Kudos to Harvard Law!
Forty thousand law books.
Forty million pages, give or take a few.
Court decisions that begin with cases that were decided before the Constitution of the United States was even written.
And — coming soon to the Internet near you — digitized copies of all of them.
Every. Last. Word.
Free.
All thanks to the Harvard Law School Library and its “Free the Law” project.
The law school’s announcement last week, that it was digitizing its entire collection of U.S. case law and making the collection available online, for free, to anyone with an Internet connection, was driven by the view that “the law should be free and open to all,” according to Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow. “Using technology to create broad access to legal information will help create a more transparent and more just legal system.”1
No argument there. The sheer cost of access to computerized legal research systems even for primary law sources like these case books can be daunting, and lawyers, law firms and legal researchers of all stripes will surely welcome the opportunity to use this new resource.
But, of course, there are those secondary beneficiaries of this kind of largesse… folks like us. The genealogical community. Because the amount of genealogically valuable information tucked into the pages of American case law can be simply stunning.
The Legal Genealogist uses one case in a court records lecture that was decided by the Virginia Supreme Court in 1843. In eight pages of discussion of a nasty murder in the back hills of what is now West Virginia, you get enough information to chart out a good part of four generations of one family: who’s related to whom, details about which individuals lived near others — and even that one family member was blind.2
That’s eight pages from one book.
Think about more than 40 million pages. From roughly 40,000 books.
Think about all the ways our ancestors might have come in contact with the courts… and ended up in those pages.
Think about all the folks who found themselves unable to pay debts, or in trouble with the criminal law.
Think about all the people who may have been trying to collect a debt, or protect a land boundary, or a reputation.
Think about all the sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, cousins, in-laws — all the family members who ever got into a fight over who was going to get the land or the money or the slaves.
Think about court records for the identities of those slaves, years before African-Americans were ever recorded by name in the census.
All of that information, free, online, word-searchable.
Even better: the entire database will be accessible to nonprofit organizations and scholars who want to develop specialized tools to access the data in particular ways.3 So there may be even more ways to get into the data and use it effectively.
The funding for the digitization project is coming from Ravel Law, a private company that runs a legal research and analytics platform. And, no, it isn’t doing this out of the goodness of its heart. Ravel and Harvard are withholding the database from other commercial users for eight years and, during those eight years, Ravel expects to recoup the costs by offering specialized tools for lawyers and legal researchers.
That’s a perfectly reasonable way of financing the enormous costs of getting this much data digitized and put online — and we should all welcome the fact that we’re going to get free access because of the way Ravel was enticed to do this.
Now, it isn’t going to happen overnight. The first set of records is from California and it’s coming online sometime later this month. New York is expected to be next, by the end of the year, and the whole shooting match of nationwide case law should be online by the middle of 2017.
But this is going to be an enormously valuable resource for all of us… and those with Californians in their ancestry should start marking their calendars. By the end of this month — this month!! — you’ll be able to word-search California case law for mention of your ancestors… free.
Kudos to Harvard Law School.
I can’t wait…
- “Harvard Law School Launches ‘Free the Law’ Project with Ravel Law To Digitize US Case Law, Provide Free Access,” Harvard Law Today, posted 29 Oct 2015 (http://today.law.harvard.edu/ : accessed 1 Nov 2015). ↩
- M’Cune v. Commonwealth, 41 Va. 771 (1843). ↩
- See Eric Eckholm, “Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age,” New York Times, posted 28 Oct 2015 (http://www.nytimes.com/ : accessed 1 Nov 2015). ↩
This is a great project! It’s something I’d even be willing to support through voluntary contributions to keep it current going forward, the way the Legal Information Institute at Cornell takes donations to keep the US Code online and current.
Just one quibble, and I’m sure this is with information provided to you (i.e., not your error). They say 40,000,000 pages in 40,000 books. That’s 1,000 pages per book, which sounds a bit excessive (War and Peace isn’t even that long!). In no way, though, does this detract from the enormity of the project!
The actual numbers from the Free the Law page should have been quoted: “Our collection totals over 42,000 volumes and roughly 40 million pages.”
Thanks for this info on another great resource. I found a useful lead on a case on http://www.Leagle.com several years ago, and this is another helpful post about which you probably already know: http://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/02/how-to-locate-free-case-law-on-the-internet/.
As good as those sources are from the LOC — this should be better. Amazing, isn’t it?
I can hardly wait for this one. As it is, New England’s probate court records have enabled me to both confirm and eliminate potential ancestors. And I enjoy reading court records and summaries (though not as much as you do!). My family scattered all over the country after leaving New England, and this project sounds like it will yield some riches.
Great job, Harvard. I still cannot grasp how very valuable this will be for us, and for generations after us!
I used to be amazed at how litigious my pre-colonial ancestors were, that is, until I began living in places in the world which don’t require title searches, (etc) prior to selling property, then I started to understand why they had to be litigious. Now I understand–and can’t wait for the NYS records. (I hope it’s the State and not only the City of New York).
State, not City, from what I understand!!
A contrary view here to Harvard’s actions with Ravel here:
https://thinkcomp.quora.com/E-Mail-to-Erik-Eckholm-New-York-Times-Reporter-How-Harvard-Law-School-Just-Sold-Out-The-American-Public
Everybody thinks somebody else ought to be making records available free. Harvard should take money out of its pocket to make these cases free for everybody else. That’s just not reasonable.