Santa Clara University School of Law Makes Available Thousands of Pages of Documents from ObamaCare Litigation Across the U.S.
Deborah Lohse
SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 28, 2012 —Fresh off the Supreme Court’s historic validation of what’s become known as ObamaCare, Santa Clara University School of Law announces the availability of a digital collection of thousands of pages of documents from litigation challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The collection contains briefs, memos, opinions, and other court documents filed as part of the scores of lawsuits that have attempted to overturn ObamaCare in full or in part since its passage in 2010.
The collection, being made available through the school’s Heafey Law Library, has been an ongoing project between the library and SCU Law professor Bradley Joondeph, a nationally recognized constitutional law scholar and author of a blog devoted to analyzing the challenges and legal issues surrounding ACA. The collection, available to legal scholars or any other users with an interest in the subject, is believed to be the largest collection of such materials in an open-access archive.
The documents are fully indexed and full-text searchable. Santa Clara University School of Law intends to maintain the ACA collection in perpetuity to preserve the legal history of these cases and their impact on national political discourse.
SCU’s law school’s digital preservation efforts are part of a wider move towards greater, more-open access for legal scholarship and court documetns, as outlined in the so-called “Durham Statement,” created by a group convened at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
"This collection is a unique legal history of the ACA, and represents our continuing commitment to open-access legal research and scholarship," said David Holt, electronic services law librarian at Heafey.
For more information about the collection (http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/aca/), please contact Mr. Holt at dholt@scu.edu or 408-554-5195.