LII Announce

Some of our best work is done by law students — take a look at LIIBULLETIN, for example, or the recent flood of definitions in our WEX legal encyclopedia.  We know these folks — and we recognize how lousy the current legal employment market is.  And that gets us thinking about how our friends and collaborators might use their online presence (at the LII and elsewhere) to help them find work.

Too often, we think, social media are presented as liabilities and not assets.  All sorts of people will tell you that don’t want potential employers to see pictures of that night when you had all those jello shots and…. well, never mind.   But you do want employers to see professional work that you’ve done — especially examples of careful, thoughtful writing, and other things that show the same skill set you’ll be using in practice.

Enter LII friend Laura Bergus and her collaborators at Legal Geekery (and others, like Rex Gradeless at  Social Media Law Student).  They’re trying to show their colleagues just what can be done with a little careful attention to things like blogs, LinkedIn, and Facebook.    We agree that these are all things that can be used to build a solid professional reputation online, and we’d suggest that you check out Laura’s tips on how to best make use of them.   It’s part of a larger site on Social Media Best Practices for law schools — well worth a look if you’ve got anything at all to do with a law school.

The LII will soon be expanding its opportunities for students to work with us, as part of a cooperative project with our friends over at CALI.  We still have some tech to put in place, but we’re hoping to have it done in time to take advantage of excess capacity (read: cabin fever) during the winter holiday.  We’ll say more about it here when we have specifics.

Our weekly crawl of news sources turned up something pretty unusual today: the use of the LII as a cited source for the law in Congressional testimony.  The cite shows up in testimony before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (and more specifically, in the Subcommittee charged with emergency management), in a segment entitled “Lessons from Katrina”.  It’s a little hard to tell whether the speaker is citing the Americans with Disability Act or a Supreme Court Case interpreting it… but we have both, and it’s nice to know that we have Hill staffers in the audience.

Tom Bruce is planning a trip to San Francisco and Silicon Valley in early November.  He’ll be giving a talk on November 3, though he claims  it will be more conversation than lecture.  He wants to discuss how the LII — and other open-access law sites — are used by their viewers.  Since the audience for the talk is expected to be lawyer-centric, he’ll focus on what clients are doing with the information they find on sites like the LII. Are clients engaging lawyers in the same way that patients engage doctors after reading WebMD and other medical sites?

Surprisingly, that’s something we know very little about — and would like to know much more.  You can help by attending the talk, or simply sending Tom your thoughts on the matter at tom () bruce (at) cornell () edu.  We’re in the early stages of investigation with this, and any information you can offer would be most helpful.  The event is sponsored by the Cornell Law School Alumni Association, and you can sign up here.

Last week,  the Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff,  Joe Arpaio, claimed authority to make street arrests of illegal immigrants under a Federal law that doesn’t exist.  He claimed that we were the source of this information.  We weren’t.  Please read what we have to say about it here.

It’s rare that we get such a dramatic demonstration of the value of open access to law and of services such as ours.  It presents a unique opportunity for us to demonstrate our impact.  Please help by passing this along to others.

Over in VoxPopuLII, Viktor Mayer-Schonberger has some ideas about peer production, open source, and the legal information sphere that are worth a look. He’s an old friend of the LII, and we are assisting him on a project involving the analysis of citations in Supreme Court opinions.

Viktor is the author of the just-released  “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in a Digital Age“.  Unfortunately, we can’t seem to find the video archive of the talk he gave at Cornell a couple of years ago, in which he outlined the thesis of the book.  Since that thesis consists, in part, of the idea that the Internet retains far too much, we imagine that he is pleased about this — even though it was an excellent talk.

It’s not in the same league as Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearances — we have always particularly liked the man with the double bass in Strangers on a Train — but the LII’s version of 18 USC 871 shows up at about 2:22 into this clip from CNN (annoyingly, WordPress does not allow us to embed it without adding a plugin, so you’ll just have to click the clicky thing). LII programmers Brian Hughes and Dave Shetland are eagerly awaiting Emmy nominations for their supporting roles.

If you’ve been paying close attention to WEX — our collaboratively-constructed legal encyclopedia and dictionary — you’ve noticed a few interesting things over the last couple of weeks.

• We’ve changed over to a new format that incorporates a tabbed layout.  That makes more room for our authors and collaborators to add more, better, and different information to the collection (take a look at the “in other words” tab for the definition of “Chevron deference” to get an idea of where we’re headed.   Expect more tabs, representing new kinds of information, soon.  Right now, it all looks a little empty — but we hope you’ll help us change that.
• We’re adding a lot of definitions. Now that our team of dedicated Wexers has hit its stride, there will soon be hundreds more terms in the dictionary.  We have chosen to focus on basic terms that will serve as building blocks for future authors, which we hope will make Wex-authoring job much easier.
• Finally, we’ve added sponsorship slots — places where people who support us can make themselves known to our audience.

We think sponsorship offers good value to individuals and businesses who want to reach out to those who seek legal information:

• People who come to the LII identify themselves, by definition, as people with a particular need for legal information or services.
• It’s a diverse audience where you might find clients for a legal-services business, firms interested in services for the legal profession, or consumers with an identifiable interest in other kinds of products (we are waiting eagerly for the day when a company that sells steel-toed shoes will sponsor our section on workplace-safety laws).
• It’s a big audience, too: about 100,000 unique visitors to the site each day, brought there for the most part by our very high search-engine rankings for popular law subjects.
• Pricing is extremely reasonable.

Best of all, LII sponsorships offer an opportunity to do well by doing good.  Every dollar that comes to us goes to support and improve our current collections, and to add new material to the site.  We think that sponsorships will help you, even as they help us make the LII bigger and better.

Information on sponsorships is here.  We hope you’ll consider it carefully, and let us know what you think.

Theater people get reviewed in the pages of big-city newspapers and national magazines; legal-information wranglers have to go further afield.  In our case, pretty far afield indeed:  Addendum 2 of Attachment 1 of OPR09000754 , the RFP for a new front-end to the United States Code as it is published by the Law Revision Counsel of the House of Representatives (the RFP closed last week, and the LII was not a bidder… but we do have some plans for a new presentation of the US Code, and it’s the second major project in the queue right now, so… in a few months, maybe?).

Addendum 2 says, in effect, “if you want to know how to build an updating feature based on the Classification Tables,  or incorporate the Notes, take a look at what the LII did”.  Or, in this case, what Dave Shetland did — he’s the guy with primary responsibility for the LII’s US Code as well as for most of our work in XML modelling over the last several years.

Take a bow, Dave.

Court-records privacy maven Peter Winn talks about Bentham and privacy in VoxPopuLII.  A video of a talk on court records that Peter gave at Cornell a few years ago is here.

As we do twice each year, we’re asking for your help in keeping this free service free. This year, we’ve gone to an abbreviated June fundraising campaign (two weeks instead of a full month) and a much less obtrusive ask on each page of the site (a dynamic header as opposed to popups). It’s low-key, but no less important: we count on you to help.

If you’re so inclined, you can donate here. We hope you will.