Freeing American Case Law, Part II

AltLaw.org contains nearly 170,000 decisions dating back to the early 1990s from the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Appellate courts. The site’s creators, Columbia Law School’s Timothy Wu and Stuart Sierra, and University of Colorado Law School’s Paul Ohm, said the site’s database would grow over time.

Columbia News ::: Columbia Law School Launches Free Database of U.S. Court Decisions

Following closely on the heels of this developmnet, Altlaw.org comes along with a collection of case law from US Federal Courts going back more than ten years.  The key to this is that it is all in one place.  Most of the cases included in this search engine are avaialble on sites scattered about the web, as shown in Emory Law’s Federal Courts FInder.  The lack of a single free, public, non-commercial interface for searching case law has been a sort of Holy Grail for lots of folks, myself included, since we started putting case law on the web in the early nineties.

There is also a companion site, LawCommons.org, that promises to serve as a vehicle for releasding the technology and collections behind Altlaw.org.  These 2 sites have the potential for becoming a major resource in the area of providing free access to American case law.

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