[8894] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: JURIS - DOJ rejects TAP FOIA Request
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James Love)
Sat Dec 11 00:34:18 1993
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1993 11:20:30 -0500 (EST)
From: James Love <love@essential.org>
To: Steve Haynes <shaynes@research.westlaw.com>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, mark@drd.com, Blue Mountain <bluemtn@cni.org>
In-Reply-To: <9312091606.AA08146@research.westlaw.com>
On Thu, 9 Dec 1993 Steve Haynes of Westlaw responded to a post
from Mark Lawrence about the availability of federal caselaw on
government bulletin boards. Steve said:
>But much caselaw _is_ available in this form. Most of the
>federal appellate courts and many state courts make their
>decisions available electronically on bulletin boards.
>federal appellate courts and many state courts make their
>decisions available electronically on bulletin boards.
While there are many court bulletin boards which provide
access to some caselaw information, these BBSs provide only
limited access.
* First, most courts only keep opinions on the BBS from a
limited time, such as 90 days, and do not maintain archives.
* Second, you often have to a have a subscription, with some
type of a sign-up fee. Since there are many of these
bulletin boards, this presents an unsurmountable burden to
anyone but a handful of publishers or lawyers working in a
particular jurisdiction. (It is too expensive and time
consuming for citizens to maintain all these separate
accounts.)
* Third, no one can search for an opinion using key words,
because the decisions are highly decentralized.
* Fourth, as pointed out by Alan Sugarman, the BBS versions of
the opinions often do not include corrections, pagination,
headnotes (the headnotes provided by the printers of the
government funded printer of the slip opinions), or the
names of the lawyers, limiting the value of the data.
* Fifth, many courts, particularly at the District and
Bankruptcy Court level, do not yet disseminate opinions
electronically. In these courts the opinions must be
obtained directly from the judges by mail.
What should be done? The Administrative Office of the Courts
proposed a central repository for judicial opinions, disseminated
in standard formats with a public domain system of citations,
including interior pagination information. This was rejected by
the federal Judicial Conference last year. Who opposed this
access broadening proposal? West Publishing did, by saying it
was a waste of the taxpayers money.
Clearly, the Courts should do a better job of disseminating
judicial opinions (and docket information, and perhaps someday,
pleadings). But if the Courts do not act, we are asking the
Executive Branch to do something (hence our interest in public
access to the JURIS database, which includes judicial opinions
plus much more).
jamie
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James Love, Taxpayer Assets Project; internet: love@essential.org
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036; v. 202/387-8030; f. 202/234-5176
12 Church Road, Ardmore, PA 19003; v. 215/658-0880; f. 215/649-4066
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