By and large, in most societies, privileged and powerful elites “own the law.” But even so, there are usually some bounds they may not overstep, particulary given that it is in their interest to maintain at least a sporadic appearance that the law is the same for everyone.
Great article and topic. Programmers and developers are amazed at how behind the legal profession is in its use of technology. My firsthand experience with the legal profession/community is that many of the actors therein profit from the information barriers that exist. Software and open access websites help surmount barriers, yet those barriers are profitable for the established gatekeepers. Given the money at the disposal of the information gatekeepers on this, I’m not optimistic that open access champions will prevail—unfortunately.
When I clerked SDNY decades ago, we wrote the decisions and then had to cope with West’s copious instructions on the keynotes. We were not paid for providing the key words so our analyses of where a case fit in terms of research was, to my mind, public information. Then Lexis and West went computer at exorbitant prices. No lawyers with whom I worked (I was a consultant to Bell Labs and had done a stint at AT&T Legal HQ on the divestiture) understood simple Boolean logic. I could do a search in five minutes that would take another lawyer days. To be fair, lawyers incapable of using a computer should not garner billable hours for digital searches. A last point: some clerks were so angered by West that they made up keynotes.
Best ABA Journal article I’ve seen in a long time. The repercussions extend beyond public access to information. The cost of access to this public information also affects access to justice because it connects to the cost of lawyers and the ability of new lawyers to practice with cheaper business models. It connects to the profitability of being a lawyer (in a double-edged sword kind of way) and therefore to the current uproar over the cost of going to law school. As a solo practitioner with a relatively new practice, having to pay Westlaw or LexisNexis would probably have driven me out of business. Without their cheaper competitors, I would have been less effective as a lawyer. Frankly I can’t begin to guess how all of these variables and moving pieces play out in the marketplace but it’s an important subject and I am glad to see in-depth coverage.
How does one write an article on this subject and not mention RECAP? The project, which aims to “turn PACER around,” lets users upload copies of e-filed federal district court documents to an archive where they can be accessed by anyone, for free, forever, without incurring PACER fees. Learn more at http://www.recapthelaw.org
The interesting part is buried in the details. The general public has absolutely no interest in access to highly technical standards - as evidenced by the complete failure of the cited Kickstarter campaign. The “donations and grants” referred to are mostly from Google and Yahoo. So is this about access for the public or just two huge internet search firms moving ahead with their agenda to make sure everything in the world is posted so they can slap an ad next to it and make more money?
SDO’s publish standards, not regulations. They are very different things (inaccurate text below).
“Last August, three SDOs—the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, the American Society for Testing and Materials, and the National Fire Protection Association—sued Malamud for copyright violations after he refused to pull copies of their regulations from his website”.
As a textbook author, I have used publications of state governments, e.g., probation and parole rules, model presentence reports, in my work. I have recently (last edition of my PROBATION & PAROLE) been told that these now require permission from the copyright holder. If this material is not in the public domain, it is not clear who (governor, agency commissioner, etc.) has authority to grant permission for its use.
SDOs publish standards that are incorporated by municipalities. Small city budgets prevent full publication of the regulation. Small City, USA adopts the SDO standard but does not publish it. Then, when a member of the public violates the standard, he or she must pay $75 or more to find out what the law is.
