Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week I'm focused on the Caselaw Access Project, a massive, free online database of U.S. case law created by the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School. Next up is a look at the controversy that cropped up around a planned lecture by Ken Starr at the University of New Mexico School of Law. And I've compiled some interesting stories you may have missed, including a look at Campbell University Law's new seven-person conference bike. Read on!

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

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Harvard's 'Caselaw' Bonanza

Harvard Law School is home to the world's largest academic law library, with more than 42,000 volumes. So why not just put it all online for anyone to access? Easy peasy, right?

I jest. Digitizing and organizing the entire corpus of U.S. case law into a free database was a very big deal and a huge undertaking. After five years, Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab last week unveiled its Caselaw Access Project (CAP), which its developers hope will not only help address the nation's access to justice woes but spur entrepreneurs and innovators to create new programs and projects that utilize established case law to solve problems. Oh, and it also aims to support new academic research on the law. But let me back up and explain how the database came to be, as described to me by Adam Ziegler, director of the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard. Library head Jonathan Zittrain first came up with the idea in 2013, and the lab established a partnership with legal research platform Ravel Law to get it off the ground. Then came the really hard part: figuring out how to digitize and organize 40 million pages of court decisions from the past 360 years. (That equates to 6.4 million unique cases). The team ended up carefully cutting apart each volume and scanning each individual page—a process that took about 18 months with a team of scanners working in shifts. Then came the task of developing a database that organizes all those cases in a way that's intuitive and accessible for users. So yeah, this was not a simple project.

“At almost every level, what we were doing was the first time anyone had done it,” Ziegler told me. “For example it was no small thing pulling 40,000 volumes out of the Harvard repository—which is the off-site storage facility for the library—and doing it in an efficient way.”

But I wanted to know why Harvard took on such a big, costly project. It's not as though the law school needs make a big splash to burnish its reputation. Ziegler said the project aims to address a fundamental problem with the accessibility of the law in the United States—or the lack thereof. “Court decisions are very much part of the law as statutes and regulations,” he said. “We're all bound by them. As a fundamental aspect of civic life, we should have access to the law that binds us. For court opinions, that just flatly wasn't true. If you are lucky enough to live by a law library like ours, you can go track the books down. But that's hard even if you knew where to look. If you're lucky enough to be able to afford a paid subscription to a commercial database, you could access to them that way. Even in this area, the full set of them—or the full set of the ones that are considered influential in appellate law—you just couldn't get online. And that's a basic failure of all of us.”

So giving free access to all case law online should solve a few problems. First, anyone can get it, regardless of their financial resources, which should help improve access to justice. Then there is the other big aim that Ziegler highlighted to me: Getting other smart people to play with the data and see what they create. “This can catalyze a lot of innovation, experimentation, and entrepreneurship and new discoveries in learning around law,” he said. “That is happening all over the place in other fields. It's happening very little—in my view—in the legal field, in part because data like this aren't made available by the people who build their businesses around that data. Once the data is out and available, it's going to make it a lot easier for startups, solo coders, for hobbyists, for anybody to take and idea they have about how the explore case law, and make that real.”

And the Library Innovation Lab plans to create a network of people using the CAP data to help foster further innovations.

My thoughts: Hands down this is a cool and important project. My hat is off to the folks at the Library Innovation Lab and Ravel for making it happen. But let's be clear, this is something that only Harvard—or maybe one or two other law schools—could actually pull off. For starters, its law library is massive. Few other institutions have that extensive of a collection to draw upon. Second, Harvard Law is well funded and its library is well staffed. This project required a lot of manpower, and Harvard is in a unique position to rise to that particular challenge. And lastly, Harvard Law's name recognition means that this is a project that will get noticed and enjoy instant credibility. When Harvard Law does something, people sit up and take notice. So now we'll have to wait and see whether CAP has the impact its creators hope for. There is certainly plenty of room for experimentation and innovation when it comes to the law.

A Starr is Canceled

So much for Ken Starr's long planned public lecture on presidential investigations at the University of New Mexico School of Law. Starr's appearance at the Albuquerque school was “indefinitely postponed” last week amid pushback within the university. Starr, who became a household name in the 1990s through his handling of the investigation of then-president Bill Clinton's relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky, was scheduled to deliver his lecture titled, “Investigating the President, Now and Then: Living in a Constitutional Quagmire” on Thursday. The talk had been in the works for more than a year, law school assistant dean Hannah Farrington told the Albuquerque Journal.

But opposition to Starr's visit bubbled up on several fronts. Some critics were uneasy with Starr's connection to controversial Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who served on Starr's team of investigators during the Clinton inquiry. Other opponents focused on Starr's tenure as president of Baylor University, and his role in a scandal involving how the Texas university handled rape allegations against football players. Starr resigned that post in 2016 under intense pressure.

The university made the call to postpone the lecture at the law school, Farrington said, but Starr also agreed that the “timing was not ideal.” The event has not yet been rescheduled.

The takeaway: Starr is no stranger to the dynamics of a law school or university. In addition to running Baylor, he was dean of Pepperdine University School of Law for six years. And he of course knows that he's a polarizing figure. So I doubt it came as a huge surprise to him when people began grumbling in advance of his New Mexico lecture. Still, I can't help feeling like this push to get the event canceled was misguided. I get the opposition. Feelings around Kavanaugh's confirmation are still very raw. And if Starr had been set to give a talk on sexual assault, #MeToo, or even legal ethics, than I agree it would be inappropriate. But he's got a unique vantage point on Special Counsel Robert Muller's closely watched Trump investigation. It's a shame those at the law school won't get to hear it.

Extra Credit Reading

Valparaiso University School of Law is calling it quits and will cease operations no later than May of 2020, officials announced last week. The move comes after a failed bid to relocate the school to a state university in Tennessee.

Here comes the conference bike. Campbell University Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law has snagged one of the country's first conference bikes: a contraption made in Holland in which up to seven people, can hold a meeting while peddling around town.

Western Michigan University Cooley Law School has dismissed its accreditation suit against the American Bar Association, saying it has achieved most of its aims outside of court. Coding is the next big thing for lawyers.

Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School is launching a recurring coding workshop for lawyers.

Thanks for reading Ahead of the Curve. I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]