BoingBoing:Tim sez, "I wanted to write to tell you about the launch of the world's first completely free and public domain legal search engine: altlaw.org. Right now, legal search is dominated by a duopoloy -- Westlaw and Lexis -- that charge hundreds of dollars an hour for searching the nation's laws. Altlaw.org is a pilot project to make the nation's caselaw freely searchable by anyone. The nation's laws are supposed to belong to the people, yet they are amazingly hard to get access to."Having just registered for both Westlaw and Lexis this past week, I found this particularly interesting. I love the idea of making legal information freely available to the public. It seems many legal resources are kept (intentionally?) obscure and difficult to find, use, and understand by the general public. This helps create job security and high salaries for the lawyers, but at what expense to the rest of society? That's probably one wealth transfer we could do without.
See the beta version of Altlaw.org here.
P.S. -- GMU limits our access to the Westlaw and Lexis databases during our first semester in order to force us to learn how to use the paper-based resources in the law library. This is so we won't have to bill clients large sums of money for paying hourly rates while searching online resources when we become practicing lawyers.
(HT Glenn Reynolds)
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