Who Owns the Federal Case Law?

Although West Publishing Company has never claimed that it "owned" the published decisions of the lower federal courts (the Federal District Courts and the Circuit Courts of Appeal), West has long been and remains the only publisher of a complete set of those decisions. The story of how this came to pass is an interesting one, and the links below will take you to a couple of interesting articles, along with the 1998 decisions of the Second Circuit Court denying West's claims of copyright for the interior page numbers in its volumes and for the "editorial enhancements" it made in the text of the decisions reported therein.

• Who Owns the Law?, an article by Gary Wolf appearing in Wired magazine.
• Debate rages over who owns the law, an article by John Oslund appearing in The Minneapolis Star Tribune.
• Matthew Bender & Co. and HyperLaw, Inc. v. West Publishing Co., No. 94 Civ. 0589, 1997 WL 266972 (S.D.N.Y. May 19, 1997).
• Matthew Bender & Co. and HyperLaw, Inc. v. West Publishing, __ F.3d __ (2d Cir., 1998)
• Matthew Bender & Co. and HyperLaw, Inc. v. West Publishing, __ F.3d __ (2d Cir., 1998)