The Lexis-Westlaw Duopoly and the Proprietization of Law

Introduction

The Political Economy of Legal Research

Open Access in a Closed Universe: Lexis, Westlaw, Law Schools, and the Legal Information Market

An Open Model for a Web-Based Semantic Case Law Repository

Legal Information Management in a Global and Digital Age: Revolution and Tradition

The Long Tail of Legal Scholarship

Neutral Citation, Court Web Sites, and Access to Case Law

Forbes, The Law Goes Open Source

http://www.antitrustreview.com/archives/1111

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/technology/20westlaw.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

http://legalblogwatch.typepad.com/legal_blog_watch/2007/11/competition-bet.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duopoly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wexis

WinterSpring? +2003" target="_top">http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?66+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+147+(WinterSpring? +2003) (Arguing for the merit of proprietary legal databases. Pg. 152-53)

Law as Intellectual Property

It would be argued that law has expressive, aesthetic content and is thus deserving of copyright. By virtue of the fact that some judges, as composers of legal materials, [[cite]evidently believe this, there is some truth to the argument. But it is an unfortunate attitude, and it has deleterious effects on the quality of the fruits of legal enterprise. Law should be conceived as software code rather than poetry, written by legislators and compiled by the organs of the executive and judicial branches of the government. This metaphor offers hints as to how problems with the legislative versus executive versus judicial process should be dealt with. For example, as illustrated in [[cite][Anarchism Triumphant], anarchical production of software code is a superior strategy, and it should be applied to the production of legislation. The [[cite][GPLv3 process] is a preliminary example of an anarchical legal drafting process.

Discussion

Heller, The Gridlock Economy

Stake, "The Property Instinct"

A promising up-and-comer is Precydent. Its parsimonious interface is superior to Lexis/WestLaw. But my first search query, "hamer v sidway" did not turn up the result that I obviously wanted.

Columbia's revolting relationship with Lexis and WestLaw?

A rarely considered alternative to the proprietary Lexis/WestLaw systems would consist of a vast wiki-ized database of legal materials, with meta-information about connections between cases filled in by the lawyers and law professors. A not insignificant objection to this is that it would not be as reliable as Lexis/WestLaw but see the Nature study demonstrating Wikipedia's comparable reliability to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

The people behind FastCase estimate that scanning and transcribing every federal and state case and statute will cost them $6 million. Apart from the unionized-labor complication, the top ten Ivy League schools could easily fund a similar open-source effort.

Law journals should be the first organizations to sign onto the free-law effort. Since they are locked in libraries and . On the one hand, this circumstance protects them from being widely read and thereby condemned for incompetence. But, as demonstrated in Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, there is demand, however small, for a virtually infinite range of creative and functional content (pg. ). By unlocking the storage and meta-connection of law journal articles, the free-law effort would facilitate the synthesis of wider blocks of information and argument.

An alternative to a centralized free-law resource would be instead a uniform system of citation, pagination, and meta-data standards for legal materials that could be implemented on a wide range of information-hosting platforms. Part of the system would be

http://www.findlaw.com/