There is little new in this debate. Law librarians have fought the battle for public access to the law devoting countless hours of their own time to these issues for decades going back to before the 1976 Copyright Act. So have other types of library organizations. The accuracy claims of Lexis and West are bunk. Their files contain the same errors as the public access databases created from the same electronic feed from the courts and regulatory agencies. They don’t even make it easy for someone who spots an error to notify them and get it corrected. As for needing to rely on only the “official” source, there would be no West if there were any truth to that idea. West was built as a private system of unofficial reports. Lawyers and courts and even our governments have relied on unofficial versions for centuries. What West had in the beginning was a distribution system that added value in large part through speed and comprehensiveness that lawyers were willing to pay for. West and Lexis survive because they still provide value that some lawyers and other commercial and government users of legal information are still willing to pay for—very comprehensive databases of legal information (although still not totally complete especially in the international and municipal arenas) with good search systems for people who are not trained researchers as well as powerful boolean search tools for those who are well trained to use them. Despite law schools and other university courses in legal research and other forms of research and to some extent because of our current exposure to powerful natural language Internet search engines from the time we learn to read now which lull people into believing we don’t need to be trained to do research, very few people comparatively have the skills and training to exploit the full power of digital legal information. But while Lexis and West were pioneers in developing good natural language search systems, their systems are no longer the only or even necessarily the best non boolean search systems around. Public knowledge of the law we are deemed to know and required to obey can only benefit from having the official data adopted by the lawmakers (whether they were the first drafters or not) widely available for all innovators to build upon. Privatization of official legal data regardless of what it may trace back to, especially by companies based outside the U.S. (West is owned by Thomson Reuters, a Canadian Corporation and Lexis is owned by Reed Elsevier and Elsevier Reed Financial - incorporated in the UK and Netherlands), in not compatible with our democratic system of government. If such companies want to contract for and obtain the financial benefits of contracting with governments to be paid for the work in producing the data for official versions of laws, they must recognize that they are paid for the work they do through the official contract. Like anyone else who contracts with the government, they must understand that government contracting generally does not aim to pay at levels incorporating the same profit percentage as the private contracts with the highest return. But then there are other benefits to be received from government contracting. Its up to them if they want to get into the government contracting part of official laws or whether they just want to be value added providers like the other Internet providers including those who provide free access and those who provide access only for fee. The standards organizations who develop codes which they then seek to have uniformly adopted must likewise accept that when they seek to have their standards adopted by governments, they are moving into a public arena. They are not just drafters of codes and regulations. They are industry advocates and lobbyists. Lobbyists are often the initial drafters of all sorts of language that makes it way into legislation. The fact that what is ultimately adopted officially as law enters the public domain is just a part of their industry and a part of the cost of industry self regulation. It is in their commercial best interests to have standards and uniformity which they draft. If they do not want to pay for that part of their industry or believe that they cannot or should not financially support that industry self regulation, then their other option is stop self regulating and allow governments, however inefficient, to regulate them or allow government to draw the industry into public participation in government sponsored regulatory drafting efforts as we have in areas like the Environmental Protection Agency and the FDA. I think these SDO’s are in the business of drafting standard codes and lobbying for their adoption because this method of self regulation is in their commercial best interest. I do not think they are in it for solely public interest altruistric reasons. They too should accept that one of the costs of seeking official adoption as law by governments is the dedication of the official digital data to the public domain.
If people are interested in more information, here are some pointers to 3 of the things Mr. Li mentioned in his very well researched article.
1. The congressional testimony on Edicts of Government is here: https://public.resource.org/edicts/
2. The docket for the court case we’re involved in with the 3 standards people is here: http://archive.org/details/gov.uscourts.dcd.161410/gov.uscourts.dcd.161410.docket.html (The files are copied out of PACER using the amazing RECAP tool, which you can find at https://www.recapthelaw.org/ ).
3. The effort to put international standards online is here: https://law.resource.org/pub/12tables.html
When the question on the cover of the ABA Journal is “Who Owns the Law?” why limit consideration to ownership of legal documents or data? Who really believes that is the same?
Who owns the law??
It would be a great Question of the Week (or the year, or the new century).
Who wrote this article? How could you write an article without mentioning the seminal case West v. Mead, where page numbers were found to be copyrightable:
Congress should have stepped in about five minutes after that decision to clarify that the law, nor the page numbers, nor anything in an official publication, may be copyrighted. They didn’t but they should now.
Michael - the seminal case of West v Mead was overruled in Mathew Bender and HyperLaw v. West. Indeed, the entire issue of whether the West versions of cases can be copyrighted was settled in the HyperLaw v. West decision in that case. The Second Circuit affirmed and the Supreme Court denied cert. I am surprised that Malamud does not mention this - he knows all about the case. And it is surprising that the article misses these cases. See hyperlaw.com. Michael, you might Shephardize your seminal case. HyperLaw is my company. Still exists. Still cannot be sued by West for copyright infringement.
@15 - Interesting! I practice family law so I was going by memory from law school, many years ago. I remember how off-the-wall that decision sounded at the time, that choosing the fonts allows the page numbers to be copyrighted. Under that rationale literally anything can be copyright, no matter how obvious. Seems all that should have been in the article assuming there are those, like me, that remember West v. Mead from school but don’t practice in the area so wouldn’t bother shepherding. You’d think the ABA Journal would spend some ink on the law. Congratulations on getting West v. Mead overturned.
