Articles Tagged with law.gov

Today is Valentine’s Day, and we’d like to take this opportunity to write our valentine to the free legal information projects we love. We’ve talked about all of these projects before, but on this day that celebrates love, it seems a perfect time to praise them again.

Law.gov and Public.Resource.Org

All who love free legal information as much as we do, owe a great deal of gratitude to Carl Malamud of public.resource.org and to the many people working with him on the Law.gov movement. Even before creating the Law.gov project, Malamud had begun gathering free cases and codes and getting them online in a free public archive. We first blogged about his work back in September of 2007, but he has been working to make public domain resources truly public for years.

Over the last couple of years, he has spearheaded a movement to get the federal government to put all primary legal materials online in bulk on a suggested domain name of law.gov, following the similar federal project known as data.gov which contains bulk data from a variety of government resources. With funding from Google as part of their 10^100 project and the support of many including others listed here, we look forward to the day soon that all primary legal materials are truly free and available to all.

2010 was a busy legal year, especially for free law advocates.  Here are some of Justia’s legal predictions for 2011:

• Lawyers and legal professionals will continue to embrace free law as fast as our Law.gov movement friends can crank it out.  Free law will continue its dramatic growth, and Justia remains proud to support the efforts of Carl Malamud’s work at Public.Resource.Org, along with Google, Fastcase, LII and other friends.
• SCOTUS will grant certiorari after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit renders a decision either affirming or denying a lower court ruling that California’s ban against same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.

2010 is almost gone–it’s been a very eventful year here at Justia. Indulge us while we review this year’s contributions to legal information on the internet. And, we are getting plans ready for 2011–if you have any ideas about things you’d like to see at Justia.com, please let us know in the comments!

Free Law!!

First of all– we have to talk about Law.gov. This movement really took off in 2010, and we are very proud to have been a part of the effort. There have been meetings and conferences across the United States, from which a Principles and Declaration was drafted. Google granted Public.Resource.Org $2M in furtherance of the law.gov effort, and most recently, the Report of Current Opinions was announced. RECOP will distribute current caselaw from the 50 states and the federal courts freely on the internet.

Great news, friends! Starting in 2011, Public.Resource.Org will release a Report of Current Opinions (RECOP) on a weekly basis. The Report will include a FREE HTML feed of ALL slip and final opinions from the appellate courts of the 50 states and the federal government. The feed will be available for reuse under a CC CC-Zero license, and will include page numbers. For more details, read Carl Malamud’s announcement on O’Reilly Radar. This is one of the major projects that Public.Resource.Org has undertaken since being awarded the Google 10^100 Grant in September.

Hi Friends,

Thanks Google for supporting free law … again 🙂 Last year Google Scholar gave the world free USA case law (with internal page numbers) and now Google has announced the first recipients of its Project 10^100 grants, including Public.Resource.Org.

To quote the Google announcement 🙂