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ElliottPaper1 17 - 10 Nov 2008 - Main.JoshS
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The Lexis/Westlaw Duopoly and the Proprietization of Legal Research | | | Because the benefits of such a free platform would be widely distributed across society, costs would be most efficiently internalized were the project government-funded. But such a course of action faces serious obstacles, not least of which being Lexis/Westlaw's substantial lobbying efforts. It would be more feasible, I think, to establish the free legal-research database as an independent nonprofit in the tradition of Wikipedia. Funding would be provided mainly by leading law schools, supplemented by donations from cooperative law firms. For financial context, it bears noting that the founders of FastCase scanned and transcribed every federal and state case and statute for $7 million. The top ten (or fifty) law schools could easily fund a similar public-domain effort. Alternatively, the law-school coalition could pay Lexis/Westlaw/FastCase to transfer their documents en masse into the free platform's database. This latter route might be more feasible than one would expect; while the free platform would likely put all three companies out of business, the search company that sells first will get out with some profit.
The social benefits of a free alternative to Lexis/Westlaw are incalculable. The free alternative described above should be pursued with all deliberate speed.
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- First, as I'm sure you know, many American statutes have been made available by the relevant legislative authorities, which means I take your argument to be primarily concerned with the unavailability of caselaw. If that's true, will allowing American citizens, many of whom assume that statutes are the entirety of what makes up the law, to freely view caselaw solve the problem of being influenced and controlled by laws they don't have access/understanding of? On the other hand, Wikipedia has entries for some cases where the cases are (minimally) synthesized. If your concern is about getting the citizenry information about what cases are out there, is that equally helpful? Differently helpful? Second, I'm pretty sure that Lexis and WestLaw? are forced to have non-mimicking platforms because they keep suing each other for (what they perceive as) copyright violations, not because of collusion.
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| Revision 17 | r17 - 10 Nov 2008 - 16:59:27 - JoshS |
| Revision 16 | r16 - 09 Nov 2008 - 03:50:28 - ElliottAsh |
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