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- up-to-date that page’s content is, the site suffers most notably from the lack of a citator; that is to say, it is not possible to find cases construing any of the statutes or regulations hosted on LII.
- The student-organized AltLaw project[1] hosts federal appellate case law, including nearly all Supreme Court cases and nearly six decades’ worth of lower federal appellate decisions.[2] AltLaw’s cases are impressively, if incompletely, hyperlinked both forwards and backwards in time: most citations to other content available on AltLaw appear in the form of clickable hyperlinks, and the site includes a functional citator service via the “citations to/from this” link on each page. The site also offers a variety of search tools for sifting through its voluminous case law repository that, if perhaps not yet as fully developed as the query languages provided by proprietary database operators, nevertheless improve upon the basic functionality of searching for key words or phrases.[3]
- The Justia project[4] includes its own browseable copies of both federal and state legislation, along with a case law repository that, unlike most competing alternatives, also hosts district court decisions and dockets.[5]
- Many of the foregoing projects draw data from the bulk collections maintained by public.resource.org, which has scanned thousands of pages of judicial and other records and made the results available for free download in a variety of formats.[6]
- ↑ AltLaw’s home page is available at http://www.altlaw.org/ (last visited Nov. 17, 2009). See also Gallacher, supra note 38, at 26 (singling out AltLaw as a particularly promising open-access resource).
- ↑ See http://www.altlaw.org/v1/about/coverage (last visited Nov. 17, 2009).
- ↑ See http://www.altlaw.org/v1/search/advanced (last visited Nov. 19, 2009); http://www.altlaw.org/v1/search/boolean (last visited Nov. 19, 2009). I do not mean to fault AltLaw’s designers for failing to match their impressive accomplishments in organizing and hyperlinking their hosted content with an equally sophisticated search engine. As David Weinberger has pointed out, one of the distinctive advantages of storing information digitally is that multiple overlapping organizational or searching schema may be adopted simultaneously without displacing or superseding other, equally valid, organizational schema for the same underlying content. See David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder 19–23 (2007). The important part of the process is the one at which AltLaw has excelled, namely, simply getting the content online and hyperlinked; higher-order indexing and search functions can follow later (or be developed by others) so long as they have an underlying pool of content upon which to work.
- ↑ Justia’s home page is available at http://www.justia.com/ (last visited Nov. 19, 2009).
- ↑ On the significance of Justia’s court document repository, see Peter W. Martin, Online Access to Court Records—From Documents to Data, Particulars to Patterns, 53 Vill. L. Rev. 855, 885–87 (2008).
- ↑ The project’s home page, unsurprisingly, is http://public.resource.org/ (last visited Nov. 19, 2009); see also John Markoff, A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free,
