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Although case law is technically public domain, the legal decisions that interpret and apply statutory law are often scattered across the Internet, locked up in proprietary systems, and only available by paying exorbitant fees. A new non-profit launching this week aims to make these legal materials easily and freely available to all.

School of Information assistant professor Brian Carver and alumnus Michael Lissner (MIMS 2010) founded the Free Law Project to support open access to the law and to develop open-source legal research tools.

The projects open-source software tools include:

Carver and Lissner say that despite a growing movement promoting public access to the text of legal statutes, it can be difficult or impossible for the public to find the court decisions that interpret and apply those laws.

In many cases, it isnt enough to know the statute, explained Carver. You also need to know how it has been interpreted and applied over many years of case law. Carver practiced law before joining the School of Information, where he studies intellectual property law and legal informatics.

Since the birth of this country, legal materials have been in the hands of the few, denying legal justice to the many, said Lissner, co-founder of the Free Law Project. With this project, we hope to ease difficulty many have when engaging in a legal dispute, whether they are lawyers or pro se litigants.

The project builds on work done by CourtListener, which began as a School of Information masters degree project in 2009 before maturing into a powerful legal research platform that serves thousands of people each week, and has seen its traffic double since July 2013.

CourtListener maintains a growing repository of court decisions, along with advanced tools for searching and analyzing the documents. Today CourtListener archives nearly a million legal opinions from 331 jurisdictions, including real-time updates from all US appellate courts, appellate court archives back to the 1940s or earlier, a growing archive of state appellate court decisions, and complete US Supreme Court records from 1754 to the present.

The Free Law Project will continue CourtListeners effort to archive court decisions, and will also promote new open-source technologies for legal research.

Unlike most other legal research services, the Free Law Project is committed to the open-source software movement. Not only can users download CourtListeners entire collection of legal documents, they can also download all the software that runs the site, and can freely edit or re-use that software.

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Free Law Project offers public an open book on case law