Kent Morlan, a civil rights lawyer in Tulsa, runs a free Web site with a scope of information once accessible only to the law firms that could pay for it.

The site, called Morelaw.com , is an inexpensive venture. One employee combs about 100 Web sites a day for verdicts, then posts a good half-dozen appellate court decisions a day, with summaries, links to the full verdicts and the amount of the awards in bright green type.

This cost of posting each record on the site is less than $1 -- the sort of low overhead that works well for independent Internet publishers. After counting the advertising he takes in, Morlan breaks even.

His audience, as he describes it, consists of about 30,000 'car-wreck, plane-wreck, train-wreck lawyers' per month. His site slogan: 'Free as it should be.'

Without question, more Web sites that examine court proceedings could materialize as courts post more records online. The availability of thousands of court records online could supply the public with insight into the workings of the court system that they never had before.

But as it stands, many policy-makers behind court systems remain reluctant to expose all their records to the glare of the Internet. In two recent policy decisions, the federal Judicial Conference and the California Judicial Council issued rules that prohibit courts from posting records from criminal cases online and encourage courts to redact personal data from electronic records. The California Judicial Council also stipulated that court records would be provided online only one at a time.

The reasoning, in both policies, is that releasing records to a broad audience on the Internet would expose plaintiffs, defendants and jurors to the risk of identity theft through the publication of the extensive personal information collected in civil proceedings.

Also, both councils argued, the publication of information such as home addresses in court records could lead to the intimidation of witnesses and jurors in criminal cases. The federal council determined that easy access to documents in federal cases could inform defendants of the extent to which other parties in the case were cooperating with authorities.

Chris Hoofnagle, legislative counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, supplied a scenario that could lead to a gross invasion of anyone's privacy:

'You're sitting in a car and someone crashes into you, and you have to submit medical records,' he said.

Also, Hoofnagle said, inaccurate information about individuals could enter wide distribution through electronic publication. He described a common trick: Because court filings are protected from litigation, lawyers 'put all this horrible information in a court filing and then call up a reporter and say, 'Look at this court filing.' There could be a lot of complaints with lots of information that is untrue about you.'

Advocates for access to court records online argued that sensitive information should be withheld on a case-by-case basis, not under broad mandates.

'If there are very good reasons to withhold pieces of information, then address that problem,' said Rebecca Daugherty, Freedom of Information service center director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press .

She said that the greatest concern should be given to the public's interest in monitoring how justice is dispensed. The privacy issue 'does not diminish the public's interest in knowing how the government is carrying out its business,' she said.

Neither the California nor the federal policy requires courts to publish records online, but many court administrators have been providing them on Web sites for years.

The Web site of the Los Angeles County Superior Court supplies a good example of how court records are presented online under the new rules.

Though full case files are not available, the site allows the public to look up case summaries and calendars on civil and small claims cases. Individuals can pay their traffic tickets. But for criminal cases, only general information, forms and felony bail schedules are available. No information about specific criminal cases resides on the Web site.

Court administrators in Oklahoma, by contrast, are in the process of getting all court dockets online to create a statewide tracking system, at no cost to taxpayers. The information allows the public to track the courts' progress on cases in the system.

Even at the county court level, individuals can read the courts' dockets on all cases, including criminal cases, including personal information the courts collect on the defendants. (A recent search on the site produced the home address and phone number of a defendant charged with lewd acts with a child, though the victim was not identified.)

The Web site says that Oklahoma 'has one of the largest initiatives in the nation for providing court docket information on the Internet. Unlike most states, Oklahoma is striving to complete a statewide case tracking system and make the information within that system available on a real time basis via the Internet.'

Information from the eight largest counties and all the appellate courts in Oklahoma is currently online, which covers the areas in which 70 percent of the state's population lives.

The state's comprehensive electronic record system allowed Morlan, the publisher in Tulsa, to get his start with posting verdicts online in 1996. As for whether publishing criminal records on the Internet has led to trouble in Oklahoma, Morlan said, 'Not to my knowledge.'

'There isn't any justification for not providing it,' he said. 'A well-informed public needs to have good information.'

Further, easier accessibility to court records could lead to better news coverage from all quarters.

'It would be a great asset for a reporter to sit at a computer at his or her desk and access a file rather than go down to a courthouse and be at the mercy of a clerk,' said Terry Francke, general counsel for the California First Amendment Coalition .

Without question, because of the cumbersome process of examining case files at the courthouse, court coverage is often restricted to cases that have been pushed by police, prosecutors and publicity-seeking litigators.

'The press attention to the court is not really a steady or even a responsible one,' Francke said. 'Part of the reason needs to be laid at the court's door.'

Of course, the recent rules issued for posting of electronic records in California and federal courts may not be permanent. The federal recommendations called for a review in two years of the issue of whether to place criminal records online.

In her address upon presenting the report to the California Judicial Council on Dec. 18, Justice Joanne C. Pirrilli, who led the council's technology committee, said that 'the proposed rules are not seen as the final word on electronic access to court records . . . The rules before you should be seen as California?s next step in fostering an appropriate joinder of technology and case management responsibilities.'

Lynn Holton, spokeswoman for the California council, said that 'there was some recognition among council members that there was room for change in the future.'

Even so, the notion of formal review makes some press advocates squeamish.

'I think we'd like to see the issue let alone,' said Daugherty of the Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press. 'Whenever it's raised, there's a committee set up to determine what should be closed.'