“Free the Law” : Open Access to all US case law

Harvard Law School is digitilizing their own collection of 200 years of US case law which will be made available online for free. The documents  are digitilized and uploaded on Ravel Law, a legal research and analytics platform. The project called ‘Free the Law‘ will be completed and go live in 2017 coinciding with the 200th anniversary  of the Law School which was founded in 1817.

Behind this effort is the belief that law should be free and open to all. Harvard Law School holds the most comprehensive and authoritative collection, except for the Library of Congress, of federal  and state judicial decisions from the beginning.

This means an incredible advance in open access to law  and it will have many implications for Law students and will change the role of databases like LexisNexis and Westlaw.