b-screeds

I have a couple of hobbies. Actually (as those close to me would tell you) I have an endless series of momentary obsessions. But a few have met the chronological challenge and persisted, so they’re hobbies. For one, I deal in antique woodworking tools. I also ride around on a bike. It’s a nice thing to do in Ithaca during the lighter months. Saturday, I was intent on both — a fellow up near Syracuse wanted to buy some planes and a set of auger bits, and I wanted to take a bike ride around Cazenovia, which is a pretty area, and fairly flat for this neck of the woods.

My tool customer was a guy named Sean Murphy, who works for (probably owns) a company called CWR Manufacturing in Syracuse. They make cold-formed parts for, well, pretty much anything. He mentioned automobiles, small electric appliances, casement windows, and electric motors among many other things. He is just getting into woodworking — and built his own dust collection system, whose cyclone chamber he welded up with a MIG welder, from plans he found on the Web. I am guessing he is a very good craftsman.

More to the point, he’s a happy, and habitual, LII user.

Sean uses us for information about employment law, intellectual property law, and as he said “the sort of thing that a guy in manufacturing needs to know to run a business”. I noticed that he didn’t blanch when I referred to the “CFR”. And he told me about how he had heard a lecture on intellectual property in a course he was taking (working toward an MBA), and started to wonder how he could use that to protect his company’s work product — none of which is patentable. As a result, he’s introduced the use of the non-disclosure agreement to his industry.

The large companies he deals with often do a kind of technology transfer — Sean’s crew is hired to produce a new part using cold-forming technology, and the company that hires them tries to learn as much as possible about what goes into the design and manufacture of the part. CWR does that for a couple of years, and then the client figures out how to use his own equipment and engineers to replicate the know-how that Sean’s crew has provided in designing and making the new part. Or the client passes the design and the knowledge on to another supplier who will make the part more cheaply, maybe offshore, leaving CWR behind. Not so good, that. After hearing the lecture, Sean consulted with the lawyer who had been brought in to give it — and as a result, now makes signing of an NDA a standard part of his arrangement with new customers. Big deal, sez you — everyone in the software industry signs five NDAs before lunch. That’s right — and now everyone in manufacturing will too, and the situation for small shops like Sean’s will improve as a result, because the client will no longer be able to walk away with CWR’s real work product: the know-how involved in re-engineering the part for cold-forming manufacture.

I get two very warm and fuzzy things from this: first, another anecdote to add to the many that tell us that the audience for legal information goes way, way beyond lawyers, and second, an indication that maybe what Richard Susskind said about a more transparent legal information regime increasing, rather than decreasing, the need for legal services is proving itself. If — as we’ve long thought here — more accessible legal information means that people are less apprehensive about approaching the legal system (or feel better prepared when they do), then more people like Sean will do so. And the result will be an increase in the use of legal services in a preventive way. Nothing new about that, of course — but I’d like to think the numbers are going up as legal information gets more and more available.

These days, if you say something is “like a legal version of WebMD” , people are inclined to think in terms of consumer law, bankruptcy, divorce. But it’s also about small business, entrepreneurship, and a healthy economy. That is, if you’re like Sean.

And he’s a good businessman — I know because he wouldn’t pay my ridiculous prices for a #8 jointer plane and a set of auger bits.

Along with LII Editorial Boss Sara Frug, I spent yesterday morning with the folks at the Sunlight Foundation — an organization with a compelling mission and a growing set of activities that reflect it. Founded with the idea of using Web 2.0 techniques to bring transparency to Congress, Sunlight is now becoming a rallying point for a diverse community of folks who share the idea of making government better by making the information it generates and consumes more accessible.

That’s an idea we find really attractive. We’ve been amazed — shocked, really — at how little access government has to its own work product (never mind the public). We recently learned that some branches of the Federal courts limit access to the commercial legal information services based on seniority; we understand that the same is true of Federal agencies, where junior people don’t have access to Lexis and Westlaw [note to legal research teachers: “junior” would pretty much describe our recent graduates, wouldn’t it? Think we should be teaching them more about free online sources? ] Our e-mail is chock-full of questions and testimonials from government attorneys who rely on our edition of the US Code and our Federal rules collections. Our most successful projects over the last fifteen years have involved improving or re-mixing the presentation of Federal data to make it more easily used and understood by a broad audience.

So our question for John Wonderlich at Sunlight was “how can we help?”.

Turns out there are a number of ways. We have a lot of expertise in the arcana of Federal data online, experience with data standards, software tools that have remained in-house because we didn’t think anyone else had any use for them, and so on. There are a lot of ways that the LII can and will participate in the growing community of technologists who want to “hack government”. One of the best ways we thought of involves some help from you… particularly if you are a law librarian, legal scholar, or anyone else with experience working with government documents.

We know from experience that some online documents are especially useful to people building new services on top of government information. Here are some examples of these “linchpin” documents:

• The US Code classification tables, which describe pending codification of public laws
• The Table of Popular Names, which ties the names used by journalists, the public, and politicians to refer to legislation to the sections of the US Code where it ends up
• The Parallel Table of Authorities, which relates sections of the Code of Federal Regulations to the statutes that enable them
  
• The Unified Regulatory Agenda, which tells the public what agencies will be regulating in the near future
• The US Government Manual, which describes the organization of the government.

These are documents that provide important information about the context and structure of government, or that link isolated pools of legal information together. For example, the classification tables form the basis of our US Code updating features; we parse them into a database that is then used to power both clickable update links and RSS feeds. As published by the government, they are difficult to use; they would be near the top of our list of documents the government should be publishing in easily processed XML form. Put another way, they are the documents that are most useful in building online services that make legal information more transparent. They would be a good focus for our efforts here at the LII, for the growing community of government-transparency hackers, and for lobbying of (and cooperation with) the GPO’s FDSys effort.

We think that it should be possible to build a list of (let’s say) 100 such documents — the Big Docs that those who develop these kinds of services would most like to see placed online in a form that is both easily processed by machines (ie. XML) and continuously updated by the official body that creates them. What would your suggestions be? Put ‘em in the comments, please.

[editorial note: this week’s post is a bit later than usual because of my stay at the 2008 CALI conference, about which more next time. The posting schedule will no doubt continue to be spotty throughout the summer — I’m travelling and talking more than usual — Tb.]

