Law Reports – They Had A Good Run

One by one, the courts world over are publishing their judgments online.

In the office next door, the clerks of those courts are prepping older cases for Internet publication. Not on paper; but digitized documents. All freely available on the Internet.

Need R. v Towtongie, a January 2000 case of the Nunavut Court of Justice? Click here.

How about the 1965 decision of the Supreme Court of Nigeria in re Ponnou-Delafon? Click here.

Or maybe you just have to have the July 1, 2010 decision of the New York Court of Appeals in The People v James McRae: click here.

Now, Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) – armed with high speed scanners of Google Books – has joined the fray. Scholar allows anyone to retrieve the more recent Westlaw cases for the last 10-15 years, with hundreds of cases being back-filled into the database every month. Simply search using the Westlaw legal citation and voila!

Irrelevance

Slowly, at the same pace, the relevance of law reports published by for-profit law reporters is dwindling.

Those private law reporters – Westlaw, Canada Law Book, Carswell – are on the precipice of corporate death.

And this is a good thing: good riddance!

Law report companies have been gouging the legal profession since the first edition of the North Western Reporter by the then-well-intentioned John West.

Access to the basic Westlaw legal database costs over $2,000 a month. In Canada, basic Quicklaw or eCarswell database access runs a hundred bucks or more a month – still too much.

Bought a law book lately?

Waddams on Contract, 6th Edition, an awful law book if you’d had the pleasure of breaking the spine of it, still sells for $165 plus taxes by Canada Law Book. For $165 plus taxes, the average Canadian can buy eight best-sellers at Chapters.

Law students and lawyers have to cough up the money, money that has to be passed on to the client.

Don’t call customer service at Canada Law Book (a private law report publisher) on this. They are for-profit corporation and they exist to maximize profit and dividends.

Good business is good business. These private corporations lurk just outside the computer rooms of law schools, handing out seductive free passes to professors and students alike to build legal research automatons.

This is your classic loss-leader.

When it has come to the altruist sharing of legal information …, well, just ask the law librarians at Osgoode Hall in Toronto.

CCH Canadian Limited and Canada Law Book objected to the downtown, public law library of the provincial law society copying published judgments. They sued for copyright infringement! This, even though the library in question? was extracting from books purchased from the publishers and those same publishers harvested their judgments from the public registries across Canada – all paid for by the Canadian tax-payer.

Rumblings

Even with the slap on the wrist by Canada’s Supreme Court, with their head firmly in the sand, most private law report publishers sustain outrageously high prices on their products even while the first rumblings of a shake-down can be felt.