Harvard Law To Roll Out Trove Of Legal Decisions In Digital Format, Searchable For Free

This is an incredible resource we are talking about, they are going to slice the spines off of all but the rarest of their books and feed them through a high speed scanner and make it all available for free.
40, million, pages worth.
It used to be you had to pay for these searches.

Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age

Shelves of law books are an august symbol of legal practice, and no place, save the Library of Congress, can match the collection at Harvard’s Law School Library. Its trove includes nearly every state, federal, territorial and tribal judicial decision since colonial times — a priceless potential resource for everyone from legal scholars to defense lawyers trying to challenge a criminal conviction.

Now, in a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for.

“Improving access to justice is a priority,” said Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, explaining why Harvard has embarked on the project. “We feel an obligation and an opportunity here to open up our resources to the public.”

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Complete state results will become publicly available this fall for California and New York, and the entire library will be online in 2017, said Daniel Lewis, chief executive and co-founder of Ravel Law, a commercial start-up in California that has teamed up with Harvard Law for the project. The cases will be available at www.ravellaw.com. Ravel is paying millions of dollars to support the scanning. The cases will be accessible in a searchable format and, along with the texts, they will be presented with visual maps developed by the company, which graphically show the evolution through cases of a judicial concept and how each key decision is cited in others.

On Ravel sites currently available to the public, for example, a lawyer planning to challenge the 2010 Citizens United decision, which permitted corporations to make independent political expenditures, can enter “campaign finance” and see in schematic form the major cases at the district, appellate and Supreme Court levels that led up to the 2010 decision and the subsequent cases that cite it.

There is more about this HERE.