US Supreme Court will require electronic filings and post them free online

I can't speak for Australia, but in the U.S. legal scholarship has shifted away from traditional legal debate. The debate has become much more abstract, yet at the same time scholars purport to apply more scientific methods backed by empirical data. This is especially true in areas like anti-trust and intellectual property, but it's happening across the board in all domains. Many top law schools are literally turning into research schools. It's an odd phenomenon.

Often times this "research" is no more substantive than literary criticism, as often the only materials available to study are court materials. Professors have and will use software and statistics to try to support various political and social claims. Improved access to Supreme Court filings will prove extremely attractive.

Now, I'm not saying that it's impossible to do meaningful research with this material. My contention is merely that most of the research is crap, and that the legal academy is not well equipped for this kind of work. Making it easier to acquire will have a similar effect to a shipment of morphine bound for a hospital falling off the truck in a red light district.

Having access to raw data is not an unmitigated good because people could (and will) intentionally misinterpret it.

It might be still be good on the balance - but there will be a variety of other consequences, good and bad, intended and unintended. Wahern's point seems to be more that it's far too early to call what the balance of all those consequences might be, and that it's not even a given that they'll be more good than bad - nevermind to make the leap to assume they'll all be good.

Cheaper than ever, barrier-free communication across the globe has it's advantages, for example - but this also leads to spammers and robocallers. I've wondered if some kind of small cost increase per call or email would help keep such things in better check.

I support free access to cryptography not because I think cryptography is an unmitigated good. It has and will be used for bad things. I support it because, at least in principle, I believe the good uses will outweigh the bad uses. And I will continue holding that belief absent substantial evidence to the contrary.

Similar situation here. But while many people intuitively understand that cryptography can be used for bad purposes, it's not obvious that simply improving the accessibility of Supreme Court filings could lead to anything bad. But it can and it will. Like in many other fields, law professors are under intense pressure to produce scholarship. The problem is, the law isn't like biology or chemistry. There are few if any readily ascertainable universal principles--at least, few that are more concrete than philosophy generally. It's not even like economics or sociology--which I respect even though there's much junk science there, as well--which are still amenable to material predictions, controlled experiments, and falsifiable hypotheses. For these and many other reasons, the law just isn't a suitable subject for the kind of meaningful, scientific analysis professors purport to apply. At least, not with the analytical tools typically used. The law is a mishmash of abstraction and exception, and the contours are fundamentally random and path dependent. Yet legal scholarship is increasingly expected to extrapolate substance from these random contours. Professors happily oblige. Moreover, scholarship doesn't win you many points unless it's controversial or seemingly up-ends established views. Basically, there are intense internal pressures for scholarship to fit certain narratives. And because of the obvious parallels between the law and politics, the scholarship is weaponized by think tanks and pundits to enhance the credibility of their social and political arguments.

It's one reason why Paul Ryan can believe himself a "policy wonk". Not that he isn't an analytical person or that I think his ideas are bad. But it's a preposterous notion that anybody in his position could have access to the kind of hard, relevant data and substantive analysis that good legislative and legal policy could just fall out as matter of course. That if you just studied this stuff enough the answers fall out. The flow of legal scholarship, much like some economic scholarship, is what permits this delusional equivocation between a national policymaker and a scientist in a lab or a quant running a trading platform.

What I object to is the charade. And I think the charade is harmful, though not necessarily so harmful that we should do things like prevent the publication of court materials.

FWIW, I went to law school mid-career. Best decision I ever made even though I returned to programming. And it was incredibly intellectually stimulating, both the hard legal education, as well as the more abstract policy discourse. But I came away with an abiding belief that the policy discourse has become unproductive in many ways, and this is compounded by how papers and "research" are misused; the work product is considered by many pundits, and even held out by professors and schools, as more scientifically rigorous and empirically grounded than it really is. When the debate is internal and you're discussing things with subject-matter experts, you can sort of expect people to be better able at calling out bullshit; groundless ideas are more likely to die quickly. Plus, lawyers are trained to bullshit, or at least push an argument as far as they possibly can. They're trained to work in a uniquely adversarial system where the opposing side often has the burden of disproving your argument. I don't think lawyers are more insincere than scientists, but when a lawyer is invested in an idea he's very capable at supporting it with strong analytical arguments, papering over the holes. Typical scientific discourse and peer review is far too timid by comparison. When this discourse leaks out into the wider world--indeed, when you're incentivized to pander to the demands and curiosities of the wider world in your discourse--things get out of control. And it has.