Introduction

This report presents findings from a survey of state level primary legal information.   Primary legal information includes code (codified statutes passed by state legislatures), regulations (codified collections of rules passed by administrative agencies) and case law (appellate court decisions).  This survey was done with the goal of reviewing the free and open status of this legal information.  A PDF version of this report can be found here: GlassmeyerStateLegalInformationCensusReport

Findings

Findings indicate that there exists at least 14 barriers to accessing legal information.  These barriers exist for both the individual user of a resource for personal research as well as a institutional user that would seek to republish or transform the information.  Details about the types of barriers and the quantity of their existence can be found under “Barriers to Access.”  At the time of the census, no state provided barrier-free access to their legal information.

Furthermore, analysis of the legal information provided by states shows that it is impossible to do any but the most basic of legal research for free using state provided legal information sources.  Current collections allow for citation retrieval and some basic keyword searching.  No state allows for federated searching of legal information collections.   The universal lack of a citator for case law renders these collections, as a practical matter, useless and would be considered malpractice for a legal practitioner to rely upon.   There is also a worrisome lack of archival material maintained by states.  Not only does this affect one’s ability to do comprehensive research, but it also could be indicative of a lack of adequate preservation.

States were scored and ranked based on the openess of their legal publication practices.  On a scale of 0 – 24, the highest score achieved was 18.  The lowest was 8 and the median was 14.  These results were compared against the adoption of the Uniform Electronic Legal Information Act (UELMA) and it was found that adoption of UELMA did not correlate to barrier free publication practices.  See the map with UELMA states marked with an X below.

ULEMAmap

 

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