Law in the Internet Society

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The Lexis-Westlaw Duopoly and the Proprietization of Law

Introduction

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>		During my first semester at Columbia, my Legal Practice Workshop instructor required his students to register with the Westlaw legal research system and submit classwork via [[lawschool.westlaw.com][TWEN], Westlaw's proprietary online courseware. I suppose I would have failed the course had I not so registered.

Since registering as a Columbia Law student 13 months ago, I have received 56 emails from LexisNexis--just shy of one email per week. These emails consist in bribes to convince me to use their service--not for schoolwork, but for playing around on an artificial legal research task in exchange for "Lexis Points," which can be redeemed for merchandise. The purpose of this exercise, naturally, is to habituate me to performing legal-research tasks on their system. In addition to generalized legal-research human capital, use of Lexis or WestLaw? produces system-specific human capital being built here;

LexisNexis? and WestLaw? are responsible for [[][__ percent]] of the market for legal information.

 

The Political Economy of Legal Research

Lexis and WestLaw? do not provide services to public libraries.


Revision 9r9 - 07 Nov 2008 - 07:56:23 - ElliottAsh
Revision 8r8 - 27 Oct 2008 - 16:22:20 - ElliottAsh
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