The Lexis-Westlaw Duopoly and the Proprietization of Law

"While the Internet provides access to many free sources of legal information, they are likely to be substantially less useful and efficient than fee-based legal resource providers."

The Future of the Casebook: An Argument for the Open-Source Approach (see pg. 10 on Wexis)

"An open access approach would mean new pools of course materials for professors to draw on, new means of interaction and collaboration between professors and students, and new possibilities for restructuring the law school curriculum."

[[]["For other academic disciplines, commercial publishing has the significant drawback of making it really expensive for scholars to get access to what's happening in their fields. Open access reduces the cost of access dramatically, whether or not it encourages scholars to read the work. In law, scholars already have ready access to their colleagues' work. And they still don't read it. What's the point of making the work ... free?]] ... Once LexisNexis? and Westlaw started putting full texts of law reviews on their databases, the authority of print started to recede, leaving the authority of the publisher and, to a lesser extent, the authority of limited access. A lot of law professors these days never actually handle original physical copies of law review articles...