Texas effectively denies open access to state law

According to the Advocate’s Studio, a recent change to the Texas Rule of Appellate Procedure gives “mem­o­ran­dum” opin­ions full prece­den­tial value — but those opin­ions are cur­rently only acces­si­ble through the very expen­sive Westlaw or LexisNexis:

Hey, Texas! What’s up with this move to lock the law behind a very expen­sive toll booth? If the Texas leg­is­la­ture insists that mem­o­ran­dum opin­ions are bind­ing, then the Texas leg­is­la­ture bet­ter fig­ure out a way to open access to them. In an age when infor­ma­tion is mov­ing steadily towards free and open source, this short-​​sighted pro­ce­dural move seems more than a lit­tle back­ward. I sup­pose the next move is to require lawyers to ride to court on buckboard.

The gen­eral trend, build­ing on sim­i­lar approaches in sci­en­tific pub­lish­ing as well as open-​​source soft­ware, has been to open up access to legal opin­ions. The goal is to make the law — an absolutely fun­da­men­tal part of soci­ety — more acces­si­ble to the pub­lic. It is, to bor­row from a rather dif­fer­ent con­text, rather like allow­ing peo­ple to read the Bible in their own lan­guage, rather than requir­ing to go to a priest trained in Latin.

Hopefully, the Texas exam­ple is the excep­tion to the trend away from pro­pri­etary lock-​​in, and not an indi­ca­tion that we are mov­ing backwards.

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