This is probably not the time for it, but honesty compels me: very few people can turn off a car radio as fast as I can when an NPR fundraiser is in progress. I’ve sent them money, and two cars. But my local NPR outlet manages to combine self-righteous patronizing with mind-numbing repetition in a way that causes me to tune out very, very quickly. I hasten to say that they’re far, far below average in this respect. I know of no other NPR station that would call the Triple Cities the “Treble Cities”, or thank its donors on-air in a tone usually used to give positive reinforcement to a slightly retarded Labrador retriever who has just managed “roll over” for the first time. These shenanigans are a strong deterrent for somebody who has to make the case — to a broad swath of the public — that our work at the LII deserves support.

It does.

That “broad swath” is one reason. We put law — well organized and well explained — in front of a lot of people. We had close to a million and a half unique visitors last month, from over 200 countries — that’s about 20 million page views, maybe slightly more. Some of those visitors are lawyers, many are private citizens, and the majority of them are making use of law in some professional way. Those that are not lawyers are doing risk management — figuring out whether the advice of a lawyer is good, checking the implications of particular courses of action, trying to figure out what they’re expected to do. Among those who are lawyers, a large number serve the public, either as government officials or as workers for non-profits and public service organizations of all kinds. Our LIIBULLETIN subscription list is fascinatingly democratic — it includes schoolteachers, professors, insurance guys, cops, the members of the Supreme Court practice group at Akin, Gump — and many, many others.

I like to avoid platitudes when I can. In a place where the justice system has no access to the precedents on which it is supposedly built, the argument for open access to law is all too obviously an argument for a fundamental human right. But, even (or perhaps especially) in developing countries, it is also a practical argument about how difficult it is for people to discover the legal framework for starting a business, buying and selling things, hiring and firing, and so on. No matter where or who you are, finding out what you’re expected to do can be expensive and troublesome. One compelling reason for open access to law is that it should be neither of those things. People in all sorts of places, for widely different reasons, have a right to legal information and practical, powerful reasons to use it to make their situation better.

These are things we’ve said before. They’re compelling and true. But they don’t really show the LII as the uniquely valuable activity that it is. That’s a much more difficult case to make. It lacks the overtly emotional grab-points that cause people to give reflexively, and that fundraisers love. Let’s try something a little more thoughtful instead. It goes like this:

Increasing numbers of people and institutions can publish law, many people and institutions already do, and soon many more will. Some of them are late to a party they should have joined long ago — particularly those courts that are only now offering open access to their decisions. But there they are nonetheless. Their efforts at self-publication are being substantially assisted by other open-access providers like AltLaw and public.resource.org. We applaud these guys, and we help them when we can. We’re also different from them in one important respect: we’re looking ahead to what will need to emerge once everyone is publishing what they should. Within cramped resource constraints, we’re working to figure out what a seamless, highly usable, multinational legal information commons would look like and how it might be built from the isolated, individual collections that now exist. We’re constantly thinking about how to integrate caselaw, statutes, regulations, and explanatory material in ways that make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

We like synergy because we’re made of it. The LII is unique in its location: affiliated with a graduate law program, inside a research university where, among many other things, you can find many of the digital librarians who did the fundamental architectural work on the emerging global structure that supports electronic publishing, world-class researchers in language technologies, and — significantly — very smart students who don’t hesitate to jump the boundaries between these disciplines. In the fifteen years that we have reliably provided public access to legal information, we have made great use of the efforts and insights of a wide variety of people in creating pathbreaking, innovative services and techniques now used by many.

As time has gone on, we have found this harder and harder to do. Most of you know that we do this with very few people: just six of us for three quarters of a million web pages. That staff is adequate to maintain and improve what we’re doing now — but we have little time free to do what we do best, which is to conceive and develop next-generation services. That is so for two reasons. Our maintenance responsibilities grow with each new database and service. And, after 15 years of Web development, innovation has become an expensive effort demanding time and talent in increasing amounts. In 1992, my co-founder Peter Martin could spend a snowy afternoon marking up the text of Two Pesos v. Taco Cabana in a new thing called HTML and produce something the world had never seen before — the first Web-published judicial opinion. Projects with comparable impact now take teams of people working for months. We have many more such projects on our list than we can possibly do. We would like to narrow the gap between our reach and our grasp, and with your help, we will. While we’re not (yet) announcing anything as complicated or ponderous as a traditional fundraising “campaign”, we would like to be raising an amount equal to one dollar each year for every repeat visitor we had to the site last month.

If you’ve taken the trouble to read this much of this blog post — cheerfully self-serving as it is — then I’m going to assume that you’re fairly committed to us and our cause. I’d like to impose on you by asking you to do more — not an increased dollar contribution, but something much harder. Please help us persuade others to join you in supporting the LII. Many of our supporters are lone individuals among many in an organization who know and value what we do. We need volunteer “recruiters” to bring others into the fold, and you can help. Just ask somebody you know who uses the service whether they’ve thought about how it’s done, who does it, and whether they think those LII folks drive fancy cars. (I don’t, personally, and you already know what I do with the old ones).

Direct support by our users is, for us, the best kind of support. It is free of partisanship and of imposed research agendas. It is a vote for what we are, and what we might become, and not what somebody else wants us to be. We need more of those who use the service to support us — and we need those of you who already make donations to know how very much all of us here value them.

Thanks again, from all six of us. We look forward to hearing from more people like you.

Hanging out at the dg.o digital government conference this week has got me thinking about the relationship between a legal-information infrastructure-builder like the LII and digital government projects generally. The LII moved into e-government work quite easily. That happened because both are concerned with increasing public access to legal process, which is often the same problem as increasing access to government process. More important, perhaps, was that the move reinforced the LII’s longstanding role as a convenor of conversations between information scientists and legal specialists. Much of my role in the project has been translating between the two. It’s not as simple as one-speaks-math-and-the-other-speaks-administrative-procedure. The two academic cultures are very different in the way they go about things, for one thing. But one of the great benefits of the LII’s location in a great research university is that we can bring world-class experts together around interesting problems, and provide real solutions to the public.One obvious relationship between digital government and legal information is simply that the LII is a reference library for all manner of digital-government activities. You can see this in our link-census, if you look for government sites that link to the LII. Many of them are using us to provide background information for web pages that support citizen interaction with government. And I have long believed that citizen interaction can be a valuable justification for a legal-information service in places that are inclined to resist exposure of the legal system. The clear benefits of increased efficiency and effectiveness in government interaction with citizens could potentially be seen as outweighing the risks of transparency.

