The Lexis-Westlaw Duopoly and the Proprietization of Law

[[http://www.lexis.com/research/buttonTFLink?_m=31179fc816dce014ff540cfd65848bac&_xfercite=%3ccite%20cc%3d%22USA%22%3e%3c%21%5bCDATA%5b62%20Wash%20%26%20Lee%20L.%20Rev.%201553%5d%5d%3e%3c%2fcite%3e&_butType=3&_butStat=2&_butNum=372&_butInline=1&_butinfo=%3ccite%20cc%3d%22USA%22%3e%3c%21%5bCDATA%5b266%20F.3d%201155%2cat%201169%5d%5d%3e%3c%2fcite%3e&_fmtstr=FULL&docnum=1&_startdoc=1&wchp=dGLbVlW-zSkAb&_md5=b5a6a6414575b90cf751100ce709de0b][

Inequitable Injunctions: The Scandal of Private Judging in the U.S. Courts

Outing the Judicial Epistemology of Hart v. Massanari

HOW NEUTRAL CITATION AND AMERICA'S LAW SCHOOLS CAN CURE OUR STRANGE DEVOTION TO BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ORTHODOXY AND THE CONSTRICTION OF OPEN AND EQUAL ACCESS TO THE LAW

"This article addresses the challenge facing law students to preserve some sense of individual voice and ownership of their writing as they enter a professional discourse community and negotiate its formal structures and idioms."

"The writer must adhere to this format despite having found and read the opinion using Westlaw, Lexis, Casemaker or some other digital source"

"Because many legal materials are increasingly available only online, and because judges are showing a greater willingness to rely on non-legal information available on the web, the Article concludes that a lawyer cannot competently represent a client without going beyond Westlaw and Lexis and conducting research on the internet."

[[]["The open access movement espouses the principle that access to all scholarly communication, including legal scholarship, should be made available to the world at no cost via the Internet. ... Further, this Article examines in detail the effects of applying open access principles to legal scholarship, current options for law schools wishing to establish a repository, and the growing number of law school repositories currently in existence"]]

"I would like to suggest that the law reviews that publish the bluebook have an incentive to engage in excessive innovation. This is not a prediction of a race-to-the-bottom, but a prediction of excessive innocuous change. The inefficiency comes in the need to learn arbitrary new rules, not in the quality of the rules themselves. The bluebook publishers have this perverse incentive because every new edition of the bluebook generates a large one-time demand as lawyers and legal libraries are driven to buy the authoritative source. It is not surprising that the bluebook is now in its fifteenth edition. Of course there may be pressing aesthetic reasons why a certain reference needs to be put in large and small capital letters instead of italics, 47 but along with these aesthetics is the knowledge that each new edition will reap an economic windfall. 48"

"The well-financed efforts of an entrenched interest group to resist open access in most disciplines means that the broad open access movement has a long row to hoe before we can reap the benefits that the Internet promises for scholarly communication. The one discipline where conditions are ripe for more rapid evolution to open access is law in the United States. Scholarly communication in American law also is channeled primarily through the medium of the journal article. But the editorial and economic structure of American legal scholarship is sufficiently different from other disciplines that no group stands to gain from resisting open access other than commercial legal publishers, who lack direct leverage to sabotage the movement for open access law."

"The Science Commons approach also provides for attribution of first publication by the law review, something that is not mentioned in any of the standard accounts of open access. ... The move to peer refereeing tends to carry with it a move to commercial publishing, and in so doing destroys the open access opportunity that student-edited law reviews generate.

THE ECONOMICS OF OPEN ACCESS LAW PUBLISHING