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.

It is so frustrating...

The law is free, and I mean that literally. Opinions, statutes, regulations, whatever- these are public documents that are produced in the course of official business.

So why is this stuff so hard to find?

In my state, precedential opinions are posted on the Court's web site for immediate consumption. However, unless you go and physically check the site you will never know it. It would not be difficult for the Court to get the word out via RSS, but they don't do it (and do not get me started on the Pennsylvania Statutes! There is no- NO- official online site containing the statutes. The only site that exists is maintained by an attorney, but it has not been updated in quite some time- much stuff is out of date.)

In fact, using Google Reader as my search tool, the only jurisdictions I could find that officially syndicate their opinions are the state courts of West Virginia, Nevada, and Utah; and the Eleventh Circuit. New Jersey opinions are available through my alma mater's library.

I understand that the law is a (small c) conservative profession, dominated by technophobes and people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, but making it so hard to track down what is public domain, what anyone can access by right makes no sense. Courts should want this information to be freely available. Citizens, who are expected to know the law, ought to access it without the rigmarole (prob! w/20 fidu! & exec!) that 1Ls are taught to endure by Lexis and West. Those services exist not so much because they provide you with the cases and statutes (which they do not own), but because they tell you how to find it.

And I don't know why the profession is okay with that.