In an effort to make researching federal case law fast, easy, more accessible to the public, and free – Columbia Law School and the University of Colorado Law School have launched a new Web site called AltLaw.org. AltLaw.org contains nearly 170,000 decisions dating back to the early 1990s from the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Appellate courts. The site’s creators, Columbia Law School’s Timothy Wu and Stuart Sierra, and University of Colorado Law School’s Paul Ohm, said the site’s database will grow over time.
Wu said he started to build AltLaw.org because he wanted a way to quickly search through court decisions the same way that the public now can search a wide array of information through such Internet search engines as Google and Yahoo! "It’s been more than 10 years since the start of the Internet revolution, and case law is one area that has not budged. Somebody has to take the initiative," Wu said. "We want to open the law to the public."
Currently lawyers and other legal researchers must use one of the big two proprietary law databases which can cost hundreds of dollars per hour for a research session. Thus, AltLaw.org has the potential to dramatically change the landscape of case law researching.
Ohm wrote thousands of lines of code that download cases to AltLaw.org from more than a dozen court websites each night. He said the data comes from the courts themselves, and AltLaw.org is designed as an extremely open platform so that others can take the raw material and use it in various ways.
AltLaw.org is a joint project of Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology, and the Silicon Flatirons Program at the University of Colorado Law School. For additional information see Columbia Law School's Press Release.
New York Legal Update highly applauds this effort. For too long access to case law has been controlled by the big two legal publishers at outrageous prices. Access to all law should be free or as close to free as possible. We can only hope that similar efforts will be made by Columbia or others to create a similar searchable database for New York case law.
This would definitely help the public in accessing the law faster and effective.
Thank you for posting!
Posted by: New York Universities | February 11, 2009 at 03:43 PM
"Columbia Law School Launches Free Searchable Database" article is best information of atlaw.com is more powerful search of law firm and lawyers.
Posted by: Law Firms | February 27, 2009 at 02:15 AM
Given the fact that I have been an ardent supporter of technology and its interaction with the legal systems, this is indeed a great news.
Posted by: Vijay Kumar | February 15, 2010 at 07:06 AM