Deal to release federal court cases exceeds expectations

I previously wrote a post about public.resource.org and their quest to make case law freely available. At the time I was skeptical, because I was afraid that it would not compete with Lexis and Westlaw as far as providing the value-added services that those vendors generally make their money.

As it turns out, the goal of the project is actually different than the poor search service I had imagined. Yesterday came the announcement that they are partnering with FastCase to make all Court of Appeals cases from 1950 and Supreme Court cases from 1754 freely available. For notes on how Supreme Court opinions can stretch back to almost 40 years before the US Supreme Court, see this Supreme Court guide from the Duke Law Library.

The really cool thing about this is that it appears these cases will be available for download and use by anyone. Elmer Masters discusses this at his blog. And according to this post at Teknoids he’s already created this Google Custom Search to search the 150,000 cases that are already available.

As Elmer mentions, making cases available in this way will mean that people can create their own services to search, display, and make these cases available to the public. Law libraries could even download them and integrate them into their electronic collections. I’m very excited to see what some serious programmers can do with these pages.