It's legal in virtually all jurisdictions, provided the proper steps are followed to organize as a cemetery, comply with laws, coordinate with funeral directors etc.
Basic principles of no embalming, no vault, simple coffin or shroud, are more or less identical to Jewish and Muslim practices, practiced in every state.
Moreover there are no ecological concerns versus conventional burial, except that conventional burial typically involves sticking a lot of concrete, steel, and treated wood in the ground. Whereas natural burial uses fewer resources and conserves land in a natural state.
Embalming does nothing regarding drugs or radionucleotides in the body. It simply adds embalming fluid consisting mostly of formaldehyde that decomposes after burial. Removing implants may or may not be done for both conventional and "natural" burial, no difference; it's always done for cremation since incineration is involved.
The "mushroom suit" innovation is not a common green burial practice at this time.
You need pre-internet cases from the era before courts had websites. Also, court rules generally require citation formats that use page numbers from the official reporters. In the past, the West has actually unsuccessfully tried to claim copyright to its page numbers (West Publishing Co. v. Mead Data Central, 799 F.2d 1219).
There is a lot of other editorial content that actual legal researchers really kind of need, but which they are going to redact because it isn't part of the reported decisions and is owned by the publisher. (Things like unofficial syllabi, indexed lists of holdings, subject matter, etc.)
There's actually several others. "Free the Law" is not even the first Ivy League entry in this space. Cornell has the Legal Information Institute (https://www.law.cornell.edu/) which is entirely free.
In the for-profit space, FindLaw has been around forever.
There's still nothing yet that really competes with Westlaw or LexisNexis for professionals though. It's not simply a matter of indexing all the decisions and adding a few hyperlinks. The stuff they are redacting for copyright reasons is stuff that you want when you are doing real research.
> There's still nothing yet that really competes with Westlaw or LexisNexis for professionals though.
I have a few friends at big law and they have 100% access to Westlaw or Lexis which means they do not need any of the alternatives at this point. That said, many, many, many small to mid-sized firms cannot afford access to Westlaw or Lexis which is why these various initiatives and companies are so important.
At a fundamental level, these services all help improve the odds you will win a case when hiring a smaller law firm. A lot of people comment here about how there are not society improving companies anymore (uber for food delivery), but I am a believer that each of these companies in this space are fundamentally important to our society.
You are missing the point. Why is it that in a "Democracy" we have to purchase access to the law through a private party? Ignorance of the law is no defense, but I have to pay to relieve that ignorance? Come on!
> Why is it that in a "Democracy" we have to purchase access to the law through a private party?
You don't. What you have to purchase through a private party is electronic access to the annotations that the private party adds to the cases. If you just want the public domain cases you don't need to purchase anything from a private party.
First, there is PACER [1]. PACER is not free, but it is pretty cheap and it is owned and operated by government, not by a private party. The documents retrieved through PACER are usually public domain, and so once someone gets a particular case they can legally share it. I don't have a link handy, but I believe there are startups that gather together cases contributed this way to build a growing body of PACER material that you can get without having to pay even the small PACER fees.
You can also get the material for free at government and school law libraries that are generally open to the public.
PACER is not cheap, nor is it comprehensive. Furthermore, it is not feasible to find out what the law is on PACER. If you already know what cases are important, then you can look them up on PACER I suppose. Or you could go to your local law library (presumably you are a member for a couple hundred bucks a year, right?) and look them up on paper. Why should we need a comprehensive electronically searchable database of casetext or legislation when paper will do just fine? Frankly as a small-time lawyer, your argument that PACER is sufficient or cheap just does not ring true for me. If it did, I wouldn't pay so much for Lexis / Westlaw.
The laws and legal opinions are public domain. The issue is distribution. Pre-Internet, courts were not in the business of publishing books of their opinions. Making the opinions available at the court house was deemed to be sufficient public access. That treatment was consistent with pretty much every other kind of public record (you had to go into the county clerk's office to view deeds, etc). Post-Internet, many courts publish their opinions online. E.g. the Virginia Supreme Court and Court of Appeals has opinions going back to 1995: http://www.courts.state.va.us/opinions/home.html.
What private parties provide is a value-add. That's what you purchase access to. They spend the money and go to the effort of digitizing, indexing, and annotating, case law and statutes going back a couple of hundred years. No single public entity can do that, because the 51 individual federal and state court systems are part of 51 distinct sovereign entities, and as a practical matter individual courts even within a single sovereign operate largely autonomously of each other.
Big fan of Jake and his team. Pretty sure they're stuck licensing case data, like everybody else. That means no unrestricted bulk downloads of permissively licensed case data for end users.
That data is "free" insofar as you can read it on Casetext without payment. That's great---I do it a lot---but it's a far cry from what Public Resource aimed to do and what Harvard has now promised to do.
In some situations, like Lexis Nexis' relationship to the State of California, there were are are already "walled garden" interfaces where you can go to read and download case law one case at a time. That hasn't opened the playing field for viable, comprehensive alternatives to Wexis, which is probably why Wexis can be convinced to offer them.
If and when the data become truly open, I can't wait to see where Casetext goes.
Basic principles of no embalming, no vault, simple coffin or shroud, are more or less identical to Jewish and Muslim practices, practiced in every state.
Moreover there are no ecological concerns versus conventional burial, except that conventional burial typically involves sticking a lot of concrete, steel, and treated wood in the ground. Whereas natural burial uses fewer resources and conserves land in a natural state.
Embalming does nothing regarding drugs or radionucleotides in the body. It simply adds embalming fluid consisting mostly of formaldehyde that decomposes after burial. Removing implants may or may not be done for both conventional and "natural" burial, no difference; it's always done for cremation since incineration is involved.
The "mushroom suit" innovation is not a common green burial practice at this time.