Monday, February 18, 2008

Free Online Access to U.S. Court Decisions

Activist to put more than 250 years of U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. appellate court decisions dating back to 1950 online

This week, Carl Malamud invites you to enhance your federal case law library by downloading millions of pages of decisions stretching back more than 250 years, all free of charge.

His latest online "public works" project is a Web site, public.resource.org, which will open up all Supreme Court opinions dating back to the 1700s and all U.S. appeals courts decisions dating back to 1950. The activist's efforts for the nonprofit group present a potential challenge to paid legal research services Thomson and LexisNexis.

Malamud's northern California-based group last week received full delivery of content from legal research company Fastcase, which agreed in November to sell the information with no strings attached. Malamud's group has spent the past several days reformatting the data to post on the Web site, an event that will occur sometime this week.

"We're about getting bulk data and making it available," free of charge, to the public, Malamud told the Law Tribune last week. "I want to see all federal case law downloadable in bulk."

By Douglas S. Malan
The Connecticut Law Tribune
February 19, 2008

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