One of the first tiny steps to a republican democracy in the west was the publication of the twelve tables of laws in Rome to allow all citizens, not just the rich and powerful, to know the law.
There should be no secret laws, no secret tribunals, no pay to have access.
Pacer should automatically provide para. numbers within all documents signed by a judge, and make the entire text open to all search engines.
Court should then require cites be to docket number, tab, and para. number and forbid citation to private reporters like West. The keynote system has always been for the lazy, the stupid, and the semi-competent (that’s what they taught in law school 40 years ago, and what became more and more obvious the longer I practiced)—and its as useful now as quill pens for scriveners!
The ABA itself is being sued in a topically-related case: Think Computer Foundation et al. v. Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts et al., case number 5:14-cv-02396, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. See http://www.law360.com/articles/541466/us-court-system-aba-sued-for-excessive-pacer-fees
Re Jonathan Freed = An interesting question is how much do Westlaw and Lexis spend on Pacer fees every year to download briefs and dockets - They then turn around and sell them to their users.
Also, Pacer and ECS are not the same. For a litigant in the Federal Courts, ECS is fantastic and costs nothing extra. Cheaper than paper and going to the court to file and serving other parties.
I am not sure that the Plaintiff’s here fully understand the various aspects of the case - they should have focused just on one issue - the charges paid by non-parties to access non-opinion material filed under ECS and available to the public under Pacer.
Still waiting for the author of this article to weigh in.
ABA moderators .. please, please step in. The sovereign citizen types are annoying enough in real life: I’m a family law practitioner and wouldn’t wish one on my worst nemesis as a client. They’re not helpful and shouldn’t be welcome here.
#23 Michael you completely missed the point of my post, which is Corporations copy right their own products, and I substantiated the corporate governments, and Foreign corporate courts right to copyright what they produce in the same way you would copy right some of the writing you did if you wrote a legal history book. The material I substantiated my point of the Corporate government was written by retired Judge Dale, I do not see where sovereign citizen comes into play but since you brought it up let me correct you, who practices family law, and thereby presumed to know the law, on one salient point. Sovereign citizen is an oxymoron, as a sovereign cannot be a citizen.
Definitions from Judge Dales writings;
“Sovereign – A real person. Sovereigns can own property while Citizens/Subjects cannot. According to the original Constitution, all government comes from the Sovereign Individual. Without the Sovereign Individual, there is no government.
U.S. Citizen/Subject – A corporate fictitious entity that merely represents the real person. It acts as a “straw man.” [To call oneself a “sovereign citizen” or “sovereign subject” is an oxymoron, since “sovereign” and “citizen/subject” are mutually exclusive of each other.] When asked if you are a “U.S. Citizen” on corporate legal documents, if you check “yes,” you agree to the terms of Corporate Law and unknowingly relinquish your sovereign status and transfer all of your rights to the UNITED STATES CORPORATION since you are now under contract. ”
As a person trained to practice Law can you dispute any of the facts presented, without pre prejudiced name calling? Or did they teach you in law school to use name calling diversions when facts cannot be rebutted?
#20 Re Jonathan Freed = An interesting question is how much do Westlaw and Lexis spend on Pacer fees every year to download briefs and dockets - They then turn around and sell them to their users.
Also, Pacer and ECS are not the same. For a litigant in the Federal Courts, ECS is fantastic and costs nothing extra. Cheaper than paper and going to the court to file and serving other parties.
The Courts are Foreign Corporations as such they are entitled to charge for the material they produce, Did you ever notice that Westlaw only picks and chooses about 15% of the actual cases, to publish? Why would it not publish all rulings? It is their prerogative as a corporation. to pick and choose, in the same way it is their prerogative to charge for materials produced and services rendered..
The problem seems to be many are looking at this issue as if the Government was a Government of the people, and should be making all public information for free because its public, that view, makes the charging of fees, copyright issues seem extraordinarily unfair. But when you understand its all corporate, one can see the why these fees, and copy right issues are justified , its just Commerce.
