ProjectPosner.org – MyJudgeSpace.com? or WikiJudgepedia.org?

I ran across ProjectPosner.org today and it’s gave me an idea. Judges posting their own opinions – hence the title of this post. – MyJudgeSpace.

The purpose of Project Posner is…

"…Why this site? While Posner’s books and popular writings are easilyavailable to the public, his opinions are difficult or expensive forthe public to access, let alone search. This site, for the first time,collects almost all of his opinions in a single searchable and easilyreadable database…"

It is not clear that Judge Posner is a participant in this project. The creators are Professor Tim Wu from Columbia and Stuart Sierra who works at Columbia are clearly fans of Posner’s work…

"…Richard Posner is probably the greatest living American jurist. He hassat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago since 1981, andwritten several thousand opinions during that time. Posner is also wellknown for his extra-judicial writings and his deep affection for mostmembers of the animal kingdom…."

I think the idea of Judges having a space to post their own opinion might be quite interesting, but, judges have to be careful about their public stateaments and can’t be explaining all the time why they decided a case one way or another. The judiciary, however, does seem to be under attack for its "activism" and I believe that part of what fuels the criticism is the required silence from judges. They must ‘speak’ through their decisions, so what better way to speak louder than to make their decisions more accessible to the public.

Judge Posner is an exemplary case study in this.

"…One thing that distinguishes the opinions is the effort to try and getat why a given law actually exists, and an effort to try and make senseof the law. That can make them more useful than most case reports…."

Judges are busy people and doing the hard work of gathering the cases and creating the website would be too much of a burden, so maybe a service like MyJudgeSpace.com would lower the barrier. Even better, if judges have fan clubs like Posner, then the space should be a wiki where the fans could gather to post the opinions AND discuss them, link them out to other sources, etc. Maybe we should call this WikiJudgepedia.com?

I am thinking that this would be a neat project combining CALI’s technical skills, law student volunteers, law librarians, law faculty and practicing attorneys.

Hat tip to the Orin Kerr for his post at the Volokh Conspiracy for the pointer to ProjectPosner.org.

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