Digital-government research — especially the part of it that involves the computational processing of regulations or other legal text — offers valuable techniques for us. The same advanced language technologies that can be used to automatically categorize and structure responses in notice-and-comment rulemaking can help us organize and navigate judicial opinions. The algorithm that looks promising for extracting metadata from SEC filings can do the same thing with Circuit Court opinions, and so on. So you can get a lot of ideas for techniques and services at a conference like this. And we have our own research and techniques to offer too. Most important, we have a very deep well of experience with non-lawyer professionals who are trying to find out about the law.

Which brings me to the first of two slightly deeper observations. Non-lawyers trying to find and understand the law face two barriers that look a lot like the barriers for ordinary citizens who try to participate in e-government. Neither has anything to do with barriers to Internet access per se, or with the usual run of “digital divide” issues. The first is that they have to somehow figure out how to map a set of terms or nouns found in a description of their problem or interest against a set of more formal concepts that map things in the way that legal or governmental agencies understand the world to be. At the LII we’ve frequently joked that we’re trying to build systems that will find the article labelled “nuisance” when the user submits “barking dog” to the search engine. This is not exactly a new idea; Dan Dabney of West Group was making the point about differences in search style several years ago, though unfortunately none of his remarks were ever published. Similar problems apply when ordinary citizens try to figure out, say, regulations put forward by a particular agency. They have their own way of talking about things.

And of organizing and doing things, too. The second shared barrier or threshold has to do with the naive user’s lack of understanding of how the government, or the legal system, is organized. The farmer who grows peaches is not necessarily going to know which agency regulates their importation or distribution, just as he is unlikely to have much understanding of jurisdiction or civil procedure when starting to pursue a purely legal question. So the question of how we get inexperienced users past barriers rooted in a lack of structural or procedural understanding is one that is shared between these two areas of investigation. And it’s an important one to solve. Public education is part of the answer, as are improved search and navigation systems, as well as tutorial systems that help users frame questions.

By the way, there are 17 separate Federal agencies whose activities touch the problem of food safety. And literally hundreds of regulations that apply to the use of dry-cleaning chemicals — something of vital concern to 85,000 small businesses in the United States, most of which are family owned. That’s a lot of help to try to give people.

I said there were two deeper observations, though perhaps this second one is more intuition than anything else. Ideas about citizen participation in the rulemaking process tend to fall somewhere on a spectrum defined at the outside by two equally impractical views. At one end, we find extreme direct-democracy advocates who believe that any attempt to channel or structure citizen input into governmental process either is now or could become a form of censorship. At the other end, some within agencies believe that increased access to process (via, say, e-mailed submissions) inevitably devolves into spam, anarchy or both. Each can point with some validity toward the excesses of the other. Both are wrong. Completely unstructured, unmoderated input is too confusing and noisy to be of much real use. Anybody who is sufficiently socialized to know that people take turns talking in face-to-face conversations has absorbed that lesson. At the same time, narrowly channeling and control of input from a set of stakeholders limited to those government already knows about is equally problematic; it misses a lot. So a better question is where and how to build reasonable structures for conversation. Likely, it’s somewhere in the middle. And many of the techniques that we create to do that will be equally useful for structuring conversations about what other kinds of law should be.

So there are lots of reasons for the open-access-to-law community and e-government researchers to be talking, and here in Montreal it’s a good discussion. As usual, the LII staff is dreading my return, because I’ll be chock full of ideas that someone will then have to build…..

Privacy is the single most difficult issue confronting legal-information providers today. There is no resolution of competing concerns that will satisfy everyone. There is tension between the belief that it is important for the business of the legal system to take place in public view, on the one hand, and the need for individual privacy on the other. That’s at the center. On the edges you’ll find a collection of other agendas that complicate things no end; and even at the center, what we are talking about is a little more complicated than it first appears.

That “need for individual privacy” is not one thing; it’s a bundle. There are crimes that inappropriately shame the victim, such as rape, or where danger to the victim still exists should their identity or location become known. There are crimes where publicity serves to inappropriately extend the punishment of a perpetrator. There are dramatic circumstances in which it is dangerous to be known as witness or whistleblower, and many more less-dramatic settings in which the public nature of proceedings discourages the exercise of rights. And above all there is the threat of identity theft, which is now the main reason for public concern about public-records privacy in general.

And then there’s the question: “privacy in what?”. Not everything is a judicial opinion; courts generate a lot of other material that goes into the public record. Records of plea agreements are a good example of this. In January, the LII hosted a session with Peter Winn of the US Attorney’s Office in Seattle that talked about, among other things, the reaction to whosarat.com — a web site that exposes informants in criminal cases (Peter also had a lot of good things to say about policy in this area, and the video of the session is well worth viewing). In a recent paper, my colleague and co-founder Peter Martin discusses the aftermarket for court-created information among data-mining services — a less dramatic story, perhaps, but one that might tell of greater harm in the long run.

Many causes of harm are beyond the reach of policy, and a practical policy would account for that — very likely with an educational component involving judges and court administrators. These days, there is a lot of “collateral damage” — exposure of personal information that is unnecessary to the business at hand. This includes myopic court-administration practices like the recycling of personal ID numbers into document or case identifiers. In the texts of the opinions themselves, we often find unnecessary personal information about parties or (worse) others involved in the case. I’ve seen many instances where the violation of privacy has occurred in what amount to dicta, and involves someone who is not a party to the case and is not even particularly important to its story, much less its conclusion. These careless, inadvertent exposures will be the hardest to eradicate in the long run. And of course the “back file” of decisions written before widespread electronic distribution was even dreamt of is potentially expensive and difficult to redact.

Public legal-information providers are far from unanimous in their views on this subject, as recent discussion in an online group shows. The LII is a little idiosyncratic in this respect. First, we run into this much less frequently than many providers do, simply because we deal in the opinions of high-level appellate courts where problems are less likely to occur (by contrast with, say, the local Family Court). Second, we’ve taken an avowedly hard-line approach. We believe that the courts (Federal courts, in particular) have a strong obligation to deal with the issue. We won’t shield them from that. As a result, we never withdraw or suppress information that the court has made public. Our sympathies are very much with the victims — but the best route to relief for many is unrelenting pressure on courts to change their policies.

