Legal Research

Free Federal Case Law (F 2d & F 3d) Available on Justia

I was using Justia yesterday and noticed something I hadn't seen before - US Federal Court Appeals Opinions. It includes all US Federal appellate cases since 1950 browse-able by F 2d and F 3d citation. Wow - how long has that been there?

An email from Justia's Tim Stanley confirmed that the 1950+ Fed is indeed brand new. According to Tim:

Carl Malamud (of Media.org) and Ed Walters (of Fastcase.com) worked out the deal, and Public.Resource.org and the Creative Commons are setting up the Legal Commons where copies of all the free case law will be online in archive form for anyone to download and use.

There is a lot of fixing to do (multiple versions of the same case, getting in the internal page numbers) but this will get done :) And of course more free case law and codes are on the way.

This is outstanding! Kudos to all involved! What a valuable resource for the legal community and for the community as a whole. I'd seen Robert Ambrogi's announcement last week that this was coming and it appears that he was dead-on, as usual.
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Updates: For more info, see the press release from PublicResource.Org.

And see also the post from Justia which says to "look for the cases to also appear on AltLaw and PreCYdent soon (if not already) and... many many other places"

How true - here is a beta search engine for the Federal Reporter.

Full post as published by WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library on February 13, 2008 (boomark / email).