ARTICLES
CROWDSOURCING AND OPEN ACCESS: COLLABORATIVE TECHNIQUES FOR DISSEMINATING LEGAL MATERIALS AND SCHOLARSHIP
Timothy K. Armstrong[1]
Abstract
This short essay surveys the state of open access to primary legal source materials (statutes, judicial opinions and the like) and legal scholarship. The ongoing digitization phenomenon (illustrated, although by no means typified, by massive scanning endeavors such as the Google Books project and the Library of Congress’s efforts to digitize United States historical documents) has made a wealth of information, including legal information, freely available online, and a number of open-access collections of legal source materials have been created. Many of these collections, however, suffer from similar flaws: they devote too much effort to collecting case law rather than other authorities, they overemphasize recent works (especially those originally created in digital form), they do not adequately hyperlink between related documents in the collection, their citator functions are haphazard and rudimentary, and they do not enable easy user
- ↑ Associate Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati College of Law. B.A. 1989, M.P.Aff. 1993, J.D. 1993, The University of Texas at Austin; LL.M . 2005, Harvard Law School. This work began as a series of presentations which I delivered at the summer 2008 and 2009 CALI Conferences for Law School Computing, and an updated version was presented at the meeting of the Section of Internet and Computer Law at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). I appreciate the thoughtful comments of the attendees at each of these sessions. Research support from the Harold C. Schott Foundation is gratefully acknowledged, as is the research assistance of Ron Jones. Copyright © 2010, Timothy K. Armstrong.
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