Give the Gift of the Federal Reporter
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, November 9 2010
Public domain maestro Carl Malamud is back with new scheme to wrest crucial legal information from the clutches of proprietariness, and this one has a powerful internal logic. Malamud has repurposed the "Yes We Scan" banner that he used for his public campaign to win the congressionally-appointed job of Public Printer, using it now for a project that calls on American lawyers and those who love them to chip in some coinage to make some of the United State's foundational legal records free and accessible to the public. For a $1,200 donation, you'll make possible the double-keying and online posting of one volume of the First Series of the Federal Reporter, the compilation of court records from the years 1880 to 1924 that were put together by the big legal publisher West but that have now fallen into the public domain. Chip in, esquires, and your name will be commemorated on Malamud's "Public Domain Wall of Fame" and in the newly sprung text version of your Federal Reporter volume.
Three attorneys have ponied up so far to free the Federal Reporter (including, as a bit of trivia, Twitter's in-house counsel). The holiday season will be soon upon us. People pay to name stars, so why not?