&gt; Why is it that in a &quot;Democracy&quot; we have to purchase access to the law through a private party?<p>You don&#x27;t. What you have to purchase through a private party is electronic access to the annotations that the private party adds to the cases. If you just want the public domain cases you don&#x27;t need to purchase anything from a private party.<p>First, there is PACER [1]. PACER is not free, but it is pretty cheap and it is owned and operated by government, not by a private party. The documents retrieved through PACER are usually public domain, and so once someone gets a particular case they can legally share it. I don&#x27;t have a link handy, but I believe there are startups that gather together cases contributed this way to build a growing body of PACER material that you can get without having to pay even the small PACER fees.<p>You can also get the material for free at government and school law libraries that are generally open to the public.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pacer.gov" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pacer.gov</a>