By Jeffrey A. Roberts
CFOIC Executive Director
As required by a bill signed into law in 2022, the Colorado Judicial Department on Tuesday unveiled a new website that gives Coloradans free access to published high-court opinions dating back to 1864.
“This new website, offering free and easy access to every opinion by both of Colorado’s appellate courts, provides anybody with important information as they make decisions about their own legal matters or simply seek to study the law,” said Colorado Supreme Court Chief Justice Brian D. Boatright in a news release. “We were happy to work with the sponsors of this important legislation to make this valuable service available.”
Rep. Matt Soper, R-Delta, first proposed the clearinghouse of judicial opinions in 2020, but his bill died along with many others during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. “If law is for the people and people are expected to know the law, and case law is considered law, then you should be able to have access to any case that’s considered precedential free of charge,” he said at the time.
Soper’s subsequent effort, co-sponsored with Rep. Mike Weissman, D-Aurora, passed easily. House Bill 22-1091, named the “Justice Gregory Hobbs Public Access to Case Law Act” to honor former Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs, required that every published opinion of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals be made available on the internet by Mar. 1, 2024.
State law previously only required judicial opinions to be published in books, which can make research difficult for pro se litigants and others who can’t afford subscriptions to online legal databases such as LexisNexis, Westlaw and Bloomberg. The judicial branch has been offering free website access to Colorado Supreme Court and Court of Appeals rulings back to 1998, and Google Scholar’s database goes back to 1950, but the Google database is missing many opinions.
The complete set now online will be updated within a day after new opinions are issued, Mondays for the Supreme Court and Thursdays for the Court of Appeals, according to the news release. All unpublished (non-precedential) opinions of the Court of Appeals will be added later this year, it also says.
The database is searchable by citation, case name or docket number or by using keywords. The most recently decided cases are listed on the home page.
The earliest decisions on the site pre-date Colorado statehood in 1876. Twelve years earlier, in Townsend v. Wild, the Supreme Court of the Colorado Territory reversed a judgment of $262.23 owed for lumber and materials used for construction in East Denver. The reason: “At the time of the purchase by the appellants of the premises upon which the plaintiffs claim a lien, there was no lien law in force in this territory.”
The judicial branch also continues to provide free online access to civil court records statewide. Users must sign up every three months by sending an email to the Supreme Court Law Library.
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