Excellent article of ABAJournal.As well all the comments .Evidently law,rules and standards in order to be widely obeyed must be freely accessed as a public domain As citizen of a democratic state with a law sistem belonging to continental law side but also as law student and researcher focused on comparative law and “legal benchmarking”(term I coined in my research in progress) I think citizen themselves and researcher by having free access to authorised legal texts can contribute to better legal environement by improving it,having also the right to propose legislation. More then this” Nemo Censetur Ignorare legem"is a latin adage expressing the principle that nobody is excused by unknowing the law, nobody is discharged by the responsibility of knowing the law. But in the same time lawmaking is an atribute of the legislative power of the state , rule of law is the main atribute of a democratic state therefore laws ,rules ,standards legally binding must be public and free in order to be observed as right to public information is a fundamental human right stated by Constitution.By consequence in France for example legifrance.gouv.fr is a site with free access to all french laws as well as the same free access to laws is started to be put in practice in Romania I think this is enforcing rule of law and is not imperil legal counselling or legal publisher in their specific professional activity as they are providing more in depth anlysis and information
B. McLeod said:
By and large, in most societies, privileged and powerful elites “own the law.” But even so, there are usually some bounds they may not overstep, particulary given that it is in their interest to maintain at least a sporadic appearance that the law is the same for everyone.
Posted: May 27, 2014 12:18 pm CDT
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EFMLawyer said:
Great article and topic. Programmers and developers are amazed at how behind the legal profession is in its use of technology. My firsthand experience with the legal profession/community is that many of the actors therein profit from the information barriers that exist. Software and open access websites help surmount barriers, yet those barriers are profitable for the established gatekeepers. Given the money at the disposal of the information gatekeepers on this, I’m not optimistic that open access champions will prevail—unfortunately.
Posted: May 27, 2014 12:25 pm CDT
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Laurens R. Schwartz said:
When I clerked SDNY decades ago, we wrote the decisions and then had to cope with West’s copious instructions on the keynotes. We were not paid for providing the key words so our analyses of where a case fit in terms of research was, to my mind, public information. Then Lexis and West went computer at exorbitant prices. No lawyers with whom I worked (I was a consultant to Bell Labs and had done a stint at AT&T Legal HQ on the divestiture) understood simple Boolean logic. I could do a search in five minutes that would take another lawyer days. To be fair, lawyers incapable of using a computer should not garner billable hours for digital searches. A last point: some clerks were so angered by West that they made up keynotes.
Posted: May 27, 2014 12:25 pm CDT
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TimT said:
Best ABA Journal article I’ve seen in a long time. The repercussions extend beyond public access to information. The cost of access to this public information also affects access to justice because it connects to the cost of lawyers and the ability of new lawyers to practice with cheaper business models. It connects to the profitability of being a lawyer (in a double-edged sword kind of way) and therefore to the current uproar over the cost of going to law school. As a solo practitioner with a relatively new practice, having to pay Westlaw or LexisNexis would probably have driven me out of business. Without their cheaper competitors, I would have been less effective as a lawyer. Frankly I can’t begin to guess how all of these variables and moving pieces play out in the marketplace but it’s an important subject and I am glad to see in-depth coverage.
Posted: May 27, 2014 01:02 pm CDT
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Nicholas M said:
How does one write an article on this subject and not mention RECAP? The project, which aims to “turn PACER around,” lets users upload copies of e-filed federal district court documents to an archive where they can be accessed by anyone, for free, forever, without incurring PACER fees. Learn more at http://www.recapthelaw.org
Posted: May 27, 2014 01:17 pm CDT
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Moazzam Khan said:
Comment removed by moderator.
Posted: May 27, 2014 01:56 pm CDT
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Michael said:
The interesting part is buried in the details. The general public has absolutely no interest in access to highly technical standards - as evidenced by the complete failure of the cited Kickstarter campaign. The “donations and grants” referred to are mostly from Google and Yahoo. So is this about access for the public or just two huge internet search firms moving ahead with their agenda to make sure everything in the world is posted so they can slap an ad next to it and make more money?
Posted: May 27, 2014 02:28 pm CDT
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PTFakes said:
SDO’s publish standards, not regulations. They are very different things (inaccurate text below).
“Last August, three SDOs—the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, the American Society for Testing and Materials, and the National Fire Protection Association—sued Malamud for copyright violations after he refused to pull copies of their regulations from his website”.
