Following up on our post about Carl Malamud's project to create a free resource for court decisions online, there's been another important advance in this area this week. On Wednesday, AltLaw launched its free legal search engine, which lets users perform full-text searches of the last 10 years of federal appellate and Supreme Court opinions. Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and one of the heads of the project, writes about AltLaw:
Obviously the program is beta and unfinished. We don't think, in its present form, that Altlaw can serve as a full substitute for a commercial legal database. But the crucial word is YET. With help or on our own we're going to do at least the following before we consider Altlaw beyond beta:
This is another important step forward for citizen access to the decisions of our nation's courts. The CMLP applauds AltLaw, which is is a joint project of Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology, and the Silicon Flatirons Program at the University of Colorado Law School.
