AltLaw was an American academic project from 2007 to 2010 aimed at making federal appellate and

Supreme Court A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts in most legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, apex court, and high (or final) court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...

case law publicly available, "to make the

common law In law, common law (also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law) is the body of law created by judges and similar quasi-judicial tribunals by virtue of being stated in written opinions."The common law is not a brooding omnipresen ...

a bit more common." The project was a collaboration between Columbia Law School's Program on Law and Technology and University of Colorado School of Law's Silicon Flatirons program. After Google Scholar added legal case documents to its collection in November 2009, the project announced that its mission was achieved, and it shut down permanently on May 3, 2010. When AltLaw was launched, digital access to US case law was dominated by

LexisNexis LexisNexis is a part of the RELX corporation that sells data analytics products and various databases that are accessed through online portals, including portals for computer-assisted legal research (CALR), newspaper search, and consumer informa ...

and Westlaw,"The structure of market relations between Lexis and Westlaw suggests elements of a noncollusive

duopoly A duopoly (from Greek δύο, ''duo'' "two" and πωλεῖν, ''polein'' "to sell") is a type of oligopoly where two firms have dominant or exclusive control over a market. It is the most commonly studied form of oligopoly due to its simplicit ...

." William G. Shepherd, ''The Economics of Industrial Organization 246 (4th ed. 1997)'' (discussing examples of noncollusive duopolies such as Boeing and Airbus and Mattel and Hasbro). charges for access to which can run in the hundreds of dollars per hour. The data in AltLaw contained roughly 716,000 cases decided between 1950 and 2007, made available on US Circuit Appeals and Supreme courts web sites, all linked to fro
uscourts.gov
and collected by Prof. Paul K. Ohm at University of Colorado Law School and by

Public.Resource.Org Public.Resource.Org (PRO) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation dedicated to publishing and sharing public domain materials in the United States and internationally. It was founded by Carl Malamud and is based in Sebastopol, California. Public.Re ...

Notes

References

*Markoff, John
"A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free"
''The New York Times'', August 14, 2007. Accessed August 23, 2007. *Arewa, Olufunmilayo
Open Access in a Closed Universe: Lexis, Westlaw, Law Schools, and the Legal Information Market
''Lewis & Clark Law Review, Vol. 10, p. 797'', 2006. Accessed August 23, 2007 *Columbia Law School
Press release
August 23, 2007. Legal research Online law databases Open-source intelligence {{US-law-stub