Open-Sourcing Our Courts

Most records and documents created and filed within court systems and police departments in the U.S. are public. And Google is trying to make it feel that way.

The company that conquered the web and coined the phrase “Don’t Be Evil” announced yesterday in a blog post that it was adding full-text decisions from federal and state legal courts to Google Scholar.

This announcement means the free web becomes a richer source not only for education and research, but also for those of us trying to overturn injustice through the court system.

The law is still a paper profession. It’s changing, but slowly. Google’s move only covers opinions filed by courts; those are currently among the easier documents to find. For real reform, we need a sea change in the way the law looks at data. We need to bring the digital revolution to the courtroom and the police station. During the Presidential campaign last year, Barack Obama talked about a Google for Government. He’s right. We need to Google-ize our courts.

The impact of this announcement from Google will be limited, but it’s a step toward a more open system, and it should come as a wake-up call for courts, police departments, public defense offices and prison systems that open data on the web is coming, whether they like it or not. The motivations are different. Google is trying to make money with ads. But ad-supported court documents serve the public much better than documents behind the expensive paywalls of Westlaw and Lexis-Nexus.

The real reform must come from within the system. We need electronic, online filing and searchable databases of court records (from pre-trial hearings to appellate filings) and police reports.

Every day we wait for an open system like this, we let injustice have the upper hand. If defendants, lawyers, investigators, reporters and the public have access to court documents, hidden injustices will see the light of day and professionals and the public will work to help cops and prosecutors solve cases.

There’s collective interest from various perspectives in solving crimes -- from victims to reporters to the wrongfully accused -- and opening the doors on the mountains of data collected by our court system will enable this volunteer army to collaborate on improvements to the court system that benefit us all.

And Google is not the only player in this new media age. Exciting open government efforts are popping up all over the place, from the work of the Sunlight Foundation to provide access to Congress to the startup Document Cloud.

Some counties and courts are taking the lead on digitizing documents and opening the archives online, but I don’t know of broad efforts -- whether state, nonprofit or for-profit -- to offer training, technology and server space to help courts and police departments. Other efforts are focused on freedom of information filings, to fill the void left by shrinking legacy media. But FOIA requests are asking for individual needles when what we need is a searchable haystack. Here are a couple of thoughts on where we can start:

• All trial transcripts and appellate filings in criminal cases should be posted online and made available for free. They are public documents and server space is cheap enough that a few million dollars a year from the government could put every transcript within reach.
• States should pass laws requiring law enforcement agencies to post police reports online. Victim names, of course, could be redacted. These are public documents and forcing police to post them online would hold agencies accountable.

By putting these tools at the hands of reporters, watchdogs, crime victims and families working to overturn injustice, we will build a stronger system.

Photo by mcfarlandmo