Not all courts are indifferent to these issues. Many, many state courts are making real progress, and some policies are masterful in the way they balance competing concerns. You can find many of them at sites operated by groups like the National Center for State Courts and EPIC. It’s instructive to see who was involved in discussion of the policies — take a look at the New York State Commission’s roster. You’ll find a reporter, the executive director of a domestic-violence shelter, an insurer, a publisher, a county clerk, and a Reporter of Decisions, among others.

The policies are best where the process has been open and representative. The worst policy, in the long run, is what we seem to be getting by default in some jurisdictions. If courts take the attitude that they simply decide cases, and will not concern themselves with the mechanics of promulgation, then privacy policy will be determined by publisher-vigilantes. This is unhealthy. However high their aspirations, or benign their actions, publishers represent no-one but themselves. It is not their business to determine what the de facto policy of the courts should be. Anything as difficult as balancing the fundamental principle of open court with the individual right to privacy should be decided in the open, with vigorous public involvement.

Long ago, in a universe far, far away, David Mamet told me about his theory of jokeless punchlines. Some punchlines, he said, were so good in and of themselves that no actual buildup is required; the receiver can mentally compose the joke himself. He’s right (hell, he’s David Mamet, fer chrissakes). A few examples:

• “For a nickel, I will”
• “Your paycheck”
• “Two pounds of Metamucil and a tuba”

Normally you wouldn’t think of the US Code as a place to find punchlines like that. At least you wouldn’t unless you were a legal-information blogger desperate for a catchy opening. But consider our old friend 4 USC 1 (”Flag, stripes and stars on”), which in its most current version states:

The flag of the United States shall be thirteen horizontal stripes, alternate red and white; and the union of the flag shall be forty-eight stars, white in a blue field.

As I said, this is the most current version. There are extenuating circumstances, of course, and we’ll get to them. But this little gem is good for a small but relentless stream of letters to the LII questioning either our currency or our sanity, usually the latter. And so the first thing to notice is that it exactly fits a popular prejudice about law and lawyers — namely, that they use fancy language and tortuous logic to reach facially ridiculous conclusions. About half the letters we get — no doubt sent by the large percentage of the population that hates lawyers anyway — contain some sentiment along these lines. Just like a bunch of lawyers to get something so obvious so wrong. Don’t you guys ever update your stuff?

Well, yes, we do — whenever the House Office of the Law Revision Counsel does. Of course there’s a trick to this. Two tricks, actually. First, the missing stars can be found in the notes to 4 USC 1; they were added by executive order. This is still a little confusing given the way things are presented in the notes — only the most recent executive order (admitting Hawaii) is fully spelled out; the earlier order admitting Alaska is listed as superseded, but unless you’re paying close attention, you’ll wonder where the other star went.

Second, the one-star-per-state algorithm is given in 4 USC 2. These just confirm conventional statutory-research wisdom: always check the notes, and always check the sections adjacent to the one that seems most interesting. These are both good advice, of course — but they are advice that no member of the general public will have heard, or have had any reason to hear. And they give the lie to the idea that somehow the general public can’t do — or shouldn’t do — legal research. Just as well tie somebody to a chair and then complain that they can’t dance.

Some further observations:

• No doubt there are statutes that the public would find difficult to understand. And no doubt there are some where the unwary researcher would need to pay close attention to interpretive caselaw in order to find out what’s really going on. The number of stars on the flag falls into neither of these categories.
• It would be reasonable to ask why 4 USC 1 has never been amended to reflect current reality. Must be because 4 USC 2 is deemed to cover the case.
• This represents at least two failures of information design, and probably three. The first is the LII’s — unlike many sites, we choose to present the Notes separately from the text of the section. The second is an accident of section-ordering or of draftsmanship; why not give the algorithm first, or combine it with 4 USC 1 so that the present state of affairs (circa 1947) and the way forward (the algorithm) are stated side by side? The third is an inevitable consequence of search engines — the places people end up after clicking a search engine result link tend to be seen as the only places there are. As a web designer, it’s sometimes hard to figure out what to do about that.

Is this whole thing just a straw man? You bet it is. Anyone actually typing “number of stars on the flag” into Google would be rewarded with an article in Wikipedia that sets out the entire history of the flag and its many alternate versions. Several articles, actually. But I’ve always loved it as an example of what can go wrong with legal research, precisely because the fault is so obviously with the organization and presentation of the information rather than with any lack of knowledge on the part of the information-seeker. And that leads me to ask: how often is that the case, and what can be done about it?

Pretty often, and not a lot — at least with primary materials, and at least as we’ve thought about the problem in the past. A lot has been done with so-called “plain English” laws, but these generally reach only the words used and the typography with which they are presented. And it is usually presented as a consumer=protection matter, conceived mostly with respect to contracts and other documents created by private parties, and not legislation itself (though regulations do get a fair amount of attention). Seldom if ever is anything said about structure, availability of secondary sources, or information design. I’d be the first to admit that the latter would be very hard to spell out — but if the statutes related to pornography can be interpreted on an “I-know-it-when-I-see-it” basis, why not good information design too?

Taken together, I find all this a powerful argument for the creation of the kind of secondary materials that we make here at the LII – intended for lay persons with problems they are trying to understand, and sophisticated enough for (say) a practitioner entering an unfamiliar area. And figuring how we can connect these kinds of contextual or explanatory documents with the primary materials they explain is a matter for ongoing exploration and engineering. The Web makes it very easy to build structures that say “show me more detail on this” or “let me drill down”, and a lot harder to automate the process of providing meaningful context for the user who is puzzled by something he sees on a particular page. That’s the business of the Semantic Web, of advanced text-categorization tools, and of essay-writers and information architects — all things you can find here at the LII, on a good day.

Ouch. I’ve just been looking over the last blog post on interoperability, which has all the charm of an underfed seagull on crystal meth. Squawk, squawk, squawk. Amid all the screeching in the last post, it’s a little hard to figure out what the point was. So I’ll just say it: folks, the future does not lie in putting up huge, centralized collections of caselaw . It lies in building services that can work across many individual collections put up by lots of different people in lots of different institutional settings. Let me say that again: the future does not lie in putting up huge, centralized collections of caselaw. It lies in building services that can work across many individual collections put up by lots of different people in lots of different institutional settings. Services like site-spanning searches, comprehensive current-awareness services, and a scad of interesting mashups in which we put caselaw, statutes and regulations alongside other stuff to make new stuff.

