The future of Oyez, the website devoted to audio recordings of U.S. Supreme Court proceedings, was up in the air earlier this year as founder Jerry Goldman approached retirement. At stake was a vault filled with Supreme Court history accessible free to the public.
Goldman, 71, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, had started the Oyez Project in 1993 to make Supreme Court audio available to a mass audience. But with annual operating costs of as much as $500,000—and Goldman having expressed interest in being compensated for his years of sweat equity—it was unclear who would be willing to take over the project.
In late May, however, Oyez and its nearly 8,000 hours of Supreme Court audio found a new home at Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute, a nonprofit site that provides extensive free legal collections on the web, with help from Justia, the online legal publisher.
“They figured out how they can make this work,” says Goldman about the new partners.
“This arrangement is a gift to us,” says Thomas R. Bruce, the co-founder and director of the LII at Cornell. “We’re delighted to be hosting the thing.”
THE GOLD VAULT
Although news stories this past winter suggested Goldman was seeking as much as $1 million in payments for the project, all sides declined to discuss the financial details. The understanding is that Oyez is being donated to LII, and that financial support from Justia will keep it going.
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