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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

I think I understand your argument from the legal perspective but what about from a public records perspective? It still feels like the precedents that have been established inside the US legal system should be publicly available without restrictions. Sure, other restricted sources may end up incorporated but restricting acccess to actual US legal decisions feels like it only benefits those few with the access for commercial gain.

Any historically accepted source should still be available for establishing precident but that doesn't mean our legal system should conceal the decisions it has made.

If nothing else access to these decisions could be a great area of study for language processing.

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>but what about from a public records perspective? It still feels like the precedents that have been established inside the US legal system should be publicly available without restrictions.

Yes, I agree with that. And in many cases (but not all), they are - court documents are generally available for nominal processing fees, though there's a long way to go before I'd say this is all truly "publicly available without [unnecessary] restrictions".

With some notable exceptions like FISA, I don't think most of the secrecy is out of a desire to conceal law from citizens. It's largely the fact that our legal system is shockingly low-tech and hasn't yet caught up to what technology now allows.

> our legal system is shockingly low-tech and hasn't yet caught up to what technology now allows.

Are there ways to improve this? What do you think the hurdles to technology adoption are in this field? Is it a document formatting problem, or a hosting problem?

Do we need to create a WordPress for state and local courts to adopt?

That state of it is actually quite sad, to be honest. I'm in South Africa, and I am baffled at how difficult it is to get access to the Acts that were approved by parliament and form part of the body of law. It's not even about precedent, and court-decisions, rulings, etc. Just the plain law, with all the out-dated portions removed/updated.

This makes it quite difficult for me, as an individual, to interpret and act on what the law says. Sure, we all know the "basics" of criminal law: Don't steal, hurt, go where you shouldn't, etc. But everything else (regulations) is a giant black-box of "you need to speak to a lawyer" and pay them money. There are probably hundreds of sites and blogs out there trying to help/guide people about what the regulations say, but that's a poor substitute and not something you want to rely on for anything more than mundane. There needs to be a clear, government-run, up-to-date resource that has all laws.

Sure, but rent-seeking, parasite lawyers will fight to prevent that, so that they can continue to extract money from the rest of us while being a big drag on the entire economy.

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