Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
Well, well, well. After centuries of sitting on that endowment and churning out lawyers who just won’t shut up about going there — ahem — Harvard has finally decided to do something valuable with their time. Specifically, Harvard is taking all those reams of dusty case law that no one is going to the library to read and making something digital out of it.
Harvard Law’s collection, second only to the one kept by the Library of Congress, includes the civil and criminal case law decisions from every state and federal court.
[Harvard’s Managing Director the Library Innovation Lab Adam] Ziegler and his team estimate that across all 43,000 case law books in the collection, each has an average of about 921 pages. That’s nearly 40 million pages that need to be digitized.
The law school has so many books that the majority are stored in a vast vault in a hidden hilltop repository in Southborough, out of sight and not very accessible to students and scholars.
Harvard has top secret vaults? Calling all tinfoil hats!
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But good for Harvard. The specific mission is to make these public and free. Most folks are still going to be paying for the work done by folks who’ve indexed and headnoted it within an inch of its life, but it’s good to see that there will be a free alternative.
Harvard Is Digitizing Nearly 40 Million Pages Of Case Law So You Can Access It Online And For Free [WBUR]