Page:10 Rules for Radicals.djvu/36

 constitution says that "equal protection under the law" may not be denied. Equal protection means that your basic rights cannot be arbitrarily denied because you are poor, are of a certain religion or race, or because somebody disagrees with your political views.

A poll tax, which preconditions access to the polls on access to money, is wrong because it denies equal protection under the law. I put it to you that just as a poll tax is wrong, preconditioning access to primary legal materials on having a credit card is just as wrong, and it violates our rights to equal protection under the law.

Turning primary legal materials from public property into private parcels violates more than equal protection, it makes due process under the law impossible, when rich lawyers can do more research than poor lawyers.

By poor lawyers, I mean public interest lawyers and solo practitioners. I also mean government lawyers in places like the Department of Justice, who, believe it or not, get memos telling them to please stop doing so much research because the department is over budget.

Going back to the 1824 decision in Wheaton v. Peters, one of the landmark cases of the great Marshall Court, the Supreme Court, has been clear, over and over again, that there is no copyright over primary legal materials, be they court opinions or administrative regulations or state statutes or OSHA regulations or even building codes drafted by third parties but duly enacted as the law of the land.

Despite this clear public policy, states and municipalities have erected a thicket of copyright