As long as it is not called a Thesaurus Legum, I am fine with it.
This would be an excellent resource, is technically achievable, and would further the worthwhile (in my judgment) goal of undoing the guild-like control over legal knowledge once held by the lawyers.
I'm happy to see you agree, but---to play devil's advocate against my own belief/desire---consider the following Mad Lib:
An online reference crosslinking lay and expert knowledge would be an excellent resource, is technically achievable, and would further the worthwhile (in my judgment) goal of undoing the guild-like control over [PROFESSION (adj.)] knowledge once held by the [SAME PROFESSION (pl. n.)].
Are there professions about which this doesn't fit? For example, is WebMD satisfactory for medicine? More to the point, this doesn't really exist for computer science, the first field you'd expect to have it. What do you (and others) think the barriers are? Unwilling/absent expert users? Lack of incentives?
I think the practical barriers are very high, as there would be no commercial incentive for someone to devote the enormous amounts of time it would take to do this for any field.
In law, there is also the huge problem of licensing barriers that prevent lawyers from practicing outside of specific jurisdictions in which they are authorized. This heavily tends to balkanize the field and also puts up high barriers to entry and to the sharing of knowledge and expertise.
Specific services like Lexis and Westlaw are given commercial incentives to organize legal data (case law, statutory law, etc.) and put out high-priced, proprietary search services that give subscribers access to many key legal authorities. Since they do this based on very lucrative contracts, I doubt that we will see any opening up of this information for free or easy access.
As a practical matter, the barriers will be around for a long time to come.
Unlicensed fields, in contrast, face only the practical barriers, but these are huge. Over a lengthy period of time, though, these will gradually lessen, as more and more significant information is brought into public accessibility via the web - at some point, it might become practical to start and sustain a project - maybe through volunteer efforts ala wikis or open source - that begins to realize such a vision. But it is a long way off.
This would be an excellent resource, is technically achievable, and would further the worthwhile (in my judgment) goal of undoing the guild-like control over legal knowledge once held by the lawyers.