New website puts Guam laws, court opinions and other legal documents within easy reach

By Jayvee Vallejera

A new website that aims to make laws in U.S. territories accessible not just to lawyers but also to the wider public is now live, starting with all Supreme Court of Guam opinions and the entire Guam Code.

The whole range of Guam jurisprudence is now indexed and searchable by topic or keywords in the new website, Territorial Review (www.territorialreview.org), said its founder and editor-in-chief, Karlo Dizon.

Dizon, a Guam lawyer who worked as a research attorney at the Supreme Court of Guam and an assistant public defender in the territory, said the website is free. There will be no need to create an account to access it.

Search results will use easy-to-understand plain English, complete with proper citations that will be reviewed by a human editor, said Dizon.

Why free? “Because the law should always be free,” he said.

Dizon said Territorial Review is a response to current practices in which laws and legal opinions are often kept behind paywalls and couched in dense, difficult-to-understand legalese.

“The irony is that the law itself is public, and yet access to it has long been gatekept by services that can charge a lawyer as much as a thousand dollars a month,” Dizon said. “We want to show that a free, public resource can lead on technology rather than trail it, and that responsibly built AI can be an equalizer, putting the same quality of legal research in everyone's hands, not only those who can pay for it.”

Dizon, a Stanford-educated lawyer who serves on the New York State Bar Association’s Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies, got the idea for Territorial Review while working at the Supreme Court of Guam in 2019.

He saw firsthand how hard it was to research Guam laws. Most websites on American jurisprudence focus only on the 50 states and the federal government. The few mentions about Guam and other inhabited U.S. territories (Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands) are scattered across incompatible court websites, never unified and rarely indexed.

“Over the last couple of years, as I became immersed in the AI and startup world in New York, the technology finally caught up to the idea and I began building,” he said.

Tapping AI’s capacity as a tool to scale up the availability of territorial jurisprudence, Dizon leads a small, dedicated team in Guam, New York and across the United States that is focused on a single idea: “that the public's own law should be the best place to read it, not the worst.”

Starting with all Supreme Court of Guam opinions since its establishment in 1996 and all 22 titles of the Guam Code, the AI-assisted website puts the aggregated body of Guam law in a searchable index and makes it available to users.

Dizon said “AI-assisted” means the search may be done by a machine, but all data the system generates undergoes three automatic checks before reaching the reader to ensure that the citation is from Guam, based on legitimate documents, and that the cited passage supports the point being made.

While the method is AI-assisted, the “standard is human accountable, with a named editor.”

Dizon said this method allows a small, focused team of lawyers to build and maintain something that once would have required a large staff.

“The leverage is the technology; the accountability is human. We are lawyers first and we review the work product. Every answer is built to show its sources, and every citation is verified against the real record before it appears,” Dizon said. “If you spot a problem, let us know. That is how a public resource should work.”

Currently, the entire corpus of Guam jurisprudence is uploaded on the website. The complete legal corpus of other U.S. territories will be available in the coming months.

“We publish each jurisdiction as we reach the internal milestones that let us do it to the same standard, complete and verified. I would rather be right than fast,” he said.

Dizon said the website does not collect or store anything about a user's identity or demographics.

“You can use the site freely, with no account. The free public resource is built to be used privately, by anyone, no questions asked,” he added.

Later, once Territorial Review introduces optional professional features, anyone who chooses them will know exactly what that involves, he said.

That is the next big thing on their plate, Dizon said. Territorial Review will soon be rolling out tools for educators, government offices and law firms, built on the same verified foundation.

So far, feedback on the new website has been “overwhelmingly positive,” Dizon said. This early, Territorial Review now has users ranging from legislators and educators to practicing attorneys and legal academics in Guam, Washington, D.C. and New York.