DOJ sets meeting re: online legal info procurement

[James Love <love@essential.org>]

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TAXPAYER ASSETS PROJECT - INFORMATION POLICY NOTE
CROWN JEWELS CAMPAIGN - Juris, Legal Information
July 25, 1994

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has agreed to a July 28 meeting
with groups concerned about its Computer Assisted Legal Research
(CALR) procurement.  At this meeting we will be discussing DOJ
new solicitation for CALR, and the requests from TAP and other
groups that DOJ use the procurement to address important barriers
to public access to federal caselaw (caselaw is the term used for
the text of judicial opinions).  Specifically, we are asking that
the DOJ procurement require that bidders use a public domain
system of citation for federal caselaw, and that the database of
caselaw itself be placed in the public domain.

Several citizens contacted TAP after our last tap-info post,
pointing out that the federal 6th Circuit Court of Appeals and
the State of Wisconsin have both recently adopted public domain
systems of citation for caselaw.

The July 28 meeting with DOJ was arranged by the Government
Purchasing Project (GPP) and the Taxpayer Assets Project (TAP),
two groups interested in broader access to federal legal
information.  Several small business have indicated that they
support a DOJ decision to put the citations and the caselaw into
the public domain, and that this will make both the procurement
and the public market for CALR much more competitive.

In a related development, Matthew Bender, a publisher, has told a
federal judge in New York that it has reached a settlement with
West Publishing regarding its lawsuit over West's assertion of
copyright of the page numbers of published federal judicial
opinions.  Matthew Bender is expected to receive a restricted
license to use the West page numbers in return for dropping its
lawsuit.  As a result, three companies, West, Mead Data Central
and Matthew Bender will have licenses to use the West page
numbers.  Mead also obtained its license after litigation with
West.  The Mead license reportedly only allows the company to use
the page numbers in LEXIS, and not in CD-ROM products.  Experts
also believe that Mead cannot provide the government with a copy
of the database that contains the page numbers, except through
the LEXIS service.

In another related matter, several firms have sought copies of
the JURIS database, which was created by President Nixon in 1971,
and terminated by Janet Reno on January 1, 1994.  [JURIS, which
pre-dated by LEXIS (1973) and WESTLAW (1975), is a large online
database system which contains federal caselaw and many other
legal documents.]

Tax Analysts, a publisher of legal information, has sued the
Department of Justice, arguing that it is entitled to a copy of
the database under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).  DOJ
and West have resisted the FOIA request.  That case was recently
assigned to a new federal judge, Gladys Kessler.  Tax Analysts
has already won the disclosure of many parts of the JURIS
database, such as public laws and other materials.  The disputed
materials, which have yet to be released, are the supreme court
opinions first keypunched by the Airforce for its FLITE (finding
legal information through electronics) program, which began in
1964, and the caselaw (Supreme Court plus the lower level courts)
gathered by West from 1982 to 1993 under contract to DOJ.

Tax Analysts is giving the data it has received under its FOIA
request to the non-profit Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), which
is housed at the University of Pennsylvania.  The LDC will be
publishing these materials on CD-ROM, formatted in SGML, for $100
or less per disc (prices reflecting the LDC costs).  For
information about the LDC dissemination project, contact Rebecca
Finch (Internet:  finch@pine.ling.upenn.edu; voice:
215/573-3959).

Persons who are interested in attending the July 28 meeting with
DOJ should contact James Love (jamie@tap.org)  or Eleanor Lewis
(eleanor@csrl.org) at 202/387-8030.

jamie love, tap


ps, thanks to all those who sent letters to Attorney General Janet Reno 
regarding this issue.

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