CPT's Page on Public Access to Legal Information

Comments on Public Domain Citations

• The is a note from info-policy-notes on the Judicial Conference Request for Comments on Public Domain Legal Citations.
  
  
• Comments from CPT of March 14, 1997, outlining the costs of the West monopoly.
• Comments of the Department of Justice of March 14, 1997.
• Letter from John Lederer, Chair of the Union for the Public Domain to the Judicial Conference, March 14, 1997.
• Comments of Barbara Simons of the Association for Computing, March 14, 1997.
• Letter from Arthur B. Spitzer, Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, March 14, 1997.
• Letter from Alan D. Sugarman, president of HyperLaw, Inc., to the Judicial Conference, March 14, 1997.
• Comments of Clev Thorton on citations to the Judicial Conference.

The West/Thomson Merger

• On December 23, 1996, Judge Paul Friedman of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia rejected a proposed consent decree in U.S. v. Thompson Corporation. The proposed consent degree would have ended an antitrust action by the Department of Justice and several state attorney generals against Thomson for its acquisition of West Publishing. There were several objections to the consent degree from various library, small business and consumer groups, which were rejected by Judge Friedman. However, Judge Friedman ruled the consent order did not serve the public interest because a compulsory license of the West citations to
• Here are the comments we filed September 3, 1996 in opposition to the West/Thomson Merger.
• On September 27, 1996 TAP filed a motion before Judge Paul Friedman, asking that he reconsider his decision to deny TAP amicus standing in the proceeding on the DOJ/Thomson consent agreement.
• For a nice source of information on this merger and related issues, look at Alan Sugarman's hyperlaw web page.
• This is Tax Analysts' page on the merger.

Access to the Text of Court Opinions

• CPT is trying to get the U.S. Supreme Court to release 14 years of typesetting records used print the United States Reports, which is the offical reporter for Supreme Court opinions. Here is the sign-on letter.
• One current project is to document the cost of collecting paper copies from the courts. We have written for several hundred federal district court and circuit court opinions, and now we are determining the cost of obtaining the documents from the courts themselves. West Publishings claims a copyright on the text of opinions that it publishes. This is an additional barrier to access to the better known dispute over the West assertion of copyright to page numbers. There is additional information about this issue in a Hyperlaw lawsuit against West, which is reported on the Hyperlaw Web site mentioned above.

Air Force FLITE Records

We have been asking for this information to be made public since 1991. The Clinton Administration resisted disclosure for years, even going to court in California and making bad FOIA jurisprudence in Baizer v. Department of the Air Force, 887 F. Supp. 225, 1995 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 3487 (N.D. Cal. 1995), and by trying to amend the FOIA laws to exempt reference materials from disclosure under FOIA. Our own FOIA for the Supreme Court decisons was denied in 1996, and dozens of FOIAs by others were also denied. Finally, we had to create some political pressure on the administration, to get the records released.

• December 21, 1996 letter from CPT to OMB official Sally Katzen on this topic. The White House official who helped the most on this was Tom Kalil .
• On September 24, 1996, The Clinton Administration finally released some of the Air Force FLITE records to public. This is the info-policy-note post on this.
• One of the barriers to access to the FLITE data are contracts between the Air Force and West Publishing, which gave West exclusive rights to the FLITE database, in return for letting the Air Force use the West Reporters as a source for cases. In 1976 the Air Force then stopped using the government's own Supreme Court Reporter, and began to use the West Supreme Court Reporter. This "barter" agreement, and the short sighted decisions to abandon the public domain source for Supreme Court opinions, is the reason why the Clinton Administration only released the FLITE Supreme Court cases through 1975. Here is the 1976 Contract between West Publishing and the Air Force.
• One good place to search the FLITE records is from the Villanova University School of Law Web page on court decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court .

West Publishing's Campaign Contributions and Gifts to Judges

• Here is Alex Roth's recent report on West Publishing's Campaign Contributions
• Viveca Novak and Michael Weisskopf's April 21, 1997 Story in Time regarding Vance Opperman, as "The Cheerful Giver: A businessman with a corner on publishing court documents was also a master of political donations." Story about Opperman approaching President Clinton at fundraiser, asking "Can you get the Justice Department off my back?" Much more. Says Oppermant donated $329 thousand and raised hundreds of thousands more for Clinton Gore during 1996 DOJ review of West/Thomson merger.
• CNN's Brooks Jackson's April 11, 1997 story in CNN regarding "Moving Money Through State Capitals A big Democratic donor makes 'directed donations' to state parties." The first news story about Opperman's use of local state committees to hid contributions to Clinton during 1996 West/Thomson merger review. The Time story is more complete, but this one is a good read too.
• A very interesting report on West gifts to federal judges is found in Tom Hamburger and Sharon Schmickle's March 5 and 6, 1995 report in the Star Tribune. This article should have won the Pulitzer. Maybe it would have, but Linda Greenhouse from the New York Times lobbied that paper not to cover the story. Linda told me that the Star report was tendentious and overblown. After you read it, you be the judge.
• There is a federal statute on the issue of Gifts to federal employees .

Other Sources of Information

• This is the section of the TAP Gopher on legal information. It isn't maintained anymore, but it contains a lot of information on earlier debates on this topic.
• Try also the TAP-JURIS archives.
• The Tax Analysts Web page on Public access to the law discusses thes issues too. Tax Analysts is a publisher of legal information which has sought to obtain court caes and put them in the public domain.