New on VoxPopuLII: Holmes on Accessible Law

Nick Holmes of infolaw has posted Accessible Law, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Holmes discusses the state of the free access to law movement, and the challenges of making free law usable by ordinary citizens. Mr. Holmes describes FreeLegalWeb, his new free access to law service, that combines free primary law with expert legal commentary presented via blogs, to make the law more accessible to the people.

Mr. Holmes also discusses the recent debate between Bob Berring, Tom Bruce, and others over the quality of access to law provided by commercial computer assisted legal research services and free law services, as well as Jason Wilson’s concept of online legal publishing as curation.

This post will be of interest to those who develop or manage legal information systems; to the legal publishing community; to the free access to law community; and all who are interest in improving public access to legal information.

Debate on Free Access to Law

[NOTE: Updated on 10 November 2010 to link to Professor Bruce's post entitled More West: What Legal Information Business Should The Government Be Out Of?. Updated on 8 November 2009 to link to Professor Bruce's post entitled The West Video and the Free Market. Updated on 4 November 2009 to link to Professor Berring's Nov. 3 reply, on sLaw.]

An interesting debate over free access to law is now occurring in the legal blogosphere.

Thomson Reuters, owners of West Publishing, a major U.S. legal publisher, and the Westlaw computer assisted legal research (CALR) service, recently published video comments about the free access to law movement by Professor Robert Berring of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, and a well respected expert on legal research. In the video Professor Berring praises the free access to law movement for increasing competition in the CALR market and compelling Westlaw and its main rival in the U.S. market, Lexis.com, to innovate. Yet Professor Berring also criticizes the free access to law movement as fleeting, and as providing insufficient metadata to enable high quality legal research.

This week Professor Daniel Poulin, Director of CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute, responded to Professor Berring’s comments, on the sLaw blog, and yesterday Professor Tom Bruce, Director of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, published his response on his B-Screeds blog.

Ed Walters, Esq., CEO of Fastcase, Inc., has offered to convene a meeting of the participants of this debate.

On November 3, Professor Berring posted a reply, on sLaw.

On November 8, Professor Bruce responded with a post entitled The West Video and the Free Market.

On November 10, Professor Bruce responded again with a post entitled More West: What Legal Information Business Should The Government Be Out Of?.

Those interested in digital legal information or public access to legal information may find this debate particularly informative and timely.

HT @caminick for tweeting Prof. Poulin’s post.