Legal Research

Yet Another Article About Carl Malamud

Yesterday the NY Times had another article about the ongoing activities of Carl Malamud, the guerilla legal publisher who’s trying to shove PACER into the 21st century. The article doesn’t really say anything that hasn’t been said before: Malamud says the PACER system is outdated and we shouldn’t have to pay to see legal documents, which are part of America’s “operating system”.

Lets be real here. The federal government is good at spewing out documents. They’re not so good at analysis. So if they got their you-know-what together, the feds would be absolutely fabulous at dumping huge amounts of cases on us. (At the EPA, we used to call that “shovelware”.) But would they make it easy to analyze the cases to determine which ones are the “good” ones, the ones to use as legal precedents? No. That’s why we have aggregators such as LexisNexis and West. The hard reality is that anybody who wants to do serious legal research is going to have to deal with “Wexis” at some point.

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Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on February 13, 2009 (boomark / email).