skip navigation
search

While open and free access to American judicial opinions has progressed substantially over the last few years, very little attention has been given to the state of access to administrative legal information.  Maybe Tom Bruce did not ask kindly enough in 2013 when he wrote “Dear Federal Agencies … put your goddamned ALJ Opinions Up” in this post. In any case, three years later, the situation is still more or less the same: administrative decisions rendered by both ALJs and agencies are not systematically available online, and when they are it can be extremely difficult for third parties to automatically agglomerate them for reuse.  This situation prevails at both the federal and state levels.

This context explains my enthusiasm for the new decision search engine recently deployed by the Washington Public Employment Relations Commission (Washington PERC) with the help of Decisia by Lexum.  The Washington PERC is the Washington State agency with jurisdiction over public sector labor relations and collective bargaining in Washington.  Like many agencies it renders several types of decisions, which were previously scattered over different sections of its website – some with search capabilities and some without – making them difficult to discover.  Understanding that providing useful access to its decisions is part of its mandate, and that online access is the only thing that really counts today, the Washington PERC decided to invest some resources (a very reasonable amount in fact) in enhancing the usability of its online decisions.

The new Washington PERC decisions website complies with many of the best practices recognized for decision publishing:

  • Self-publishing of full text decisions

The staff at the Washington PERC has full control over the content of its decisions website via a web-based interface. Publishing is not relinquished to any third-party commercial publisher that could require some kind of exclusivity in exchange for its input.  It enables online publishing of the most authoritative version of the full text of decisions.

  • Timeliness

Since the agency is in complete control of the publishing process, it can make its decisions available to its stakeholders as soon as they are rendered.  Any error in the body of a decision can be fixed in a matter of minutes by the registry clerks.

  • Comprehensiveness

The Washington PERC has invested effort in making sure that all of the decisions it has rendered since the mid-‘70s are available on its website, turning it into an historical repository.  Thus, serious legal research can be undertaken from the new website without any fear of missing part of the material.

  • Accessibility

The technology used for the Washington PERC decisions website is designed to facilitate access for individuals with disabilities by being compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA of the World Wide Web organization.

  • Provision of both HTML and PDF versions

Decisions are provided in both HTML and PDF formats.  The HTML version enables the provision of advanced search functionalities and highlighting of search hits in the body of decisions.  The PDF version preserves the appearance of the original file (a scan copy of the signed version is provided whenever available) and facilitates printing.

  • Navigability

The Washington PERC decisions website can be browsed (or crawled) by decision date or decision title and its URL structure is SEO-friendly.  This makes the content “discoverable” by both human researchers and web robots operated by third parties interested in reusing the data.  On top of that Decisia also features a RSS feed of recently published material and an API providing a machine readable version of all content.

  • Full-text searchable

A powerful search engine supporting Boolean queries, proximity operators and wildcards enables users to undertake advanced searches in the complete body of all decisions.  Users also benefit from an auto-completion feature providing quick access links to exact matches and a spell-checker that proposes alternative queries in case of typos or errors.

  • Multi-criteria search tools

Advanced database search is also facilitated by the availability of eight additional fields that can be queried individually or in conjunction (decision number, date, parties, decision-maker, case type, appeal status, statute and collection).

  • Citation availability

Finally, each decision is provided with a unique medium neutral citation by the agency itself, for example “Decision 12563-A (PECB, 2016)”.  This type of citation enables the identification of individual decisions without referring to any specific publisher.

In the end, all of this should provide positive outcomes on two distinct fronts:

  • Enhanced access for those directly affected by Washington PERC decisions

Washington State union members, employers and their representatives will undoubtedly be the first to benefit from this enhanced access to decisions on public sector labor relations and collective bargaining.  Without a doubt, making it easier to find how previous conflicts were resolved significantly contributes to Washington PERC’s mandate of assisting parties in resolving labor-management disputes.

