I’ve been having a think about the very sad news that @ROSSIntel has had to cease operating in the wake of the ongoing litigation brought against it by TR.

The issues this litigation has raised, particularly in the light of the ROSS counterclaim, are complex and important.

Virtually all common law jurisdictions, to some extent, are currently grappling with the extremely knotty #openlaw issues that this dispute engages.

The problem at the heart of the TR v ROSS case is the same problem that lurks behind every other obstacle that stands in the path of making laws open to all:

The colossal chasm between principle on the one hand and the machinery required to make that principle work in practice.

The principle in play is the rule of law; specifically that aspect of the rule of law that holds that I should have the means to *discover* the content of the laws by which I am bound. This shadows the rule that “ignorance of the law is no defence”.

We all know the principle and nobody can sensibly disagree with it. The very real problem is that the machinery to make that principle operate, to make it real, has never really existed.

We currently rely on two devices to make the overarching principle “sort of work”: (1) private sector publishers of laws; and (2) lawyers, who are trained to understand and apply the published material.

We’ve been relying on those two devices since the invention of the common law itself.

There are lots of good points we can make about the problems caused by proprietary interests in judgments, copyright and the rest of it. But until judgment dissemination converts to an operation carried out by the state, we’re doomed to keep on making them.