Why isn't there a Google for the law?
Anecdote, I was at Google in 2006 and there was (is?) a database of ideas that people shared that Google might pursue. As their motto was organize the world&#x27;s information and make it easily accessible.<p>I had gotten a ticket for obstructing the intersection (the &quot;anti-congestion&quot; law in California that sought to limit gridlock by making it illegal to enter an intersection that you couldn&#x27;t exit before the other light changed). I was fighting it and wanted to find other cases that had been decided on this law[1]. The only way to do that was to go to the public library and look through their published volumes of decisions and cases. So I thought here is a really useful thing Google could do, it isn&#x27;t even a <i>hard</i> problem, collect the decisions that the courts publish anyway, and just connect the ones that are about the same part of the code. Match a number, match a date. And very useful to people who are fighting cases. It saved me some time and money [2]. But the idea never made it past the discussion stage because, as I was counseled, doing that would take on &quot;powerful interests&quot; who would really fight back hard and Google didn&#x27;t want to draw that level of scrutiny. It wasn&#x27;t until Carl Malamude started attacking this problem in earnest[3] that it became clear to me what it means to take away a revenue stream from lawyers.<p>[1] And learned this is called &#x27;Sheparding&#x27; based on finding citations -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shepard&#x27;s_Citations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shepard&#x27;s_Citations</a><p>[2] turns out there had been no case law on this particular law and lots of dismissals so I just entered a plea of not guilty at the clerk, and the court informed me a week before my trial date that the prosecution had declined to prosecute.<p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20150726&#x2F;23080731763&#x2F;even-if-state-georgia-can-copyright-legal-annotations-should-it.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20150726&#x2F;23080731763&#x2F;even-...</a>