  • Consolidation of the field of law under the jurisdiction of the Washington PERC

Whether Washington PERC decisions are considered to be precedential or not, the fact remains that they are the only sources of information about past conflicts resolved in this niche area of law.  By making sure this information is available in a format useable by all, the Agency is contributing to the development of the legal field in which it operates while at the same time promoting its competence as a decision-making body.  As a consequence, the authoritative status of its decisions is bound to be enhanced over time.

Considering the overall state of online access to administrative decisions, one can only hope that this example will inspire other agencies and ALJs to follow suite and implement adequate decisions websites.  The Washington PERC is only one agency within one state, but its latest initiative at least has the merit of demonstrating how easy it can be to publish administrative decisions the right way.

Pierre-Paul Lemyre is the Director of Business Development for Lexum, Inc., a legal informatics company in Montreal.   Lexum provides the technology and publishing infrastructure for CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute.

 

Raise your hand if you’ve heard (or said) a variation of one of these tired truisms: “Politics is dominated by lobbyists and spending.” “Policy making has degenerated into a glorified yelling match.” “Our country has never been more polarized.” “Today’s online communities foster echo chambers of the like-minded rather than fora for discussion.”

Is your hand raised? Because ours certainly are.

The only thing anyone can seem to agree on today is that the current U.S. political system is broken. We’re mired in a confluence of corporate spending, ugly discourse, and voter voicelessness.

LexPop provides an open public platform for tackling these problems.

Meet LexPop

LexPop allows participants to collaborate in the creation of legislative bills — bills that are later introduced by actual legislators. At its most basic, LexPop is a Wikipedia for creating public policy. (There’s a lot more to it than that, as we’ll explain below.) In our first project, Massachusetts Representative Tom Sannicandro (D-Ashland) — one of those actual legislators we’re talking about — has agreed to introduce a net neutrality bill created on LexPop.

LexPop has two primary goals. Our first goal is to give the public a voice. We hope to provide a space for ordinary people (i.e., people who can’t afford to hire lobbyists) to contribute substantively to public policy — to give their best ideas a fair hearing.

As you know, lobbyists write the bulk of the legislation coming out of our various legislatures. LexPop provides a voxlobbylane.jpgcounterpoint to the current model — a way for the public to provide legislators with voter-created model legislation. A legitimate, 21st-century democracy will invite the public into meaningful collaboration, and LexPop is part of the march in that direction.

Our second goal is to determine the best way to achieve the first. That is, a compelling movement is attempting to take governance into the 21st century, and organizations like PopVox and OpenCongress are doing great work. Several organizations and initiatives, including a government-sponsored effort in Brazil, are trying to make it possible for citizens to help write legislation. But at this point, nobody knows the best way to make the co-creation of laws a reality. Our work will contribute to figuring out what’s possible, what works, and what doesn’t.

How LexPop works

There are two ways to use LexPop. Our primary focus is on Policy Drives — where legislators pledge to introduce bills written on the site. Policy Drives are somewhat analogous to what goes on at Wikipedia, but LexPop provides more structure through the use of three specific phases:

  • Phase 1: Initial discussion, debate, argument, and research;
  • Phase 2: Outlining the bill in plain English (for those who aren’t regular readers of Vox PopuLII); and
  • Phase 3: Transforming the ‘plain English’ outline into legislative text.

voxnet-neutrality.jpgWe’re currently in the discussion phase of our first Policy Drive, devoted to the net neutrality bill Rep. Sannicandro has agreed to introduce.

A second option on LexPop is working on a “WikiBill.” WikiBills are written via the familiar, wide-open wiki model, and they offer a spot for the public to create model legislation on their own, without the three-phase structure of Policy Drives, and without a legislator-sponsor. WikiBill creators collaborate through a free-for-all process, very similar to Wikipedia — start from scratch and cobble the bill together. There’s no end to the WikiBill process, so participants can create a bill, submit it to their representatives, modify it, and submit it again.

Yeah, sounds great. But can this really work?

It’s usually at this point in the conversation that questions start coming up. LexPop, and similar projects, are largely operating in uncharted waters, and so there’s good reason to think the project sounds ambitious, perhaps even crazy. Below are a few of the questions we’re asked most often, along with our preliminary answers.

