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Comment by kimmel | Hacker News Reader

There is an over saturation of lawyers in America in many of the legal fields. Making the laws harder to access is a way for lawyers to add value to their jobs because it erodes away the ability for the common person to read, understand, and use the laws. Carl Malamud has pointed out this protectionist racket in the past and actively fights against it.

Law schools lie about the availability of jobs post graduation to keep the student money flowing in. This has been mentioned before on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8180690 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9443739

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Lawyer here, although I went back to tech and don't practice as far as the public would be concerned. Access to the law has always been hard. Reading the laws (meaning statute) is easy and will only get easier. But for any matter of more than trivial complexity, you need case law. That's been difficult to access easily for a very long time, but even proposing that you live next door to a law library and can access all of the reporters and such, actually analyzing the case law is still hard. You need to know what's still good law, follow cites, etc. That's where Westlaw and Lexis make their money - their product is actually pretty good, if not horribly expensive.

Anyway, making (statutory) laws harder to access doesn't do much for lawyers. Most of the work is in the case law, and that couldn't possibly in the future get any more difficult to access than it is today.

If you're interested in this issue, follow Casetext. They're doing good work:

https://casetext.com/

Disclaimer: I have no interest in casetext. And none of this is legal advice, obviously.

> Making the laws harder to access is a way for lawyers to add value to their jobs

Which fails to explain the ABA lobbying for this, since -- despite the misleading headline -- the ABA is actually pushing for making the laws easier to access, if not with as much freedom to make use of the content as some (myself included) would prefer.

(Really, I don't see any evidence that lawyers don't their jobs as protected by secret information that only they have access to that any layperson could use just as effectively, any more than computer programmers do; AFAICT, they are much more likely to see themselves as having invested considerable time in developing specialized skills that most laypeople don't have, and thus don't see themselves threatened by mere information about the content of the law being more freely available.)

I could see some forces wanting to create a Genius-style annotated version of all the laws of the land. DRM and a EULA would be a great way to slow down such a creation and keep the power in the ivory tower.

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