Andrew Raff is being equally geeky as Mike! Andrew envisions a future where courts publish their opinions in open format (!).

I don't want to burst anyone's bubble -- they're great ideas! But I predict there won't be any critical mass happening on that front in the courts anytime soon (and probably not within our lifetimes). People may have grown up using computers, but there are still many many people who don't understand anything but basic application use (and can't even take advantage of the advanced features of those applications). Computer knowledge needs to be driven to comparatively astronomically high levels before judges -- even those that grew up on computers -- will see the need for such a system, especially considering the time, expense, and potential problems with switching over, even if the implementation of the system is transparent.

There are all sorts of problems if you wanted to take this sort of solution and launch it on a large-scale. What would Westlaw & Lexis do? After all, they've built their businesses around the idea that these free, public materials are relatively hard to access. If open source software pops up and eats away at those services until the margins shrivel, what happens (to us, not them!)?

We get everything for free (except, of course, for the massive databases of secondary materials), but we lose something that a lot of people don't think about -- massive centralized repositories of case law. Maybe that doesn't outweigh the benefit of free or new searching, but it's something to consider. What happens when one state's server goes offline (or gets hacked)? What happens if the building catches on fire and that state didn't want to spend the money on off-site backups (or just couldn't spend the money on providing online access to the cases for a year? see Massachusetts for serious budget crunches in the judicial system)? There are a lot of valid reasons why free isn't necessarily better.

Plus, who is providing the links between cases? Case law is too complex, nuanced, or cryptic to rely on grammar analytics to figure out what a case is saying, or to distinguish between holdings and dicta. Legal research services pay the head note writers not to summarize the cases, but to figure out where they fit in the relational database. 10,000 monkeys can write Shakespeare and that many law students surely can figure out where the cases in the extremely limited sample a casebook provides fit in such a database. But what about the cases that don't get a headline until they provide the basis for groundbreaking law 50 years later? Don't forget to note that the decisions provided in your casebook are edited, often differently depending on the editors. Who decides what's important? Remember, even relational linkage algorithms (like Google) don't always work correctly.

I think that a much better use of the technology would be within the existing legal research services. It has a far better chance of being implemented (and standardized!) that way. Don't think I'm trying to discourage this kind of idea. Focus it, figure out where it fits now and determine what kind of policy you're trying to set with that kind of system and then you can work on grandoise schemes of world domination making the world a better place through open legal research!