Open Media Review

New Site Offering Open Case Law

Kevin sent in a link to Open Jurist, a site offering court opinions free of charge. The site itself is licensed under an attribution only CC license though I also found a traditional copyright notice. I am also not sure what the limitations on the original source material would be and whether the re-licensing under a CC license or exclusive copyright is correct in this case. So far the offering is limited by both browsable and searchable. It is also unclear what their plan is to expand their data, or even how they acquired and processed what they already have. They have an RSS feed which I suppose is for notices of additions to their database.

I have not fully investigated this site but the premise is awesome. So far they have opinions from the Supreme Court and the U.S. Courts of Appeals and they are asking for volunteers to help expand their database. And it’s released under a Creative Commons license.

While the court opinions have always belonged to the public domain, being authored by a branch of the government, copyrights on the published opinions have been held by the companies who publish and distribute the opinions because of the publishers pagination and summary system. Courts and lawyers are totally dependent on the pagination for citing their caselaw so the court can reliably find them. And that made the bound reporters valuable and too expensive for your average person to access. I love the idea of having solid case law posted for free on the web and available to the public.

Now, excuse me while I test it.

Open Case Law Access – Thanks Kevin

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