Although it is excellent, and I recommend it very highly,
I had not expected Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the
Anthropocene to shed light on the Caselaw Access
Project. Near the end of the book, he writes,
The study of the humanities is nothing less than the patient
nurturing of the roots and heirloom varietals of human symbolic
life. This nurturing is a practice not strictly of curation, as many
seem to think today, but of active attention, cultivation, making
and remaking. It is not enough for the archive to be stored, mapped,
or digitized. It must be worked.
The value of the Caselaw Access Project is not primarily in
preservation, saving space, or the abstraction of being
machine-readable; it is in its new uses, the making of things from
the raw material. We at LIL and others have begun to make new
things, but we’re only at the
beginning. We hope you will join us, and surprise us.