February 13th, 2008
Archive of court decisions in need of Web 2.0 applications
My local paper has a piece about Carl Malamud’s court.gov project, which thus far has uploaded 1.8 million Supreme Court and federal opinions to the Web.
Apparently, this is one of Carl’s primary missions these days, to make court decisions, which are public domain, as available as SEC or patent filings. Actually, Carl was instrumental in pushing the SEC and the PTO to get filings online. Everything in the law is slower, though — not least because the courts have long-standing relationships with the proprietary publishers, Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis.
Malamud wants every court ruling online for free, and he is employing the same tactics he used against the government in 1994.
“There is nothing like a huge user base,” Malamud said. “It becomes a lot harder to ignore if you are a politician.”
OK, this is laudable. As a law student, I’m quite interested in the effort. But lawyers are not exactly the most tech-savvy profession in the world and I’m wondering if the Web 2.0 tech world will pick up the UI piece that’s needed to make this happen.
What’s online right now is not sufficient for users. The main site — http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/ — is a directory listing. By clicking through to US/ you can get a reasonable listing of Supreme Court reports from volumes 1 to 539 (incomplete). But looking at any given volume, say 524gives you a list of cites and dates — the first one is 524 US 1 (118 S.Ct. 1772), dated April 29, 1998. Oh there’s a hash, too.
So for one thing there’s no display of the case caption; for another there’s no full-text search. I tried to point Google at the site but it couldn’t pick up anything. No knock on Carl here, but someone needs to start layering some of the basic user access tools needed to make this effort useful.
Beyond this, is the issue of making the repository as useful as West or Lexis. Here some Web 2.0 implementations would go a long way. There are two ways to use Lexis:
- Enter a citation to get a case; you will get not only the case text but also a table of authority and a list of subsequent cases that cited the case, along with an indication of whether the cite is approving or disapproving.
- Do full-text searching with various operators to find cases on a topic. While power users make full use of these, most lawyers do the most basic kind of Boolean searching. Probably just using Google’s advanced search on this would do the trick.
I don’t foresee a user-based effort to build all of the stuff in Lexis — the millions they make funds an awful lot of not particularly fun work, but I think some Web 2.0 approaches could go a long way to making cases online more discoverable and usable. The real strength of this approach is that Lexis requires everyone to go through the same tedious search process on their own. If you start doing social networking on top of legal searches, you could make things a lot easier.
For instance, what if you logged and published everyone’s searches with some kind of indication of whether the search was successful. You could search through the searches as a starting place. For another, what if there was just a way to add tags to every case: the more users who looked a case, the more tags there would be (the sheer number of tags would clue you into seminal cases. I think you could create a useful portal of the most important cases in given areas. On Lexis and West, there’s no good way to make sure you’re at a minimum covering the big cases in any area.
What about allowing users to annotate cases, creating something akin to West’s headnotes and key system? You could do this in a Wiki, I think; but the actual text of the case needs to be pure, uneditable. Aren’t there Web 2.0 gadgets for annotating Web pages? But they’re only for your own annotations. What you want is to share the annotations with others, and in fact be able to select whose annotations you view.
Other ideas? Anyone thinking about building any of this stuff on top of Carl’s great archiving?
