Michael Lissner
For Immediate Release — Berkeley, CA
Brian W. Carver and Michael Lissner, creators of the CourtListener
platform and associated technology, are
pleased to announce that after four years developing free and open legal
technologies, they are launching a non-profit umbrella organization for
their work: Free Law Project. Free Law Project will serve to bring legal
materials and research to the public for free, formalizing the work that
they have been doing, and providing a long-term home for similar
projects.
“Since the birth of this country, legal materials have been in the hands
of the few, denying legal justice to the many,” said Michael Lissner,
co-founder of the new non-profit. “It is appalling that the public does
not have free online access to the entirety of United States case law,”
said Brian Carver, UC Berkeley professor and Free Law Project
co-founder. “We are working to change this situation. We also provide a
platform for developing technologies that can make legal research easier
for both professionals and the general public.”
The official goals for the non-profit are:
- To provide free, public, and permanent access to primary legal
materials on the Internet for educational, charitable, and
scientific purposes; - To develop, implement, and provide public access to technologies
useful for legal research; - To create an open ecosystem for legal research and materials; and
- To support academic research on related technologies, corpora, and
legal systems.
The CourtListener platform was started in 2009 as part of a masters
project at UC Berkeley, and has matured over the years to be a powerful
legal research platform. It has nearly a million legal opinions dating
from 1754, and has more each day as it gets them directly from court
websites. CourtListener currently serves thousands of people with free
legal opinions each week, and has had a doubling of traffic just since
July 2013. CourtListener sends out hundreds of alerts to its users each
week, informing them of new legal cases in which they have expressed an
interest. All of CourtListener’s code is open source and all of its
content is available for free bulk download. Numerous startups and
researchers have used both the code and the bulk data as a basis for
their work.
More information is available in the Free Law Project about
page, where you can find a list of
current activities and non-profit documents. The co-founders expect to
pursue grant funding from foundations, but also hope that those who
support the goals of improving public access to the law will donate
directly so that
the non-profit can put more developers to work on these efforts.
In the future, https://free.law will be the official place to find
updates about Free Law Project and its related technologies.
“This is a huge day for the open legal movement, and we hope you’ll help
share the news by telling your friends and colleagues,” said Lissner.
Mike and Brian
Brian W. Carver is Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley School of
Information where he does research on and teaches about intellectual
property law and cyberlaw. He is also passionate about the public’s
access to the law. In 2009 and 2010 he advised an I School Masters
student, Michael Lissner, on the creation of CourtListener.com, an alert
service covering the U.S. federal appellate courts. After Michael’s
graduation he and Brian continued working on the site and have grown the
database of opinions to include over 900,000 documents.
Michael Lissner is the co-founder and lead developer of
CourtListener, a project that works to make the law more accessible to
all. He graduated from UC Berkeley’s School of Information. Michael is
passionate about bringing greater access to our primary legal materials,
about how technology can replace old legal models, and about open
source, community-driven approaches to legal research.
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