Breaking Down The Barriers
Activist’s project opens up centuries of federal case law
By DOUGLAS S. MALAN
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. (The case law is available here, here and here.)
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."
He noted that there are no restrictions on the use of the information after it's downloaded and that it's up to individuals to create web sites that utilize the information.
Any initiative that "makes case law available for free in new and different ways is something all librarians are in favor of," said Darcy Kirk, associate dean for library and technology and law professor at the University of Connecticut.
Not A Competitor
Last summer, Malamud began scanning public domain federal case law and codes available in the Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement and Federal Appendix, all case law reporters published by West, which is owned by the Thomson Corp.
Malamud contacted Thomson last summer outlining his plan.
“The goal is not meant to compete with commercial vendors such as yourself,” Malamud wrote to Peter Warwick, president and CEO of Thomson North American Legal. “Rather, we wish to make this information available to a population that today does not have access to the decisions of our federal and state courts because they are not commercial subscribers to one of the handful of services such as your award-winning Westlaw tools.”
In an interview last week, Rick King, executive vice president and chief operations officer of Thomson West, said that he does not consider public.resource.org a market threat that will change the way his company does business. He called the two endeavors “complementary.”
“I think there’s value in both” paid and free access to case law, King said. “We’re all in favor of collections of legal works being available to the public.”
The difference, King noted, is in the details. Downloadable raw law is different from his company’s inclusion of case notes, analysis and links to other cases, all of which is produced by an editorial team of 900 lawyers. When it comes to case preparation and case analysis, “that’s when [people] come to us,” King said.
Public Information Maverick
Malamud, a maverick of information dispersion, has battled the government over public access several times in the past. He challenged the Smithsonian Institution by posting photos of the museum's artifacts on the file-sharing site Flickr. The museum claimed a copyright and charged the public for high-resolution downloads of the photos, but Malamud said the photos should be part of the public domain.
Malamud also founded a nonprofit group that succeeded in placing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database online.
He also recently launched a PACER recycling site (pacer.resource.org), on which users who download federal case information at 8 cents per page can then upload them to the recycling site to be accessed later free of charge.
The idea of wider public accessibility, even among lawyers, is part of the reason Malamud decided to form his group last March and tackle the federal case law project. He said a solo practitioner friend of his in Indiana is an example of what happens when lawyers don't have ready access to information. The lawyer does water rights appellate work as a side hobby and sneaks into law libraries to get access to case law for free.
"This [project] is partly about the public's right to know," Malamud said. "It's also about barriers to entry, and innovation." •
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