TAP/CR Professor Hafner on JURIS

[James Love <love@essential.org>]

TAXPAYER ASSETS PROJECT
Crown Jewels Campaign - JURIS
October 28, 1993

The following report of the October 25 meeting with DOJ was 
written by Professor Carole Hafner, and posted on TAP-INFO with her 
permission.  Carole is a computer scientist who held a faculty position 
at Harvard Law School last year, and is currently the co-director of the 
Center for Law and Computer Science at Northeastern.  She is one of the 
nation's leading experts in natural language processing for legal texts.  
(She can be reached at hafner@ccs.neu.edu)


    On the Need for Free Competition in the Legal Information Field

                                by
                          Carole D. Hafner
               Associate Professor, College of Computer Science
               Co-Director, Center for Law and Computer Science
                  Northeastern University, Boston MA 02115
                 

On Oct. 25 I had the opportunity to participate in a meeting at the U.S. 
Department of Justice at which a group of concerned citizens expressed their
concerns to Assistant Attorney General Stephen Colgate about the
government's decision to shut down the JURIS legal database, and more
generally about the the anti-competitive situation that is currently
stifling research and innovation in the legal information field.

Since 1971, the U.S. Department of Justice has maintained a large computer
database of Federal cases, statutes, regulations, briefs and other
legal documents. On December 31, 1993, the JURIS system,
which serves the entire Federal government, is scheduled to 
shut down because one powerful corporation that sells legal information
wants to prevent public access to the documents stored on JURIS.

Since 1982, the Justice Deparment has contracted with West 
Publishing Company, the largest vendor of law books and legal information
services, to supply computer tapes of Federal case law. The
contract with West prevents the government from sharing its electronic data 
with the public, even for purposes of pure research, as I
discovered in 1991 when my request for samples of legal text for research in 
computational linguistics was denied. At that time, I became concerned 
that progress in understanding legal communication, as well as innovative 
ideas for new kinds of legal information systems, were being stifled because
the text needed to do even basic research is inaccessible. (I offered
to make my text samples commercially worthless by deleting some fraction
of the documents on a random basis, but my request was still denied.)

Attending the meeting were representatives of public interest groups,
universities, small businesses and library associations.  Government attendees
included five Department of Justice officials,
staff from Senate and House Congressional Committees, and
representatives from GPO and the Congressional Research Services.
Public interest groups such as the Taxpayers Assets Project (a spin-off of 
Ralph Nader's Center for Responsive Law) are concerned about the 
implications for government openness and accountability when
government documents generated at taxpayer expense, residing on government 
computers, can be denied to the public by the terms of a private contract with 
a supplier of computer services. TAP has filed a Freedom of Information Act
request, to test whether this type of contract restriction is legal.

How could West force the U.S. Government to shut down an information
resource that many view as a "national treasure"?
Unfortunately, the fine print in the West/JURIS contract requires the 
government to return or erase all West-supplied data at the end of the 
contract. On September 30, West declined to renew the contract, and
on December 31 JURIS will lose 80% of its data, according to Asst. Attorney
General Colgate, making the system economically non-viable.  James Love, 
director of the Taxpayer's Assets Project, organized the Oct. 25 meeting in 
the hope that a plan for saving JURIS might be found.

Government officials and other participants at the meeting said the
WEST withdrawal from the JURIS contract was a direct result of
citizen efforts to obtain access to the JURIS database.  One non-
government participant at the meeting recounted a discussion with
a West official at last week's Information Industry Association
(IIA) meeting where West expressed great alarm at the expanding
role of the Internet in the dissemination of government
information, and expressed hope that West could find ways to stop
such efforts. As a case in point, once JURIS is closed down, citizen
requests for access to it will become moot.

Unless JURIS is saved, starting in January 1994 the government will be
in the unenviable position of having to buy from West the right to access
its own legal documents, at more than twice the cost it previously spent
to maintain JURIS. (This estimate is based on current Federal government
rates for West on-line services. Private attorneys must pay an even higher rate 
of $250/hr or more -- an expense that adds significantly to cost of 
legal bills for everyone.) And perhaps the last chance for researchers,
public libraries, and small businesses to obtain large
collections of electronic legal documents will disappear.

At the meeting, the participants describe dtheir needs
for access to electronic forms of government documents.  I explained
that I had created a computer-based alternative to some parts of the
West paper-based bibliographic system in 1978, but that my ideas, and the
ideas of other researchers, could only be refined "on paper". Since West and
and its only major competitor, Mead Data Systems, refuse to sell their
text to the public, the government is the only possible source 
of large bodies of legal text. I argued that free competition in the legal 
information industry would lead to a wide variety of innovative products  --
instead of two almost identical ones -- and would lower the cost of all legal 
information.

Two small businessmen who are attempting to develop competing
products in legal information systems explained that a virtual monopoly
(or "duopoly") on legal text has obstructed their ability to innovate.
Several ideas were proposed to save JURIS, including one proposal to
replace the missing text at a cost that would be outweighed within
one year by the savings.  While Mr. Colgate and his staff were sympathetic
to these ideas, they said there was not enough time to develop such
a plan before the end of the year, and in any case the 30 employees of the
JURIS project had already been advised to seek other positions. 

A final issue that was brought to the attention of Mr. Colgate 
is the need for a non-proprietary system of legal citations. Currently, many
courts require attorneys to use citations that include
the page numbers in law books published by West. Since West has
recently asserted copyright ownership of these page numbers, free
competition in the legal market now requires that a non-proprietary system
of legal citations be developed. Although it was understood that the
Justice department does not have authority over court rules, the participants
asked Mr. Colgate to use the considerable influence of the Justice Department 
to help bring about this much-needed change.

Mr. Colgate said he was suprised and impressed by the variety of needs for
access to legal documents that were represented at the meeting, and by the
arguments that there is a problem with anti-competitiveness in the legal 
information industry.  Although the Justice Department apparently will not 
respond immediately to these concerns, the participants at the meeting 
were energized by the discussion and plans were made to try to organize 
a Congressional hearing.

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