The Monopolists Who Gatekeep the Court System
If you want to read the laws that govern, you have to pay a steep price. Break a duopoly and this can be changed.
Welcome to the podcast Organized Money. You can listen to today’s episode on Apple on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We tend to think of the law as a public asset - centuries of statutes, common law, and legal precedents that shape how society governs itself. So why is the law itself so hard and so expensive to access?
Matt and David talk with Mike Lissner of the Free Law Project about the quiet duopoly that controls legal information, how Westlaw and LexisNexis turned public court records into pricey commodities, and why even the federal government charges by the page to read your own laws. Along the way, they uncover a system that drives up legal costs, shuts regular people out of justice, creates real security risks, and stifles innovation, and explore how a scrappy nonprofit might finally crack it open
Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.
Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.
I use pacer a couple times a year. I never get a bill because I don’t pull enough pages. (There is a minimum billing or it’s free). My idea is to get bunch of people like me to pull as much as we can for free each quarter Granted, you would need a bunch of us doing that to really make a dent. But helping out a good cause is something I’d be happy to do.