AltLaw.org Provides Free Searchable Database of U.S. Court Decisions -- Joint Effort of Columbia and Colorado Law Schools

Aiming to make federal case law fast and easy to search, more accessible to the public – and free – Columbia Law School and the Colorado Law have launched a new Web site, AltLaw, which has the potential to dramatically change the national landscape of case law resources.

AltLaw contains nearly 170,000 decisions dating back to the early 1990s from the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Appellate courts. The site’s creators, Columbia Law School’s Timothy Wu and Stuart Sierra, and Colorado Law’s Professor Paul Ohm, said the site’s database will grow over time.

Wu said he started to build AltLaw because he wanted a way to quickly search through court decisions the same way that the public now can search a wide array of information through such Internet search engines as Google and Yahoo!

“It’s been over 10 years since the start of the Internet revolution, and case law is one area that has not budged. Somebody has to take the initiative,” Wu said. “We’re a nonprofit and we’re purely interested in opening the law to the public. We don’t have a commercial motive.”

Wu said he envisions AltLaw being used by many groups – journalists, the public, lawyers who want to avoid the hundreds of dollars per hour in fees for proprietary law databases, and legal scholars who need quick and searchable access to cases at home or on the road. One of the assets to AltLaw’s design is that it is fast and simple to use, Wu said.

Ohm wrote the thousands of lines of code that download cases to AltLaw from more than a dozen court websites each night. He said the data comes from the courts themselves, and AltLaw is designed as an extremely open platform so that others can take the raw material and use it in various ways.

“This is what we call the `law commons’ part of the design,” Ohm said. “The touchstone of AltLaw is openness, and this means that not only will users be able to search cases at AltLaw, but they'll also be able to make copies of all of the cases in our database to reuse or remix in any way that they'd like.”

“This is all public domain material, and we’re repackaging it into a more useful, flexible, powerful form,” Ohm said.

On the Web site, Wu and Ohm note that “The law is meant to belong to the people, but it can be surprisingly hard to find.” Case reports, a major part of the laws of the United States, are hard to get at, and even when on the Internet, rarely searchable. To get full access you generally need either a library of law reports, or an expensive subscription to an online database, which can cost hundreds of dollars per hour.

“AltLaw is a small effort to change that – to make the common law a bit more common. AltLaw provides the first free, full-text searchable database of Supreme Court and Federal Appellate case reports. It is a resource for attorneys, legal scholars, and the general public.”

AltLaw is a joint project of Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology, and Colorado Law’s Silicon Flatirons Program.