Search Results for: public domain citation

The Administrative Office of the Courts announced yesterday that FDSys will now include opinions from 64 federal courts.  The program to integrate federal court opinions into FDSys began in 2011.  In 2011, they added opinions from 12 courts. In 2012, they increased that number to 28 courts.  In February of this year, they announced that they were expanding the program. And now we know they have increased the number of courts to 64. According to today’s press release, they are backfilling some jurisdictions, putting in an archive back to 2004. They claim to have 750,000 opinions in FDSys now.

According to the statement, “FDsys currently contains opinions from 8 appellate courts, 20 district courts, and 35 bankruptcy courts.”  To put this in perspective, there are 17 circuit courts, 94 district courts, and 195 bankruptcy courts.  All together, they are pulling opinions from 63 of 307 federal courts (roughly). That’s 21% of the federal jurisdictions in 3 years.

As usual, I feel compelled to say “it’s great that they’re doing this, BUT”—they’re focusing on the wrong things. Why are they pulling documents from district courts and bankruptcy courts? The case law that most people care about is appellate opinions that create precedent.  In federal jurisdictions, this means the Circuit Courts of Appeal and the United States Supreme Court.  FDSys has no SCOTUS opinions (which are freely available on the Court’s site), and only about half of the Circuit Courts of Appeal.  Some district court opinions are interesting and useful, and I suppose the same is true for bankruptcy court opinions, but why are they being added ahead of the Supreme Court? 750,000 documents is a lot—my guess is they’re pulling in random orders and rulings that are part of the public record but not especially useful in legal research.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently announced that it will move to “in-house publishing” of its opinions. According to the press release, “Court staff now manage the process of converting opinions from the original word processing documents into Adobe PDF files, which are then uploaded onto the website, where they can be viewed and/or downloaded by the public.” This task was previously managed by West Publishing, and bringing it in house is expected to save the court $350,000 in the first year.

Hooray? Sort of. I’m glad the Ninth Circuit will be saving itself over a quarter of a million dollars, but that’s basically the only public benefit here. In fact, the headline on the press release is a bit misleading, because the court is not officially publishing their own opinions – West is still doing that. The documents they post are only slip opinions. They are official and can be cited only for a short time before they are published by the official publisher (The Federal Reporter, owned by Thompson West). In order to effect real savings and provide true open access for the public, the Ninth Circuit needs to take this further and actually publish their own opinions.

Right now, when the Ninth Circuit judges issue an opinion and release it on the Web, it is immediately available to read and cite as a slip. After that, however, they send the opinions to Westlaw, who copy-edits each opinion and adds a citation in order to resell it in this final “official” version (in the Federal Reporter). I talked with David Madden in the Public Information Office at the Court, and he confirmed that this process will not change; West’s Federal Reporter will continue to publish the official opinions.

Carl Malamud of public.resource.org has a guest post on Boing Boing: Liberating America’s Secret, for-pay Laws. In it, he discusses the problem of laws that incorporate copyrighted technical standards by reference. Because the standards bodies that issue them are in the private sector, anyone who wants to view the standards (to comply with the law) must pay for a copy. Those copies can be very expensive; public.resource.org spent over $7,000 for copies of the corpus.

Have you heard that Judge Richard Posner hates the Bluebook? Of course you have. It’s been all over the blawgosphere lately. But thanks to the UGA Law Library Blog, which posted a direct link to the article, I actually read it. True to form, the article is brief, articulate, and humorous. As someone who is regularly frustrated by citation practices, I could appreciate Posner’s points. Particularly interesting is the inclusion of the style sheet that Judge Posner provides to his own clerks.

By far, the best tip I got out of his article was a reference to a terrific piece by Professor Ian Gallacher: Cite Unseen: How Neutral Citation and America’s Law Schools Can Cure our Strange Devotion to Bibliographical Orthodoxy and the Constriction of Open and Equal Access to the Law. 70 Albany Law Rev 491 (2007). Professor Gallacher argues that the current citation format fetish reinforces the West/LexisNexis caselaw duopoly:

Hi Friends,

Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.org have gotten together with Ed Walters CEO of FastCase and are happy to announce that they will be putting online an archive of US Appeal Court decisions since 1950 and all of the US Supreme Court cases since 1754. Here is their announcement.