Feb
4Precydent Open Law Source: Site Now Open

There's a new open source collection of primary law on the Internet, which went live very recently. Now in alpha testing, this site is called: PreCyDent: Open Law Source.

This new site seeks to provide Google-like simplicity for searching cases, while utilizing a novel approach to ranking cases based on citation analysis and methods borrowed from network theory in other disciplines. According to the site, they have more than 335,000 opinions and 2500+ statutes. It's still in an early stage of development. For instance, a search within just the Supreme Court returned "Approximately 5 opinions in 0.05 [seconds]" but no results list was displayed. Nonetheless, the collection looks very promising, and they already have a Facebook Application and code you can use to put the PreCYdent search on your own site. For more background, view the  About PreCYdent Team.

More of the theory behind aspects of their novel case ranking can be found in a paper from Law Professor and PreCYdent CEO Thomas Smith, available on SSRN.

Scientists and mathematicians in recent years have become intensely interested in the structure of networks. Networks turn out to be crucial to understanding everything from physics and biology, to economics and sociology. This article proposes that the science of networks has important contributions to make to the study of law as well. The network of American case law closely resembles the Web in structure and can be studied using techniques that are now being used to describe many other networks, some found in nature, and others created by human action. Studying the legal network can shed light on how the legal system evolves, and many other questions. Read the complete abstract and download the paper at SSRN.