Some new projects underway

A few weeks ago, I complained about the difficulty of doing legal research for free, despite the fact that the law itself is free and public. It makes no sense to me that we should have to pay a company like Lexis or Westlaw for the privilege of finding information that is generally available free of charge somewhere.

So, now I am doing something about it. Jimmy Wales' new for-profit company Wikia offers free topical wikis on everything from the Transformers to cognitive linguistics. So naturally, there is a law Wikia. I have started working on articles for the legal wiki, focusing so far on my area of expertise, i.e. criminal. Wikia is also starting a new service in the next few weeks called OpenServing, in which users develop the content and Wikia provides the backend. The OpenServing site should be live in a few weeks.

Using the collective knowledge capital of the legal web, it should be possible to offer a meaningful research alternative to the subscription services. I'll keep you updated.