Harvard Law School has announced that it is digitising its entire collection of US case law, and that it will make the collection available online, for free, to anyone with an internet connection.
The project is a collaboration with Ravel Law, a legal research and analytics platform.
The Harvard Law School Library is the largest academic law library in the world, with a collection comprising of 40,000 books containing approximately forty million pages of court decisions, including original materials from cases that predate the US Constitution. It is the most comprehensive and authoritative database of American law and cases available anywhere except for the Library of Congress.
The Harvard Library Innovation Lab is currently working on scanning the bound volumes, and the digitised materials will be searchable through Ravel’s platform, which uses data science, machine learning, and visualisation to help users sift quickly through millions of court opinions.
The full collection of nationwide case law is expected to be digitised and searchable for free by mid-2017, and will be available through www.ravellaw.com.
More details here.