« The Problems With Terrorist Watch Lists | Main | Lat-itude for Fair Use? »
August 25, 2007
AltLaw
A terrific new free legal research tool has just been released -- AltLaw:
AltLaw 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. AltLaw was written by Stuart Sierra and Paul Ohm, with help from Luis Villa, and produced by Tim Wu.
AltLaw allows you to search the past 10 years of federal appellate and Supreme Court decisions with advanced search capabilities, such as Boolean searching, proximity searching, and the use of wildcards.
The site describes the purpose of the project:
The law is meant to belong to the people, but it can be surprisingly hard to find. Case reports, a major part of the laws of the United States, are hard to get at, and even when on the Internet, rarely searchable. To get full access you generally need either a library of law reports, or an expensive subscription to an online database, which can cost hundreds of dollars per hour.AltLaw is a small effort to change that—to make the common law a bit more common. AltLaw provides the first free, full-text searchable database of Supreme Court and Federal Appellate case reports. It is a resource for attorneys, legal scholars, and the general public.
Check out AltLaw -- it's quite nifty. I hope it continues to grow. Right now, it doesn't have district court opinions or state court opinions, but perhaps one day soon it will.
Posted by Daniel J. Solove at August 25, 2007 10:52 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.concurringopinions.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/2373.
Comments
It also doesn't contain standard citations to any of the cases the it provides, although this too seems to be in the offing. A very cool project nevertheless.
Posted by: Nate Oman at August 25, 2007 10:12 PM
