LII Announce

LII Director Tom Bruce gave a short talk yesterday as part of a roundtable at iConference 2010, a gathering of next-generation librarians and information professionals held at the University of Illinois.  On the panel with him were James Jacobs of Free Government Information, ShinJoung Yeo of Radical Reference, Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation, and Cindy Etkin from the USGPO depository library program.  Under discussion were policy issues and historical conflicts involving government institutions and open access to government documents.    A writeup of Tom’s last trip to Champaign-Urbana is here (at p. 69).

We’re at Day 2 of the Princeton Center for Information Technology and Policy Open Government Workshop.  Day 1 was interesting and highly informative, with presentations from longtime LII friends at the Sunlight Foundation, from the US GPO, the Law Library of Congress, and a variety of other presenters.  Particular treats included a keynote speech by Anil Dash, and a chance to catch up with former LII associate Ross Housewright, who now works at the Ithaka S+R higher-education consultancy and was co-author of an influential report on the Federal Depository Library System and its place in a 21st century democracy.

Today, LII Director Tom Bruce will be part of a law.gov panel with legal-information activist Carl Malamud, VoxPop author and LII friend John Joergensen, and Steve Schultze of PACER-activism and RECAP fame.  You can follow the action in Twitter at #pogw .

Those of you who don’t know the work of the CITP should take a look at the “Government Data and the Invisible Hand” paper by Robinson, Felten et al.

Google and others provide us with tools that tell us a lot about those who use and value our materials — especially bloggers.  And from time to time we salute some of those folks here.  But such net-based tools don’t find their way to some of the places that LII resources do — like college classrooms, textbooks, trade magazines, continuing legal education courses, and countless term papers every year.  For example, our LIIBULLETIN analyses of upcoming Supreme Court decisions can be found each month in the Federal Lawyer, the magazine of the Federal Bar Association, which is also distributed to all Federal judges and members of Congress.  But we are much more often found in class handouts that discuss Supreme Court cases, educational materials for lawyers who are keeping up their professional skills via continuing education, and textbooks in the US and abroad.  Our favorites over the years have included books for fledgling writers, the Investigator’s Guide for the GAO Office of Special Investigations,  and (just today) a work on aviation management — and a search of Google Books shows the LII mentioned in more than 700 works.   

Today in VoxPop Sarah Rhodes of the Georgetown Law Library talks about preservation of digital materials, and the Chesapeake Project.  The Chesapeake Project is  a cooperative effort to archive primary legal materials in Maryland and Virginia, and is part of the larger Legal Information Preservation Alliance.

VoxPopuLII also has a new editor-in-chief, Robert Richards.  Widely known for his prolific tweets as @richards1000, Rob is an avid observer of the legal informatics scene and the maintainer of the Legal Informatics Blog and the incredibly comprehensive and useful (and growing) Legal Informatics Resources List.  So far as we know, Rob reads everything, and digests all of it (in both senses of the word). Also, it appears that he never sleeps.  These, we think, are important professional qualifications, and we’re delighted to have him on board.  Judith Pratt, a professional writer, editor, and playwright,  will continue as VoxPop’s editor and prose stylist.

We received a mysteriously weighty box via UPS yesterday.  In it, we found 100 copies of the 2009 IRS Tax Products DVD (First Release).  The IRS distributes this DVD to its regional offices, third partytax-assistance operations, and corporations that help out their employees by distributing tax forms and materials internally.  They distribute thousands of them — and every one contains the LII’s version of 26 USC, the Internal Revenue Code.  This is the third year that the IRS has made use of our version of the Code, and we’re very, very pleased.  Thanks, tax guys!