There are some services like that. AltLaw is one; so is the Public Library of Law; so are the Legal Research Engines that the Cornell Law Library runs; and I’m sure I’m omitting many more, including some we built here at the LII more than five years ago. Most are either “framers” ( who put a wrapper around multiple sites operated by others) or “spiders” (who, like Google, crawl other sites and federate the content in interesting ways). These are fairly blunt instruments — they don’t show much in the way of law-specific metadata — and the spiders in particular are hard to maintain. And there are really very few of them. There has not been very much building of distributed services in the legal-information world.

Why is that? It’s partly because trying to build and maintain site-spanning applications in the absence of standards is insane. Source material moves around. Sites disappear and reappear. Firewalls suddenly block your robot, then just as surprisingly stop, after you’ve spent two weeks finding an e-mail address for a webmaster who is wisely concealing her identity. Robots.txt files suddenly sport new policies. The subdirectory on site X that holds the decisions for the month of December changes its name from dec2007 to december2007. The name of the judge writing the opinion gets moved from the third line after the second <H3> in the document to the fourth line. And so on. And on. And on. The whole thing is a house of cards, because there are few common practices among sites and very little consistent practice on any site. This makes it very difficult to automate things, and things that can’t be automated won’t scale. In such an unstable environment, building services that remain reliable over the long term is very difficult. And (I speak from experience here) it’s mind-numbingly annoying, because the things that (frequently) break such services are trivial and preventable and numberless and arbitrary. For a programmer, it’s like being nibbled to death by ducks.

These are not new problems. Librarians and others concerned with long-term information availability have been discussing these issues since about fourteen minutes after the first Web site appeared. Reporters of decisions and court clerks have long settled similar issues in print publication, and are beginning to do so on the Web. But much more is needed, and faster. The Web is not going away, and Web publication of legal information should not be thought of as a kind of unfunded mandate delivered as a sop to those who don’t buy the books.

Sorry, the seagull started screaming again. Persistent little bugger.

Difficulty and tedium aside, few Internet legal-information providers have been interested in building distributed services. How come? It’s partly because we’re brainwashed by centralized models that are the legacy of many years’ reliance on Westlaw and Lexis. It’s partly because law people deliberately confuse that kind of branded centralization with authority — easy to do when those who grant “official status” use it as a form of barter, chiefly with those who operate large, centralized systems. It’s partly because, up until now, pulling everything together in one big heap has been easier than creating interoperability. And it’s mostly because we haven’t been paying attention.

More than a decade ago, the digital-library community began solving this problem, systematically and effectively. They were mostly dealing with another kind of heavily cross-referenced essay: not the judicial opinion, but the scientific pre-print. Many approaches were tried; some (like Dienst, which Brian Hughes and I built into a law-journal repository system a decade ago) were glorious failures. But ultimately these folks were successful because they realized several things:

You can unbundle services from repositories. This is what Google does. It doesn’t hold everything — it just indexes it. The same thinking applies to things like current-awareness services that need input from multiple sources. You can do that without holding everything yourself. Indeed, services like large-scale search will only work if you unbundle them from repositories. Early on, there were many attempts at federating search services that failed because the whole system was held to the performance of the weakest participant. As a practical matter, scaling past 100 sites just would not work no matter what.

Services can be made a lot better if they have metadata available to them, particularly metadata about where to find the documents the service addresses. This is the basis of Google Sitemaps and the other related site-mapping standards. As an idea, it goes back to at least 1992 and Archie, the system for discovering anonymous-FTP sites. An important side effect is that participation in such schemes give the repository operator greater exposure for her information; in a way it’s a form of marketing.

Issuing metadata in a standard format makes a lot of things easier — like developing harvesting tools, services, and anything that has to process the metadata. XML is a really good vehicle for this, because it can be validated and reliably processed. This makes new services much, much cheaper to build. And, if your metadata standard can be extended by well-understood technical means, so that communities can effectively customize it — well, you get a lot of leverage in the form of standardized toolsets and the like.

Most important, all of this can take place independently of administrative structures, institutional gaps, or any other incidental barrier. It doesn’t matter who the repository operators are, or where they are, or what sort of institution they’re affiliated with. No consortium or other administrative apparatus is needed. It is up to the service provider to decide what makes a useful aggregation. And that is a very scalable idea.

Let’s hope it’s salable as well as scalable, because of course it depends on network effects for most of its value. It’s working that way in the digital-libraries world, where OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) is now a basic standard used by hundreds if not thousands of sites. Creators of legal data can do likewise. The protocol is easy to implement, and at the LII we are making it even easier by building OAI implementations that can easily be bolted onto existing case-management systems and otherwise fed from existing repositories. If you’re interested, take a look at http://oai4courts.wikispaces.com, where we’re starting to put things together (including a reference implementation you can tour, and for which we will shortly release code that all can use).

Oh, and interoperability? Well, it turns out that it takes the form of a lot of really geeky and scary-looking XML. But it could just be the best thing to happen to the free exchange of legal information since the death of Law French.

Comments, please.

Interoperability — it’s a big topic, and an important one in the evolving legal infosphere. I’ll try to make it a little more manageable by breaking it up into a series of posts that will appear over the next several weeks.

In general , the idea is that collections of online legal information should work together (and with the audience, and with other legal-information authors and providers) in a way that makes it easier to develop and use information services. Services that span collections offered by different providers, such as cross-site search and current-awareness services, are especially attractive. Interoperability is created at several levels of technical implementation, but the underlying ideas are simple: similar repositories should be transparent in the way they expose their information to the rest of the world, and if possible, they should do so in reliable, standardized ways that span a community of interest. Sometimes this involves standard-setting within the community; often, though, it’s just a series of small, sensible design decisions.

Here at the LII, our first stab at interoperability was the use of “head-compatible” URLs — the idea that a document’s address should be easily guessable by a would-be linker or author. For example, the Wild Horse Annie Act, 18 USC 47, becomes http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/47.html . Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 US 306, becomes http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct-cgi/get-us-cite?539+306 (though these days we’d probably change that “supct” to “scotus” just to be like everybody else). The idea is to make it easy for other people to link to your stuff, whether they are authoring manually or building something by automated means. Simple enough.

