Articles Tagged with free law reporter

John Mayer, Executive Director of CALI

For the third year in a row, I’ve had the pleasure of being part of a delegation that represented Justia and the Free Law Coalition at CALICon, the annual Conference for Law School Computing^® from CALI (The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction).

This year’s conference was themed “Unbound,” which to CALI meant both the idea that boundaries to technology in legal education are falling away, and that the binding of books are becoming “electronically unbound,” which is certainly a theme we here at Justia can get behind.

CALI (Computer Assisted Legal Instruction) introduced the Free Law Reporter this week.  The FLR is a database housing published (official) legal opinions that provides a simple search interface for research.  According to CALI, “The goal of FLR is to develop a freely available, unencumbered law reporter that is capable of serving as a resource for education, research, and practice.”

The FLR is populated with opinions from the RECOP service. There’s been a little bit of controversy over whether the opinions are being used or adopted. The archive itself is not designed for caselaw research, it’s just a repository. The goal is to make the data freely accessible in bulk access. RECOP is not a research tool, in other words. It’s where sites that run research tools get the opinions.