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Harvard Law Library to be digitized, available free to the public
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: January 22, 2016
The entire law library of Harvard University will be scanned and digitized in a recently-announced partnership between the school and legal data company Ravel Law (https://www.ravellaw.com).
The initiative, called “Free the Law,” will make all 42,000 volumes in the library available to the public in searchable, digital form. That’s over 4 million pages of materials. The Harvard University law library holds the second-largest collection of legal publications in the country—second only to the Library of Congress.
The entire project will take a couple of years to scan. Releases will start with all California law (which will be done and out by the time this column goes to press). It will be eight years before all of the texts are published.
The releases will be free to any entity, public or private. I’m guessing that pay sites like LexisNexis and Westlaw are not happy about this.
According to a release from the Free the Law project, “Our common law - the written decisions issued by our state and federal courts - is not freely accessible online. This lack of access harms justice and equality and stifles innovation in legal services.”
“Driving this effort is a shared belief that the law should be free and open to all,” said 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.”
Ravel Law is a fairly new legal data analysis company based in San Francisco and headed by Stanford Law grads using proprietary search algorithms that allow lawyers to visualize their research, along with some cranked-up data analysis. Ravel is a powerful merger of Silicon Valley and legal research.
The company has done well enough to donate the millions of dollars of effort that the Free the Law project will require.
The project will be open source, and Ravel will provide the API to any developer that wants to create apps that will access the database.
Also, any jurisdiction that already makes its law available online in an authoritative, free format will be published out immediately, instead of waiting for eight years. Only two states do this, but this should encourage other states to follow suit.
Ravel Law is also free to negotiate other uses of the database, according to their agreement with Harvard.