RECAP in the Wall Street Journal
Last week we did a round-up of leading technology-focused sites that have covered RECAP. Now, it seems that news of RECAP is spreading beyond the "tech blogosphere," as more mainstream publications have begun writing about our software. Foreign Policy's Evgeny Morozov covered RECAP, calling it "smart and subversive." On Wednesday NextGov, a National Journal publication widely read within the government IT community, ran a thorough write-up of RECAP by Aliya Sternstein. It included some good background on how RECAP fits into the larger debate about judicial transparency.
Finally, Katherine Mangu-Ward has penned a piece for the Wall Street Journal about RECAP. Katherine calls RECAP "a sleek little add-on" with "a stylish and subversive touch." She writes:
With the possible exception of the ever-leaky CIA, no aspect of government remains more locked down than the secretive, hierarchical judicial branch. Digital records of court filings, briefs and transcripts sit behind paywalls like Lexis and Westlaw. Legal codes and judicial documents aren't copyrighted, but governments often cut exclusive distribution deals, rendering other access methods a bit legally questionable. Supreme Court decisions are easy to get, but the briefs and decisions of lower courts can be hard to come by.
Last week, a team from Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy took a pot shot at legal secrecy, setting in motion a scheme to filch protected judicial records and make them available for free online. One of the developers, Harvard's Stephen Schultze, says he went digging for some First Amendment precedent last fall and was shocked by the outdated technology he found. Knowing that "there's a certain geek cache to openness projects these days," Mr. Schultze and Princeton computer science grad students Tim Lee and Harlan Yu went straight to work.