Posted: May 27, 2014 03:19 pm CDT
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Howard Abadinsky said:
Another public domain copyright issue:
As a textbook author, I have used publications of state governments, e.g., probation and parole rules, model presentence reports, in my work. I have recently (last edition of my PROBATION & PAROLE) been told that these now require permission from the copyright holder. If this material is not in the public domain, it is not clear who (governor, agency commissioner, etc.) has authority to grant permission for its use.
Posted: May 27, 2014 04:49 pm CDT
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Free the Law said:
SDOs publish standards that are incorporated by municipalities. Small city budgets prevent full publication of the regulation. Small City, USA adopts the SDO standard but does not publish it. Then, when a member of the public violates the standard, he or she must pay $75 or more to find out what the law is.
~true example from last month’s case.
Posted: May 27, 2014 08:47 pm CDT
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MaryJ said:
There is little new in this debate. Law librarians have fought the battle for public access to the law devoting countless hours of their own time to these issues for decades going back to before the 1976 Copyright Act. So have other types of library organizations. The accuracy claims of Lexis and West are bunk. Their files contain the same errors as the public access databases created from the same electronic feed from the courts and regulatory agencies. They don’t even make it easy for someone who spots an error to notify them and get it corrected. As for needing to rely on only the “official” source, there would be no West if there were any truth to that idea. West was built as a private system of unofficial reports. Lawyers and courts and even our governments have relied on unofficial versions for centuries. What West had in the beginning was a distribution system that added value in large part through speed and comprehensiveness that lawyers were willing to pay for. West and Lexis survive because they still provide value that some lawyers and other commercial and government users of legal information are still willing to pay for—very comprehensive databases of legal information (although still not totally complete especially in the international and municipal arenas) with good search systems for people who are not trained researchers as well as powerful boolean search tools for those who are well trained to use them. Despite law schools and other university courses in legal research and other forms of research and to some extent because of our current exposure to powerful natural language Internet search engines from the time we learn to read now which lull people into believing we don’t need to be trained to do research, very few people comparatively have the skills and training to exploit the full power of digital legal information. But while Lexis and West were pioneers in developing good natural language search systems, their systems are no longer the only or even necessarily the best non boolean search systems around. Public knowledge of the law we are deemed to know and required to obey can only benefit from having the official data adopted by the lawmakers (whether they were the first drafters or not) widely available for all innovators to build upon. Privatization of official legal data regardless of what it may trace back to, especially by companies based outside the U.S. (West is owned by Thomson Reuters, a Canadian Corporation and Lexis is owned by Reed Elsevier and Elsevier Reed Financial - incorporated in the UK and Netherlands), in not compatible with our democratic system of government. If such companies want to contract for and obtain the financial benefits of contracting with governments to be paid for the work in producing the data for official versions of laws, they must recognize that they are paid for the work they do through the official contract. Like anyone else who contracts with the government, they must understand that government contracting generally does not aim to pay at levels incorporating the same profit percentage as the private contracts with the highest return. But then there are other benefits to be received from government contracting. Its up to them if they want to get into the government contracting part of official laws or whether they just want to be value added providers like the other Internet providers including those who provide free access and those who provide access only for fee. The standards organizations who develop codes which they then seek to have uniformly adopted must likewise accept that when they seek to have their standards adopted by governments, they are moving into a public arena. They are not just drafters of codes and regulations. They are industry advocates and lobbyists. Lobbyists are often the initial drafters of all sorts of language that makes it way into legislation. The fact that what is ultimately adopted officially as law enters the public domain is just a part of their industry and a part of the cost of industry self regulation. It is in their commercial best interests to have standards and uniformity which they draft. If they do not want to pay for that part of their industry or believe that they cannot or should not financially support that industry self regulation, then their other option is stop self regulating and allow governments, however inefficient, to regulate them or allow government to draw the industry into public participation in government sponsored regulatory drafting efforts as we have in areas like the Environmental Protection Agency and the FDA. I think these SDO’s are in the business of drafting standard codes and lobbying for their adoption because this method of self regulation is in their commercial best interest. I do not think they are in it for solely public interest altruistric reasons. They too should accept that one of the costs of seeking official adoption as law by governments is the dedication of the official digital data to the public domain.
Posted: May 27, 2014 10:14 pm CDT
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Carl Malamud said:
If people are interested in more information, here are some pointers to 3 of the things Mr. Li mentioned in his very well researched article.
