public.resource.org

Liberate PACER Documents With RECAP Firefox Extension

August 14, 2009

U.S. courts insist on charging for access to electronic court documents. Ostensibly, this is because the clumsy PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) system is also overpriced—who would have guessed!?
Fortunately, many PACER documents are also online and available for free at public.resource.org, an ambitious effort to collect public records and provide the public with [...]

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Carl Malamud makes public records available to the public, for a change

December 22, 2008

Although court records are technically available to the public, you have to pay to get copies. Even digital copies. That does not sit well with Carl Malamud (or with me, for that matter).
I mentioned public.resource.org last year, but since then, it has grown to include 50 years of federal appellate decisions and 20 percent of [...]

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AltLaw.org: another free caselaw repository

August 22, 2007

Hot on the heels of my mention of public.resource.org yesterday, another free caselaw repository was brought to my attention. AltLaw.org, which is in beta, purports to allow users to search the full text of decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and of the U.S. circuit courts.

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Carl Malamud is my hero

August 21, 2007

The laws of any nation are, by definition, open source. The developers–courts and legislators–release their source code regularly so that users of the legal system can use it, test it, and report bugs.
None of this works, however, if users of the legal system do not have access to law and court decisions. Carl Malamud styles [...]

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