Federal Judiciary Should Open Access to Opinions from the U.S. District and Bankruptcy Courts.
May 9, 2008
The federal judiciary should open up access to opinions of the approximately 200 U.S. district and bankruptcy courts, says HyperLaw's Alan D. Sugarman in letters to the federal judiciary and to Senator Joseph Lieberman.
HyperLaw, which has been lobbying the federal judiciary since 1991 on this issue, asked James Duff, Director of the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts to create a subset of the judicial opinion documents presently included in the case documents in the federal judiciary's Case Management/Electronic Case Filing System. (CM/ECF). Duff acts as Secretary to the Judicial Conference, the "executive committee" of judges which runs the federal judiciary, and chaired by the Chief Justice.
Sugarman also wrote a letter to Senator Joseph Lieberman, one of the primary sponsors of the E-Government Act of 2002 which required the judiciary to open up access to opinions. Sugarman asked for further hearings on the pending E-Government Reauthorization Act of 2007 to consider issues related to access to court opinions.
Excerpts:
We believe that the Administrative Office should (1) take the simple steps of extracting from the master database, the subset of documents and data representing judicial opinions; (2) assign a persistent public file name to each document, and (3) then place the files with associated metadata in an open server available to the public for bulk downloading and searching by search engines
[W]e ask that judges and clerks exercise extra care in being sure that written opinions are properly designated on the CM/ECF system. To make this task easier to busy judges and clerks, we propose a new category on the system, "written orders," to permit less substantive orders to be marked as such.
Sugarman also suggested that a natural citation for the federal court opinion files: that file name and metadata include the docket entry number along with court and docket number.
Read the Letter to the Administative Office PDF - HTML.
Read the Letter to Senator Lieberman PDF - HTML
Updates and Addenda:
May 11, 2008
Another source of free public access law is The Public Library of Law provided by FastCase, again without access to district and bankruptcy decisions.
The FastCase paid service does include all cases from the Federal Supplement and the Bankruptcy Reporter.
First There Was Oregon - Now New Mexico Claims Copyright in the Law?
May 2, 2008
Tim Stanley (founder of FindLaw) recently received a cease and desist letter from the Legislative Counsel Committee of the State of Oregon demanding that he remove the Oregon Revised Statutes from his Justia web site. Well, my friend Carl Hartmann, who is a member of the New Mexico bar, yesterday received this letter from Robert Mead, Interim Director of the New Mexico Compilation Commission. Although dated April 1, 2008, it seems a coincidence since it took a month to move through the mails. This is what it states in part:
The New Mexico Compilation Commission is the official legal publisher for the State of New Mexico. The Commission is statutorily responsible for compiling, annotating, editing, and indexing New Mexico's annotated statutes, court opinions, and court rules in both print and electronic formats. In its role as Official Publisher, the Commission protects the State's copyright and content of its databases while providing high quality products at competitive prices to the private and government sectors.
The Commission's publishing partner, Conway Greene Company, produces the electronic and print products according to the highest industry quality standards. Conway Greene is the exclusive source for these products for private sector attorneys both within and outside of the State of New Mexico. For complimentary, on-site training on New Mexico One Source of Law, please call Anne at the Conway Greene Company at 866-240-6550. For more information on the content, features and cost savings with using New Mexico One Source of Law®, contact Conway Greene to assist you in making the best decision for you and your firm.
Sounds like a threat to me.
Public Resource Scores a Hit - Federal Reporter At Your Fingertips From Public Resources and Precydent via FastCase.
May 1, 2008, Revised May 3, 2008
Notwithstanding the unfortunate inclination to overstatements describing Carl Malamud's efforts [all federal law does not equal the cases in the Federal Reporter - by a long shot], it is clear that Carl Malamud has made a major contribution by obtaining the Federal Reporter decisions from FastCase, making them available to all, posting them on a public web site, formatting them with the assistance of professional programmers, and giving the decision file the Federal Reporter citation as a file name, and then using the citation in the HTML title. Yes!!!
Because Google indexes the Federal Reporter citation, and displays the citation on the first line, then Googlling the Federal Reporter site will find the case in the first one or two hits. Try it below - wow, there it is. Although missing pin-point West pagination, it is faster than West or Lexis and free as well. This is absolutely awesome. Just copy the cite and drop into Google and voila.
For sure, these cases have been on the Internet for years in the form of slip opinions from the Court of Appeals web sites, but, not accessible by the West citation . The the court web sites will not put in the Federal Reporter citation and the law schools are afraid to do so or do not have the resources to insert the citations into the opinions downloaded from the courts.
