Submitted by emasters on Thu, 11/15/2007 - 1:25pm.
As somebody who is trying to build tools that require the use of
freely available case law, this is a big deal. Finding case law on
the web has always been a crap shoot. It is all over the place, in
different formats, and coverage is haphazard. Sources like LII have
done a great job with specific collections, but overall there are
gaps. Little exists before the early nineties on free public sites,
for example. The promised release by public.resource.org of all of
this material in a single, uniform collection is an incredible boon to
anyone looking for that case law or trying to build tools that use
case law.
A preview of the collection can be seen at
http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/. You can search the preview
collection with the Google CSE that I put up:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=004708334741545358535%3Aycoswf1894k
(though at the moment the links are not resolving properly.)
CALI will be using this repository to power a new generation of course
material creation tools. The eLangdell tools will allow faculty to
create and assemble course materials by drawing upon cases in this
collection and then editing editing and/or annotating them as they
like before sharing them with their students (or colleagues, or the
world).
I hope that others here see some of the tremendous possibilities that
this release makes available.
Elmer.
On 11/15/07, Ben Chapman wrote:
> Folks,
>
> Here are the first paragraphs from a recent announcement regarding making
> some federal appellate and Supreme Court case law available on line. I must
> be out of the loop, because this didn't seem like such a big thing to me,
> given the LII's good work, but I was curious if others had a different take
> on it ...
>
--
Elmer R. Masters
Director of Internet Development
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction
emasters@cali.org 773-332-7508