Interoperability is built on a series of seemingly-trivial decisions like that, decisions that favor common sense, transparency, and ease of use for those who want to build other things on top of information you’re providing. Good practice also involves a commitment to transparency and maintenance over time. We’ve changed the way we handle New York Court of Appeals decisions at least three times since 1996, when we first offered them. All our old systems of document addressing still work as well as they ever did (take a look at the two links to Wild Horse Annie in the last paragraph) . The same is true of all of our old “captive-search” URLs as well (for example, the one that will return Supreme Court decisions on employment discrimination). There, interoperability rests on a 50-line Apache server module that translates old search-engine search strings into whatever we are using now. It replaces hundreds of lines of mod_rewrite code piled up over five generations of LII search engines.

Interestingly, years of debate over “persistent document identifiers” — pURLs, DOIs, and all that stuff — have finally resulted in some recognition that the problem is not one of creating complicated, all-embracing alternative schemes for the naming of information resources. Rather, it’s a matter of consistent, transparent practices by people who run web sites. And there’s a lesson in that — no matter what technical schemes and formal standards are used to create interoperability, it ultimately rests on non-technical practices and concern for quality.

So interoperability — even the simplest kind — takes thinking and a fair bit of work. Even so, you’d think that the First Commandment of Legal Information Interoperability — “Thou shalt make thy URIs harmonious with well-known document identifiers like citations” — would be honored more often than it is. Good luck with that.

You can’t find opinions on the sites of the Circuit Courts of Appeal that way, for instance, nor can you link directly to sections of the Code of Federal Regulations in the new(ish) e-CFR collection at NARA. The reasons in each case are instructive. The Circuit Courts don’t do it at least in part because print citation information — unfortunately still the best-known (and usually the only) set of addresses for these documents — isn’t available at the time the decisions are put online. It’s not clear why they don’t return to the decision and add the print citations when they become available; probably it’s a matter of time and expense in courts that issue thousands of opinions every year. Vendor-neutral citation — which numbers according to the order in which decisions are issued rather than using page numbers from a bound volume — would do better, but very few courts use it in a way that is reflected in their URLs (the court system in Ohio is a notable exception). In NARA’s case, the reason given is that there is just too much churn in the numbering of sections to allow reliance on section-level URLs (we note that the GPO has no such misgivings, but then they are flighty types, and not archivists at all). You’ll see these same problems — accidental fallout from reliance on printed books, and a concern for stability at the expense of practicality — oddly spattered across the legal-information landscape. It’s a weird product of time and place. If reporters of decisions, and others who publish legal information, brought the same meticulous and conscientious pursuit of standards and interoperability to cyberspace that they have to print, we wouldn’t be talking about interoperability at all. We’d have it. But those folks are, for the most part, not yet as comfortable in the electronic world as they are in the world of print. I’ll say more about why that is in a minute.

But I’ve skipped over a couple of points on my way here, and they’re crucially important:

First, why would technical discussions about citation and URIs pass anybody’s who-cares test? Simply: document addresses always matter in retrieval systems, as does the granularity of the documents they address. Importantly, this is one place among many where legal-information systems have a very different character from other kinds of text databases, especially in common-law jurisdictions. Document addresses matter because it is crucially important that everyone look at the same authoritative information when resolving a dispute (that means “same” as in “same text”, not as in “same web site” — it is no more necessary to put all electronic legal text in a single repository than it is to put all the world’s books in a single building). So we need a common way of referring to things.

Second, why do we need any kind of interoperability between collections at all? Wouldn’t it be easier — and more authoritative — to just put everything in one place and give people access to it? Old-timers on the legal information scene will recognize this as the “why don’t we build a public-domain Westlaw?” question. That question has been asked many times, always in the interval before a newly-arrived group of legal-information enthusiasts discovers the dimensions of what it has taken on. It is a particularly thorny issue, and I’ve walked up to it before:

End users have been conditioned by training, experience, and careful marketing campaigns to value particular aspects of familiar systems like LEXIS and WESTLAW. Those systems are strongly branded, and have a deservedly high reputation among those who have been able to use them. It is not at all surprising (though it is at times dismaying) that experienced users find it difficult to recognize those same virtues when they are produced by new and unfamiliar implementations. At the core of this phenomenon is a bias induced by thirty years’ experience with older computer systems and older modes of industrial organization: centrality equals reliability. The Internet approach stands in sharp contrast as it argues the contrary: decentralization equals reliability, attainability, and scalability. On some profound but subliminal level this is news that shocks and bewilders. New, distributed models of computing that are reflected in distributed information systems and distributed models of business organization must seem inherently anarchic and therefore inherently suspect, no matter their virtues. That suspicion will subside in time, to a degree. But it will never vanish entirely until we become more discerning than we are about what was necessary about older ways of doing things and what was merely incidental.

I don’t want to re-fight that battle, particularly in something that is meant to be a quick run through the issues. But quickly: distributed systems provided by diverse actors allow for audience-oriented customization, encourage greater innovation, lower barriers for new entrants into the market, encourage greater care and authority (as when the publisher is also the law creator), conform better to our existing systems of organization for courts and legislatures, and can scale much larger over a more diverse collection of actors. In an environment as jurisdictionally and administratively complex as the United States, a distributed model may well be the only approach that works. Other, smaller jurisdictions provide counterexamples, notably Canada and Australia. Even there, there is no attempt for the systems to take in all the legal information that might be produced by agencies, municipal government, local commissions, and so on. There will always be a need for federation. That need becomes all the greater as multiple niche providers of legal information emerge to serve a diverse variety of audiences. We are on the brink of such a system, if we are not there already.

The price of such a federated, distributed system is the development of standards. In a system where there are only a few, supposedly comprehensive legal publishers, standards are whatever that publisher says they are. That is the system we had in the US until relatively recently, and it is one that commercial publishers fight very hard to maintain. Interestingly, it is also a system that has a deeply symbiotic relationship with the source publishers of legal information (reporters of decisions) I was talking about a moment ago.

That profession, whose leading light once referred to his staff as “double revolving peripatetic nit-picker[s]”, is accustomed to looking for nits that might accidentally find their way onto the pages of the bound, authoritative volumes produced by an official publisher. This was not neglect on their part; it was what professional practice demanded at the time, and still demands today. But the world of published legal information is a much bigger, more digital place now, and they are adapting to it, but slowly. The websites of many courts and legislatures are not crafted with the same attention to detail as their printed output. A new understanding of best practices is needed — one that brings to the electronic realm the same meticulous concern with consistent metadata, citation, and organization that reporters of decisions have always brought to print. These are emerging, but slowly. And there are many costs associated with a lack of workable standards, though they may only be immediately apparent to those who try to build resources that span multiple court web sites without themselves housing the information.