Will anyone contribute to this sort of effort?
We think so. (Obviously.)

Here’s why: Ordinary people collaborate on difficult projects online — especially online — often with great success. Take Linux, the open source operating system. The vast majority of people who work on Linux aren’t paid; they’ve incrementally created it in their spare time.

Are you reading this blog on Firefox? Well, guess what? Your browser was built almost entirely by volunteers.

At LexPop, we’re asking people who are passionate about certain issues to give some of their free time to developing better policy, in the same way engineers have asked them to help develop software. Sure, it will be complicated, but people are smart, and given the right opportunity and tools, they’ll be able to (once again) create something extraordinary.

Politics is too controversial — How can you expect people to come to consensus on one answer?
To answer this question, we like to look to Jesus — the “Jesus” page on Wikipedia, that is.

There are plenty of controversial topics addressed on Wikipedia, but it’s the pages for these topics that are often the most accurate. Wikipedians who edit the Jesus page know the topic is controversial, so they back up what they say with facts — otherwise, the crowd of users won’t allow it. Over time, the Jesus page has turned into something that most users are pretty happy about. And this is the similarity between LexPop and Wikipedia: They’re both about collaboratively writing something that isn’t perfect in the eyes of any one participant, but is better than the alternative.

Fine, but isn’t there a better model than a wiki?
This is one of the things we’re trying to figure out, and one of the things with which we need your help. We’re starting with a modified wiki (the three phases), but as we learn, we’ll adapt. A wiki allows a certain type of collaboration (the kind found on Wikipedia), but it may not be the best way to collaborate. Is the three-step process we’re using the right model, or should the phases be combined? With your help, we’ll find out — and we promise to share our findings.

Will legislation created on LexPop be representative?
We don’t claim that bills made on LexPop will be perfectly representative, and we’re not trying to make representative democracy obsolete. After a bill is written on the site, it will still have to go through the same bill-into-law process as every other piece of legislation.

voxexperts.jpgBut LexPop will certainly be more representative than the system we have now. With LexPop, non-profit organizations with valuable knowledge of an issue, passionate experts well-versed on a topic, and regular voters (Joes the Plumber, if you will) will no longer be shut out of the process. Right now, we live in a world where participation too often means a voter pours out her heart in a letter and receives a form response that the intended recipient didn’t write, read, or even sign. Our system for adding more voices to lawmaking may not be perfect, but it will be less imperfect than the current political system.

LexPop provides a first draft of legislation that’s written by people, not by lobbyists. This is our value-add; we’re opening a new channel for public participation, and taking a step toward a more legitimate and deliberative democracy.

But we need your helpvoxmeeting_brains.jpg

And we need it big time. For a project like this to work, we need participants.

If you’re interested in collaborative democracy, please get involved in the conversation. You’ll be helping even if you post only one comment. Even if you aren’t particularly interested in net neutrality, we encourage you to learn more about it on the site, and then make sure you come back when we have a Policy Drive on your favorite issue.

Also, we’d be grateful if you spread the word about our site. Like us on Facebook, Tweet about LexPop (@LexPopOrg), blog about us, or, even better, let us write a guest blog post on your site (Thanks, VoxPopuLII !).

We’d also love for you to tell us what we’re doing wrong. LexPop is perfect in neither theory nor practice. So please help us make LexPop and, ultimately, deliberative democracy better with your feedback. We have a Google Group for discussion about LexPop, or you can contact us through the website.

Coda

LexPop is a platform for public engagement and empowerment. LexPop provides a space for discussion-driven public policy and a stronger, more agile democracy. LexPop is about more voices. Add yours.

Matt_BacaMatt Baca is a joint J.D./M.P.A. student at New York University School of Law and the Harvard Kennedy School. He’s interested law, public policy, government 2.0, and the Rockies (team and mountains).

Olin_Grant_ParkerOlin Parker is a Master’s in Public Policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School. His interests include disability policy, education reform, the states of Kansas and Louisiana, and his 17 month-old daughter.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editor in chief is Robert Richards.