1. The congressional testimony on Edicts of Government is here: https://public.resource.org/edicts/
2. The docket for the court case we’re involved in with the 3 standards people is here: http://archive.org/details/gov.uscourts.dcd.161410/gov.uscourts.dcd.161410.docket.html (The files are copied out of PACER using the amazing RECAP tool, which you can find at https://www.recapthelaw.org/ ).
3. The effort to put international standards online is here: https://law.resource.org/pub/12tables.html
Posted: May 27, 2014 11:48 pm CDT
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B. McLeod said:
When the question on the cover of the ABA Journal is “Who Owns the Law?” why limit consideration to ownership of legal documents or data? Who really believes that is the same?
Who owns the law??
It would be a great Question of the Week (or the year, or the new century).
Posted: May 28, 2014 07:24 am CDT
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Michael said:
Who wrote this article? How could you write an article without mentioning the seminal case West v. Mead, where page numbers were found to be copyrightable:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/West_Publishing_Co._v._Mead_Data_Central,_Inc./Opinion_of_the_Court
Congress should have stepped in about five minutes after that decision to clarify that the law, nor the page numbers, nor anything in an official publication, may be copyrighted. They didn’t but they should now.
Posted: May 28, 2014 06:48 pm CDT
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Alan Sugarman said:
Michael - the seminal case of West v Mead was overruled in Mathew Bender and HyperLaw v. West. Indeed, the entire issue of whether the West versions of cases can be copyrighted was settled in the HyperLaw v. West decision in that case. The Second Circuit affirmed and the Supreme Court denied cert. I am surprised that Malamud does not mention this - he knows all about the case. And it is surprising that the article misses these cases. See hyperlaw.com. Michael, you might Shephardize your seminal case. HyperLaw is my company. Still exists. Still cannot be sued by West for copyright infringement.
Posted: May 30, 2014 11:12 pm CDT
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Michael said:
@15 - Interesting! I practice family law so I was going by memory from law school, many years ago. I remember how off-the-wall that decision sounded at the time, that choosing the fonts allows the page numbers to be copyrighted. Under that rationale literally anything can be copyright, no matter how obvious. Seems all that should have been in the article assuming there are those, like me, that remember West v. Mead from school but don’t practice in the area so wouldn’t bother shepherding. You’d think the ABA Journal would spend some ink on the law. Congratulations on getting West v. Mead overturned.
Posted: May 30, 2014 11:19 pm CDT
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FW said:
One of the first tiny steps to a republican democracy in the west was the publication of the twelve tables of laws in Rome to allow all citizens, not just the rich and powerful, to know the law.
There should be no secret laws, no secret tribunals, no pay to have access.
Pacer should automatically provide para. numbers within all documents signed by a judge, and make the entire text open to all search engines.
Court should then require cites be to docket number, tab, and para. number and forbid citation to private reporters like West. The keynote system has always been for the lazy, the stupid, and the semi-competent (that’s what they taught in law school 40 years ago, and what became more and more obvious the longer I practiced)—and its as useful now as quill pens for scriveners!
Posted: Jun 02, 2014 12:19 pm CDT
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B. McLeod said:
There was a table for insolvent debtors too, but they broke that one. Yet, with all those tables, they still published no couch of restitution,
Posted: Jun 02, 2014 12:25 pm CDT
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Jonathan Freed said:
The ABA itself is being sued in a topically-related case: Think Computer Foundation et al. v. Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts et al., case number 5:14-cv-02396, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. See http://www.law360.com/articles/541466/us-court-system-aba-sued-for-excessive-pacer-fees
Posted: Jun 03, 2014 08:15 pm CDT
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Alan Sugarman said:
Re Jonathan Freed = An interesting question is how much do Westlaw and Lexis spend on Pacer fees every year to download briefs and dockets - They then turn around and sell them to their users.
Also, Pacer and ECS are not the same. For a litigant in the Federal Courts, ECS is fantastic and costs nothing extra. Cheaper than paper and going to the court to file and serving other parties.
I am not sure that the Plaintiff’s here fully understand the various aspects of the case - they should have focused just on one issue - the charges paid by non-parties to access non-opinion material filed under ECS and available to the public under Pacer.
Still waiting for the author of this article to weigh in.
