Info/Law

I have been absent from this space because of a combination of Christmas, grading, and last week’s AALS conference. Happy New Year! It’s good to be back.

At the AALS, I had a conversation with a very smart person who commented on the death of the old-fashioned legal treatise. As he put it, such treatises used to represent impressive efforts to explain and synthesize huge quantities of law, and to create a harmonious vision of a complex field. As they age, however, these giant multivolume works tend to lose the very coherence that gave them their greatest value. They become bloated with footnotes assembled by research assistants that merely provide string cites of relevant cases. In a world before Lexis and Westlaw that service may have had some value, but now any 1L can assemble the same case law, and print it all out to boot.

I agreed with this assessment. I also remarked that Ann Bartow has gone further, writing a provocative attack on the “hegemony” of the copyright treatise. We may, however, have spoken too soon.

This week West released a brand new copyright treatise, written by William Patry, which clocks in at seven dizzyingly comprehensive volumes (over 5000 pages). Moreover — and this is the important part — Patry, unveiling his magnum opus, notes that he “did 100% of the research and writing, never using assistants of any kind.” It took seven years.

I was already an admirer of Patry, whose copyright blog is top-notch. I have linked to it many times, generating some of my own favorite posts (such as here and here). His diversity of experience in copyright law is also quite remarkable: it includes private practice, significant tenures in Washington working for the House subcommittee that handles IP and for the Copyright Office, and a stint as a law professor. Now, in addition to his treatise work, he is copyright counsel to Google.

Finally, as if all that wasn’t enough to set an info/law geek’s heart aflutter, Patry has unveiled a new blog devoted solely to the treatise, in order to “begin to break down the one-way nature of legal treatises.” He hopes readers will comment with suggestions and corrections, and he also plans to air possible changes to be made in the treatise’s twice-yearly supplements.

I haven’t seen Patry on Copyright itself yet, of course, so it’s too early to celebrate. But it sounds like this might be a fabulous marriage of the virtues of the late lamented treatises of old and a more transparent future…

Update: Mike Madison and Frank Pasquale of Madisonian.net have some further interesting thoughts on the Patry treatise and open access (and I added my two cents in the comments).

Update 2:  Patry will do a stint as a visiting blogger at Prawsblawg to talk more about the treatise.

Filed under: Blogging, Copyright, Education & Copyright, Law School, Open Access, Scholarship