Re:Three hundred and sixty years of United States caselaw
by rayiner on Monday October 29, 2018 @10:25PM
(#18333603)
> Is caselaw data an artifact originating from the public dollars which funded the whole show to begin with?
Yes and no. It’s important to realize that the US courts (1) are a distributed system comprising hundreds of autonomous courts; and (2) predate the internet, photocopiers, telephones, telegraph, a large centralized federal government, and indeed the federal government itself.
Today court opinions are published as PDFs on courts’ websites. But back in the day, they were published as slip opinions stored in the clerk’ office of each individual court. Private companies like West undertook to collect cases from all these hundreds of courts and publish them in books called “reporters.” Back then (and even today) that meant sending someone out to hundreds of courts to collect and copy the decisions. They not only published the opinions, they organized everything within a comprehensive ontology of their own creation, and added their own annotations.
When computers were invented a century later, these publishers were well placed to digitize their collections and offer access to them over pre-internet electronic systems. Then, of course, those moved to the Internet.
Even collecting these cases together on a going forward basis is no easy task. As noted above, the courts are decentralized, by design, even within the federal system. Just getting the decisions from hundreds of courts and uploading them would be an expensive endeavor. Nothing stops someone from undertaking this—court decisions themselves cannot be copyrighted and you’re free to go to and court and ask to copy published decisions.
Yes and no. It’s important to realize that the US courts (1) are a distributed system comprising hundreds of autonomous courts; and (2) predate the internet, photocopiers, telephones, telegraph, a large centralized federal government, and indeed the federal government itself.
Today court opinions are published as PDFs on courts’ websites. But back in the day, they were published as slip opinions stored in the clerk’ office of each individual court. Private companies like West undertook to collect cases from all these hundreds of courts and publish them in books called “reporters.” Back then (and even today) that meant sending someone out to hundreds of courts to collect and copy the decisions. They not only published the opinions, they organized everything within a comprehensive ontology of their own creation, and added their own annotations.
When computers were invented a century later, these publishers were well placed to digitize their collections and offer access to them over pre-internet electronic systems. Then, of course, those moved to the Internet.
Even collecting these cases together on a going forward basis is no easy task. As noted above, the courts are decentralized, by design, even within the federal system. Just getting the decisions from hundreds of courts and uploading them would be an expensive endeavor. Nothing stops someone from undertaking this—court decisions themselves cannot be copyrighted and you’re free to go to and court and ask to copy published decisions.