Citation and, more generally, systems of legal document identifiers are just one example of legal metadata we should make transparent and interoperable. It is probably the most urgent case. Next time, I’ll move on to how broader interoperability might be done. Interestingly, many of the problems have already been solved.

You’ll remember that we were running a naming contest for this blog, with a winner to be announced on March 14th. It’s now the 18th, of course. We missed the deadline because some sorehead contestants demanded an independent audit and, unfortunately, our accounting firm was tied up on the Bear Stearns deal. Undaunted by fiscal meltdown, I am proud to announce that this space shall henceforth be known as “b-screeds”.

The lucky winner was Will Sadler, known to many of you as the pioneering creator of a legal web site at Indiana (among the first five or so on the web), former cruise-ship piano player, and hater of Jet-Skis. Will long since departed the legal information scene for the more hospitable arena of the insurance industry, but it’s nice to know he’s keeping an eye on us.

Let’s start with some talk about the audience for legal information. Such conversations are rare. Usually people in the open-access-to-law world jump right in at the high end of why. We make big statements about freeing the law, or protecting rights, or keeping government accountable. These are all very important things, but they are also a little abstract, disengaged, lacking in detail. Here I want to think about what people are really doing with law they find online. Compared with ringing statements made at ribbon cuttings and in press releases, this is pretty dull stuff.

Let’s start, too, with the inevitable disclaimers: I can only talk about what I can see. My vantage point is that of a provider of limited (but important) collections of American caselaw and statutes, and a certain amount of commentary in the form of Wikipedia-like articles on legal topics or analyses of current cases. Someone doing the same kind of work with, say, the recently-constructed and published laws of a developing country would see things very differently. Someone doing it under a different legal system, or in a place with less jurisdictional complexity or with a different economy would too. And like everybody else who tries to analyze Web behavior, I’m peering through a keyhole that’s covered with gauze. I’ll stipulate the limitations of Web statistics; they’re very poor absolute measures of anything (though they have a lot of relative value). At the LII we learn more from mailing lists and feedback from readers, and a lot from links to the site. Most our examination of our audience has been done to satisfy short-term goals, provide statistics for reports, or satisfy momentary curiosity. There is, by the way, a desperate need for systematic study of what’s going on on our site (and any interested social scientist can take this as an invitation to get in touch with us). What you’re about to read is a synthesis of scattered observations and anecdote that involves limited samples. But we have to start somewhere.

That said, let me make five observations about the audience for legal information:

The audience for legal information is not bipolar.

People — and by “people” I mean “lawyers” — generally believe that there are two consumers of legal information. The first is a “law person” — a judge, lawyer, academic, or student — who makes sophisticated professional use of caselaw, statutes, regulations, treatises. The other is the “man in the street”, someone who is having an episodic, traumatic encounter with the legal system: getting crushed by debt, getting divorced, getting arrested. This leads to a misconception: the idea that both the literature and the audience for it are sharply bifurcated. On the one hand, there is “legal information”, a specialist literature that the man in the street doesn’t want and couldn’t understand in any case. On the other, there is what I suppose one might call “advice to the law-lorn”, simply-written, presented in bite-size chunks via newspaper or television, and providing orientation for those participating in one of the episodes mentioned earlier, or perhaps trying to solve a consumer-protection problem.

A thoughtful look at the Americans with Disabilities Act shows that this just ain’t so. It’s written understandably — so much so that it can be understood by the bowling-alley operators, municipal building inspectors, and architects that it affects. Yes, there is caselaw interpreting it. But the language is easy enough to understand if you are a person who is trying to figure out what it most likely requires of you. And, no question about it, this law is of interest to a lot more people than lawyers, and for professional rather than personal reasons. It’s also an economic engine: think of all the carpenters and builders who have retrofitted ramps and lifts to existing structures. There are a lot of people out there who make use of this one law in their professional lives, and there are a lot of laws like this one. There are, for example, over 80,000 dry-cleaning businesses in the United States, most of them family-owned, and over 120 Federal regulations that pertain to the use of a single dry-cleaning chemical. And there are the usual almost-lawyer suspects: tax accountants, police officers, government officials. It’s a spectrum, lawyers at one end and “men in the street” at the other, with a vast majority within spitting distance of the middle: people who make relatively continual professional use of law but are not legal professionals.

Probably this was always the case, even before the Internet put the spotlight on it. Nolo Press has always catered to the small-business segment of this crowd, and a lot of trade papers have occasional columns that treat legal subjects for the benefit of whatever the trade might be. Tax-law aids and publications abound — there’s nothing surer. Federal agencies write field manuals and put up web sites that summarize relevant law for their officials and for the public. But as with a lot of other things, the Internet concentrates diffuse interest into prominence. It’s still foggy; the edges are indistinct and the contours shift a lot. But that audience of non-lawyer professionals is definitely there, and it’s important. Sure, other audiences are there: our secondary materials reflect their presence. Materials on bankruptcy, civil rights, and divorce are among the most-used resources in our WEX legal encyclopedia — but, interestingly, contracts and civil procedure come very close to divorce in popularity. And, by contrast, one of the highest time-on-page rankings goes to a Spanish translation of our page on partnership law.

The Internet audience for law is less interested in caselaw than it is in regulations and statutes

Lawyers — and legal academics even more so — see the world through the lens of caselaw. The rest of the world starts with regulations. I once asked a group of law students to re-imagine the bromide “Ignorance of the law is no excuse”. I asked them to tell me who the ignorant person might be and what they might be ignorant about. Fourteen of fifteen imagined, generally, someone representing themselves in court on a felony charge. I’ll say more about pro se in a minute, but it’s the lone dissenter I’m interested in right now. He was a German lawyer, here to study American law, who listened very politely to all the other students and then announced that, to the contrary, it was probably somebody having a problem with a regulation.

He was right. The Internet audience cares vastly more about what it sees as the rulebook, and is not for the most part playing for stakes that justify deep research into interpretation. You can dismiss that approach as naive — if you believe that everyone who wants to learn about a rule is likely to be an exception to it, or that all rules are ambiguous to the point where relying on their text is dangerous. But in fact the rules are, much of the time, not so vague, and the Internet audience is assessing risk and reckonability. So, much of the time it concentrates first on regulations, and then on statutes, and only then on caselaw. And even when it comes to caselaw they are more likely interested in what has been said than in how it was said. Only about 15% of those who read Supreme Court opinions on our site read the majority opinion after reading the summary (syllabus) prepared by the clerk.