But, as well, Precydent.com has its versions which will be found l from the search above. The Precydent.com case are as well sourced from FastCase, and include internal hypelinks. Plus - Precydent has the West pin-point citations paginaton.
We wonder where they came from? Were these in the FastCase files, but not used by Malamud -it seems so?
But, there is one rub with Precydent - they have become another West by taking it upon themselves to assign a public domain sequence based citation - oh well - we will have a Westlaw cite, and Lexis cite, and then a Precydent public domain cite, and perhaps someone else's public domain citation.. More about that later. Wait until they get to decisions not in a West printed volume. Lesson: do not design a system and a produc around one type of source of opinions, in this situation Federal Reporter decisions with clean formatting and coding.
This set of Federal Reporter opinions is by not means all citable cases of the United States Courts of Appeals - missing of course arethe unpublished opinions which since January 1, 2007 are citable by rule. Also missing are important opinions of United States District and Bankruptcy Courts. Court of Appeals decisions, albeit not with the West citation, has been in the glass for over ten years.
Comments Re: Law.Com Article by Erig Gardner "An Operating System for Law: Online Case"- Re HyperLaw v. West Publishing, Matthew Bender, and Carl Malamud: The Text Copyright Decision
April 19, 2008, Revised May 1, 1908
An article on Law.Com of March 31, 2008 mixes up the issues and neglects to mention the other Second Circuit and Trial Court decisions re copyrightability of text in the Matthew Bender v. West case. Also, fails to note that Matthew Bender's was soon to be acquired in 1998 by Reed Eslevier, which owned Mead and Lexis. The article also confused issues concerning the Juris database once operated by the Department of Justice, and the source of the FastCase opinions being posted by Malamud.
Because West had claimed copyright in their enhanced versions of court opinions, West was able to threaten anyone who copied a decision from a West reporter. These claims were soundly rejected by Judge John S. Martin and his opinion was affirmed by the Court of Appeals. Not only did Matthew Bender not involve itself in the text part of the case, but it soon to be owner file an amicus brief opposing HyperLaw.
Second Circuit Text Decision: Matthew Bender v. West,
158 F. 3d 674 (2nd Cir. 1998), aff'g, No. 94 Civ. 0589, 1997 WL 266972 (S.D.N.Y. May 19, 1997), cert. denied sub. nom. West v. Hyperlaw, 526 U.S. 1154 (1999).
Read the entire Article ...
LOOKING FOR "THAT" CASE - I
A simple search for a new case leads off into the twisted and entangled roots of the publishing and electronic dissemination of federal court opinions - Google AltLaw Pacer ECF FindLaw - and Docket Numbers in citations redux.[pre-released September 23, 2007, revised and edited October 12, 2007]
After reading about a recent United States Court of Appeals antitrust opinion in an on-line newsletter, I wanted to read the opinion, as well as the United States District Court opinion below, and decided to search for the opinions using public free resources on the Internet.
The newsletter had no link to the text of the opinion and no citation. There were three clues: - the case was known as the "Elevator Antitrust Case ", it was a Second Circuit case, and the article implied that the opinion was decided September 7, 2007. No docket number was provided in the newsletter, nor any citation to Westlaw or Lexis.
Read the entire article ...
New York Times Article - "A Quest to Get More Rulings Online and Free."
August 20, 2007
HyperLaw is back in the New York Times in an article "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free" dated August 20, 2007 by John Markoff noting HyperLaw's successful challenge to the West copyright claims in 1997 and 1998. The Times article describes an initiative by Carl Malamud to persuade West to give up its database of federal court opinions.
Read the entire article ...
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John B. West, Multiplicity of Court Opinions. 1909.
The definitive article on the need for public domain citations by the courts when decisions are issued. There is not much new today.
THE HYPERLAW REPORT
Newsletters published in July 1995 and December, 1995 concerning citation and court publication of opinions - still relevant today.
HYPERLAW V. WEST
Nine years later - a cornerstone of copyright law as to the lack of copyrightability of non-original works.
ACCESS TO THE LAW
United States District Courts opinion dissemination
Citation to unpublished opinions.
Legal Markup Standard
PRESERVE THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
Google and Fair Use - the virtual card catalog.
Database protection.
PUBLIC DOMAIN CITATION
Adopted by the courts of the United Kingdom - delays persist in US Courts.