Here comes the Legal Commons.
Carl Malamud and the team at Public.Resource.org with Larry Lessig and the Creative Commons gang got the FastCase deal done and the case law online. The cases include all of the Federal Court of Appeals decisions since 1950, and all of the US Supreme Court decisions.
You can obtain a copy of all of the cases at Public.Resource.org case archive. Public.Resource.org has tar balls for easy downloading of the complete data sets. There is still some fixing of the cases going on, and the community will be working to get the internal page numbering for the cases (among other features). We did an initial conversion of the Federal Court of Appeals cases on Justia with some cross linking to other cases etc…. We and many others will be fixing these up, as well as sending changes and issues to Public.Resource.org where the master copy will be provided for free to all.
Developers and interested members of the public are invited to join our open discussion group which will evaluate the format of this public domain data. These cases and codes are America’s operating system and for the first time Americans can use them with freedom.
The cases will also be up on AltLaw and PreCYdent soon (if not already) and… many many other places 🙂
Ed Walters CEO of FastCase worked with Carl to really make this happen. The Legal Commons financial support for these datasets came from donars including David Boies, the Elbaz Family Foundation, John Gilmore and the Omidyar Network.
When did Carl start focusing on free law?… Not too bad.
Now on to the state cases, codes and regs (year by year), some legislation updates, annotations and presto free legal stuff for everyone everywhere. LegalCommons.
Public.Resource.org announcement
Creative Commons Blog Post (Mike Linksvayer)
Peace,
Tim