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Will old law reports ever die?

An interesting post here from SLAW bearing in mind it is from a Canadian perspective, in it the author discusses how for decades publishers have been threatening (or promising) that Law Reports will eventually become obsolete. Yet in 2008 they still have as many Law Reports being published as they did in the 1970's.

The question is why? well the post goes on to discuss the reasons for the continued publication of hard copy law reports and why Online services may never replace them, from the Blog post:

"On line services have become vast archives of cases. Year after year, tens of thousands of cases of little or no value are added to databases making it increasingly difficult to find a case of any use to a lawyer or legal researcher. While almost all of the cases have summaries attached, no real effort is made to separate the wheat from the chaff. The result is too much irrelevant information.

Law reports, by contrast, are selective. Experienced editors review thousands of cases and publish only those that add something to the development of the law. For this reason, the legal profession knows that a case reported in print is more useful than one that is simply made available online"

An informative post that is well worth reading.

Full post as published by The BIALL Blog on November 05, 2008 (boomark / email).