These notions are reflected in interesting ways in our statistics and in our link census. If you count users of the LII’s US Code by country, the ordering roughly parallels trade volume with the US (for a variety of complicated reasons it is not an exact match). Usage tends to track business hours, indicating professional use. The highest page-per-visit counts come from businesses. A look at our link census similarly reflects non-lawyer professional usage, particularly of statutes.

And by any account statutes and regulations are important. Transparency of trade law is very important to developing economies; the international investment community wants to know that there are rules, and what they are. And, as the World Bank “Doing Business” reports (particularly the 2004 edition) repeatedly recognize, street-level regulatory burdens have huge effects. The 20 worst economies in the world are the ones where it is hard to form and dissolve a business, to hire and fire, and to enforce commercial contracts. By contrast, the vast majority of judicial opinions affect only the parties. The question of why we have traditionally placed so much emphasis on access to caselaw will be explored in a future post.

The Internet audience is not trying to replace lawyers, or harm itself.

As long ago as 1628, Sir Edward Coke suggested that legal materials should not be published in English “lest the unlearned by bare reading without right understanding might suck out errors, and trusting in their conceit, might endamage themselves, and sometimes fall into destruction.” Worries about sucking, endamaging, and destruction persist to this day, though the conceit is arguably heavily concentrated on the other side of the issue. There are echoes of this in the Michael Kirby speech I quoted last week, and outright ranting in a recent comment responding to a listing of free-to-air law sources in a blog run by the Wall Street Journal:

Citizens do not need access to this kind of information. This is as bad as the WSJ publishing data on hospital/doctor errors and malpractice rates!! It is irresponsible for the WSJ to publish information about these sites!! Please remove this article.

I shudder to imagine what sort of government this guy would want, but let’s stay with this idea of reckonability. The streets are not littered with the corpses of those who have self-prescribed after reading WebMD, and I very much doubt that courtrooms and jails will be flooded with pro se plaintiffs and defendants (the effect of abusing WebMD, though, may be happily Darwinian rather than drearily Dickensian). Here’s the thing — probably THE thing, in fact: people who are using the Web to look up law are doing so in the interest of making the legal system more predictable. They are trying to get a general idea of what to do. Just as people do when they seek medical information, they are reality-checking the advice of professionals, or perhaps the advice of friends, and they are trying to foresee and prevent the harmful interaction of prescriptions made by the gaggle of specialized advisors that surrounds each of us these days. They are not seeking to replace lawyers, though they may be trying to understand them, and make sure of their advice.

Richard Susskind has remarked the existence of a “latent legal market” that is unfulfilled because the legal system is a forbidding realm whose gates are built and guarded by the inhabitants themselves. In some ways this mirrors longstanding notions about “preventive law” as an idea that could be as lucrative for lawyers as preventive dentistry has been for dentists. If you accept Susskind’s idea, and I do, the availability of legal information should have the opposite effect: we will see more, rather than less, routine use of professional legal services as people come to accept and understand the need for them.

The Internet audience is not doing legal research as lawyers understand it

Which brings us to the next point. Dan Dabney, the creator of West’s KeyCite feature, makes a perceptive observation about legal research. A somewhat compulsive person wanting to know, say, the specific heat of tungsten might go to two or three web sites (an ordinary person would go to a single website that looked authoritative, but let’s make allowances for any scholars who might be reading this). Once they have discovered a few sources that agree, they assume the answer is good enough. Lawyers doing legal research, by contrast, visit every source they can possibly imagine in the hope of finding one that will support their argument. Or at least they do if they can afford it. John B. West himself set the stage for this idea in 1889, when he responded to complaints about the over-inclusiveness of the West reporters by saying:

It is one of the greatest merits of the National Reporter System that it gives all the cases. Some of our critics call it a ‘Blanket System,’ and we are disposed to accept the analogy. No policy of insurance is so satisfactory as the blanket policy; and that is the sort of policy we issue for the lawyer seeking insurance against the loss of his case through ignorance of the law set forth in the decisions of the highest courts. [23 Am. L. Rev. 396, 406-407 (1889)]

Comprehensive research is necessary to lawyers working in an adversarial system on behalf of clients who can pay for their time. Those interested in simple reckonability — who are doing research as a form of risk management, or trying to understand those who are working on their behalf — do not need so much. Nor do they seek information in the same way as lawyers do.

Or do they? One study of lawyer information-seeking behavior — there are surprisingly few — notes an idea-forming stage during which lawyers prefer to deal with a limited number of sources until they know for certain where their argument is headed. That is what legal-research teachers call framing the question or formulating a research strategy, and in some ways it is not so different from what interested laypeople do. Both groups are trying, as efficiently as possible, to compose a mental map that will cover the surrounding terrain. The lawyer goes on to sketch a directed path to a known destination; the layperson contents himself with general knowledge of which pathways are possible and perhaps which landmarks and obstacles one might encounter along the way. Either or both might then rely on a more specialized guide — a specialist — to reach their specific destination. The layperson neither requires nor expects a step-by-step mapping in detail, or too much discussion of transportation choices, portages, and byways.

The overall point is that ultimate comprehensiveness of sources may not be as desirable as we are disposed to think. The lay audience for public information is doing a different kind of research.

The Internet audience uses law they find in unexpected ways

A final interesting but perhaps less important point. Legal research is not the only use of the legal infosphere, nor is the use of hyperlinks limited to crossreferencing or navigation. We’ve observed a tendency to use them to make assertions about legal relationships. So, for example, a popular fan site for the “Lord of the Rings” carries over 25,000 links to Title 17, the law of copyright — presumably as a declaration that the numerous photos and other movie material found there comes under the heading of fair use. Similarly, we get a lot of links from porn sites to the child-porn statute — an assertion about what the site operators are not doing. 18 USC 704, which deals with the appropriate use and reproduction of military medals, is used by Wikipedia and others to show that what they are doing is within the law. This is an interesting trend, and like many others mentioned here, needs further study. It’s also one of the oldest Web capabilities; we haven’t even started to talk about social tagging, or wikis, or other novel ways of presenting and interacting with legal text.

Finally

I’m written out, for now. What does all this add up to? One answer is “not much, yet”. To really understand the meaning of what the audience is up to, we need to look at those activities and practices by comparison with what we do when we build collections that ostensibly meet those needs. That will be the subject of the next post.