UC Berkeley School of Information assistant professor Brian Carver and alumnus Michael Lissner were named today to the Fastcase 50, which recognizes entrepreneurs, innovators, and trailblazers who have charted a new course for the delivery of legal services.
Carver and Lissner are the co-founders of the Free Law Project, a non-profit that provides free access to primary legal materials, develops legal research tools, and supports academic research on legal corpora. They also run CourtListener, a free legal research website with millions of legal opinions from federal and state courts. CourtListener collects new opinions daily from a broad range of courts, and powers several legal research startups; it was initially developed and Lissner’s master’s final project in the School of Information’s MIMS program.
In May 2014, the Free Law Project announced that it would be partnering with Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy to manage the operation and development of RECAP, a public domain archive of PACER documents.
Brian W. Carver is a lawyer and an assistant professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, where he studies the laws and policies governing technology and information, particularly the technical, economic, social, and legal frameworks that best promote progress and access to information. His research has led him to write on open-source software projects and software licensing; he also teaches courses on intellectual property law for information professionals.
Michael Lissner is the co-founder and lead developer of CourtListener. He graduated from UC Berkeley’s School of Information in 2010. Michael is passionate about bringing greater access to primary legal materials, about how technology can replace old legal models, and about open source, community-driven approaches to legal research.
