40, million, pages worth.
It used to be you had to pay for these searches.
Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age
Shelves
of law books are an august symbol of legal practice, and no place, save
the Library of Congress, can match the collection at Harvard’s Law School Library.
Its trove includes nearly every state, federal, territorial and tribal
judicial decision since colonial times — a priceless potential resource
for everyone from legal scholars to defense lawyers trying to challenge a
criminal conviction.
Now,
in a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the
Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest
volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner.
They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete,
searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on
the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually
must be paid for.
“Improving
access to justice is a priority,” said Martha Minow, dean of Harvard
Law School, explaining why Harvard has embarked on the project. “We feel
an obligation and an opportunity here to open up our resources to the
public.”
snip
Complete
state results will become publicly available this fall for California
and New York, and the entire library will be online in 2017, said Daniel
Lewis, chief executive and co-founder of Ravel Law, a commercial
start-up in California that has teamed up with Harvard Law for the
project. The cases will be available at www.ravellaw.com. Ravel
is paying millions of dollars to support the scanning. The cases will
be accessible in a searchable format and, along with the texts, they
will be presented with visual maps developed by the company, which
graphically show the evolution through cases of a judicial concept and
how each key decision is cited in others.
On
Ravel sites currently available to the public, for example, a lawyer
planning to challenge the 2010 Citizens United decision, which permitted
corporations to make independent political expenditures, can enter “campaign finance”
and see in schematic form the major cases at the district, appellate
and Supreme Court levels that led up to the 2010 decision and the
subsequent cases that cite it.
There is more about this HERE.
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