New Legal Research Site Combines Case Law with Crowdsourcing
This post has been viewed 2,949 times.
Imagine if you could combine a full-text case law library for research with crowdsourced editing and annotating in the style of Wikipedia and user rankings of annotations and references in the style of a site such as Digg? That, roughly speaking, is the idea behind Casetext, an innovative legal research site launched this week that provides free access to court opinions together with a platform for crowdsourcing references and annotations.
Casetext is the brainchild of two lawyers, Jake Heller and Joanna Huey, who met in 2009, when Jake was president of the Stanford Law Review and Joanna was president of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking together for 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Michael Boudin and then serving separate stints as law firm associates, the two reunited to build Casetext.
At its core, Casetext is simply a case law research database. Presently, it includes all Supreme Court cases, all federal circuit cases starting from volume one of the F.2d series, all federal district court cases published in F.Supp. and F.Supp. 2d since 1980, and Delaware cases published since Volume 30 of the Atlantic reporter.
Read original articleTags: annotations, Appeals Judge Michael Boudin, Crowdsourcing, full-text case law, Joanna Huey
