Abstract
Case law is the term that refers to reports of past court decisions. It is considered an essential source of law, vital for legal professionals. Existing case law services are currently centralized, with an entity having complete control over the data and often charging fees for its access and other adding value services. This paper attempts to leverage the potential of blockchain technology in order to develop a public and decentralized platform that allows the submission of court decisions in a decentralized database and employs a network of curators who offer their validation, classification, and evaluation. Specifically, we design, analyze and implement AnyCase, a proof-of-concept prototype system on the Ethereum platform. We focus on the establishment of a sybil-resistant voting protocol used for reaching agreement and the development of a tokenized economy that incentivizes participation. Our preliminary analysis indicates that, besides being decentralized, AnyCase has the potential to compete with existing centralized systems in several other aspects.
Highlights
The essence of case law is captured by the principle of stare decisis, which is Latin for “to stand by decided matters”
We offer a brief description of the Blockchain technology and we discuss important elements of the Ethereum platform as it is needed for understanding our design, analysis, and implementation of our system
Trustless and guaranteed correct program execution provided by the Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts can be used as building blocks to develop decentralized applications
Summary
The essence of case law is captured by the principle of stare decisis, which is Latin for “to stand by decided matters”. The larger part of legal research services employ attorneys for the curation and quality control of the massive collection of documents they provide, a procedure which undoubtedly requires expert knowledge and immense effort. This leads to duplication of effort and a scatter of legal information across different sources and inconsistent formats, since no standard metadata structure has been agreed to represent a case law document. As the volume of digitally available legal documents increases, the need for a more scalable and robust solution is apparent To this day, there is no decentralized, unified, comprehensive, aggregator of case law which is open access and offers opportunities for contribution by anyone. Section Implementation discusses implementation issues and section Synopsis and prospects concludes the paper and offers recommendations for potential enhancement of the platform’s capabilities
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
