Free public access to legal information has a long history going back to the earliest days of the Web. John Wonderlich describes some of the background in Legal Information as a Global Movement (Open House Project, May 27th, 2008), which also includes 3 videos about the movement. This is excellent, informative, and inspiring!
Tom Bruce describes still more of the history here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.