims to make these legal materials easily and freely available to all. School of Information assistant professor Brian Carver and alumnus Michael Lissner (MIMS 2010) founded the Free Law Project to support open access to the law and to develop open-source legal research tools. The project’s open-source software tools include: [1] A 'daily awareness' service providing customized notifications about today’s legal decisions to attorneys, journalists, and others. [2] A cutting-edge 'legal citator' developed by School of Information alumnae Karen Rustad and Rowyn McDonald, which automatically detects citations in court opinions, creates links between cases, and tracks the resulting citation network, allowing lawyers and researchers to trace the history of issues and cases via citations between opinions. [3] Juriscraper, a software tool to automatically find, retrieve, and archive legal documents published on hundreds of different court websites. [4] Additional tools for software developers. Carver and Lissner say that despite a growing movement promoting public access to the text of legal statutes, it can be difficult or impossible for the public to find the court decisions that interpret and apply those laws."