Slashdot has reported (& discussed in typical Slashdot style) an article in Searcher magazine by Melissa Bar called "Democracy in the Dark: Public Access Restrictions from Westlaw and LexisNexis." It is a very interesting and well-written article that highlights the important issue of public access to the law.
In my biased opinion, this article has one major flaw, which is that it seems to totally ignore the role of law libraries - particularly academic law libraries and court libraries. I can only speak for the academic law library where I work. Although we mainly exist to serve our students, faculty and alumni, we never turn anyone from the public away who needs help with legal research. We are trained to help people find what they want or need without crossing over into the area of unauthorized practice of law. At the risk of blowing the profession's own horn too much, I say that the the assistance of a good law librarian - who is armed with a standard collection of printed materials and the resources available on the "free web", including the Legal Information Institute, West's FindLaw and LexisOne - will usually do a much better job for the pro se patron than free access to LexisNexis or Westlaw. The printed sources aren't all bad. They are very strong with the older materials, which Ms. Barr uses as an example, and they make it more difficult to fall into the full-text infoglut trap - where the few pearls are hidden in a tonne of garbage.
Law libraries should do a better job of communicating all this to public libraries. I know that some of the professional associations, including the Minnesota Association of Law Libraries are already doing some work in this area.
None of this is to say that I don't have my issues with LexisNexis or Westlaw - or think that they're perfect, altruistic companies. But now there are more free electronic alternatives (or cheap ones, like VersusLaw) available for legal research. They don't have the all the fancy bells & whistles of Westlaw or Lexis, but they still offer the public access to primary legal materials that would have seemed unthinkable 15 years ago.
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