For reasons that are a mystery to us, our news aggregator periodically kicks out a blog post from very far back in time.  Yesterday it resurrected a post from the “Keep Me In Suspense” blog, a resource site for writers of mystery fiction.  Turns out they just love the LII.  And we love people who find unusual uses for us.  Here’s what they said:

The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University (http://www.law.cornell.edu) is an EXCELLENT source of background material on legal issues. This page: http://topics.law.cornell.edu/wex/all leads to overview articles on a host of legal issues. Have questions about child support? Start there. How about probate and wills? You guessed it – go there first. Many of the initial questions I’m asked could be answered if the person searched for an article here first. The general page breaks the law into federal and state issues and gives a helpful overview. I STRONGLY encourage you to start your legal research here.

How cool is that? We know that we’ve received mentions in at least one published mystery novel, and now we’re looking forward to others. Thanks, guys.

Around here, the biggest mystery is how we manage to keep this operation funded. If you haven’t yet made a tax-deductible contribution to the LII this year, we’d ask that you do so now. Your C-note would be greatly appreciated.

[NB: the observant among you will find our Mystery Reason for selecting the particular Hardy Boys illustration we did. If you were producing an audio book, it’s very odd that you would select as the reader a man whose reputation (and MacArthur genius grant) was based on his work as a silent clown….]

Over in VoxPopuLII, our Catalonian collaborator Joan-Josep Vallbe (known to one and all as “Pep”) talks about the role of organizational management and KM systems in judicial administration.  He argues for the use of techniques that capture and model knowledge from non-documentary sources as helpful to judicial process, and we’d agree — in fact, we’d extend the idea to processes such as the drafting of regulations and the preparation of guidance and compliance documents.

From time to time, we like to give some recognition to projects that make use of our materials.  This month, we salute the StandDown Texas Project and its director, Steve Hall.  In its own words:

The StandDown Texas Project was organized in 2000 to advocate a moratorium on executions and a state-sponsored review of Texas’ application of the death penalty. To stand down is to go off duty temporarily, especially to review safety procedures.

The site advocates a moratorium on capital punishment in Texas, and provides news and commentary about capital cases throughout the US.  Good work, Steve — and thanks for the links.

Somehow, there was a two-week gap between our postings on Law via the Internet Day 1, and this posting about Day 2.  But we lacked time to post about Day 2 before leaving Durban for a week and a half in places (including the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve) that lack reliable access to the Internet.

Details of the second day are reported in great detail by Christine Kirchberger in her excellent blog.  Highlights included a talk by Graham Greenleaf of AustLII on sustainability strategies for LIIs, a presentation by Justice O’Regan of the SA Constitutional Court, and a dinner speech by the LII’s co-founder and co-director emeritus Peter Martin about the 40-year history of important developments in online access to law.  We were most taken with Justice O’Regan’s remark that the privacy of public records is the responsibility of courts that must act with full knowledge that judicial opinions will be indexed by Google.

All in all a most successful conference, with much to offer on policy and technology.  It should be a great source of pride to its hosts at SAFLII.

LII co-founders Tom Bruce and Peter Martin are in Durban, South Africa, attending the tenth Law Via The Internet Conference. It’s an exhilarating and humbling experience, seeing what so many are doing to make law available and accessible around the world.  It’s especially interesting to see those who have no investment in old ways of doing things create new and innovative solutions — we were particularly taken with Kenya Law Reports’ Bench Research Hotline , a service that provides Kenyan judicial officers with research services via a call center.  It’s a creative way of strengthening judicial infrastructure.  Geekier presentations included Fabio Vitali’s very useful presentation of the Akoma Ntoso legal-XML framework and a report on the emerging URN:Lex standard for uniquely identifying legal documents on the Internet, to which LII Director Tom Bruce is a contributor.

There’s a lot more to report (and we will, when things calm down a bit– last night, we were preoccupied with finding a turkey dinner in South Africa on Thanksgiving Day).  For legal information news junkies, we recommend VoxPopuLII author Christine Kirchberger’s detailed narrative of the first day’s doings.  If you want to follow along, the conference is tweeted as hashtag #LVI2009.