Posted: Jun 03, 2014 09:16 pm CDT
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Johnny Kunitake said:
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Posted: Jun 13, 2014 09:20 pm CDT
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Johnny Kunitake said:
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Posted: Jun 14, 2014 04:08 am CDT
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Michael said:
ABA moderators .. please, please step in. The sovereign citizen types are annoying enough in real life: I’m a family law practitioner and wouldn’t wish one on my worst nemesis as a client. They’re not helpful and shouldn’t be welcome here.
Posted: Jun 14, 2014 06:20 am CDT
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Johnny Kunitake said:
#23 Michael you completely missed the point of my post, which is Corporations copy right their own products, and I substantiated the corporate governments, and Foreign corporate courts right to copyright what they produce in the same way you would copy right some of the writing you did if you wrote a legal history book. The material I substantiated my point of the Corporate government was written by retired Judge Dale, I do not see where sovereign citizen comes into play but since you brought it up let me correct you, who practices family law, and thereby presumed to know the law, on one salient point. Sovereign citizen is an oxymoron, as a sovereign cannot be a citizen.
Definitions from Judge Dales writings;
“Sovereign – A real person. Sovereigns can own property while Citizens/Subjects cannot. According to the original Constitution, all government comes from the Sovereign Individual. Without the Sovereign Individual, there is no government.
U.S. Citizen/Subject – A corporate fictitious entity that merely represents the real person. It acts as a “straw man.” [To call oneself a “sovereign citizen” or “sovereign subject” is an oxymoron, since “sovereign” and “citizen/subject” are mutually exclusive of each other.] When asked if you are a “U.S. Citizen” on corporate legal documents, if you check “yes,” you agree to the terms of Corporate Law and unknowingly relinquish your sovereign status and transfer all of your rights to the UNITED STATES CORPORATION since you are now under contract. ”
As a person trained to practice Law can you dispute any of the facts presented, without pre prejudiced name calling? Or did they teach you in law school to use name calling diversions when facts cannot be rebutted?
Posted: Jun 14, 2014 04:51 pm CDT
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Johnny Kunitake said:
#20 Re Jonathan Freed = An interesting question is how much do Westlaw and Lexis spend on Pacer fees every year to download briefs and dockets - They then turn around and sell them to their users.
Also, Pacer and ECS are not the same. For a litigant in the Federal Courts, ECS is fantastic and costs nothing extra. Cheaper than paper and going to the court to file and serving other parties.
The Courts are Foreign Corporations as such they are entitled to charge for the material they produce, Did you ever notice that Westlaw only picks and chooses about 15% of the actual cases, to publish? Why would it not publish all rulings? It is their prerogative as a corporation. to pick and choose, in the same way it is their prerogative to charge for materials produced and services rendered..
The problem seems to be many are looking at this issue as if the Government was a Government of the people, and should be making all public information for free because its public, that view, makes the charging of fees, copyright issues seem extraordinarily unfair. But when you understand its all corporate, one can see the why these fees, and copy right issues are justified , its just Commerce.
Posted: Jun 14, 2014 05:02 pm CDT
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DRAGOMIRESCU MIHAELA EUGENIA said:
Excellent article of ABAJournal.As well all the comments .Evidently law,rules and standards in order to be widely obeyed must be freely accessed as a public domain As citizen of a democratic state with a law sistem belonging to continental law side but also as law student and researcher focused on comparative law and “legal benchmarking”(term I coined in my research in progress) I think citizen themselves and researcher by having free access to authorised legal texts can contribute to better legal environement by improving it,having also the right to propose legislation. More then this” Nemo Censetur Ignorare legem"is a latin adage expressing the principle that nobody is excused by unknowing the law, nobody is discharged by the responsibility of knowing the law. But in the same time lawmaking is an atribute of the legislative power of the state , rule of law is the main atribute of a democratic state therefore laws ,rules ,standards legally binding must be public and free in order to be observed as right to public information is a fundamental human right stated by Constitution.By consequence in France for example legifrance.gouv.fr is a site with free access to all french laws as well as the same free access to laws is started to be put in practice in Romania I think this is enforcing rule of law and is not imperil legal counselling or legal publisher in their specific professional activity as they are providing more in depth anlysis and information
Posted: Jun 21, 2014 02:39 pm CDT
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