Time to Feed the Elephant!
We often find the tale of the blind men and the elephant useful for explaining the many facets of the Legal Information Institute. In the story, each encounters a different part of the elephant – the tusk, the trunk, the legs – and comes away with a different perception of what an elephant is (it’s like a spear, like a snake, like a tree).
You see where this is going, right?
This old parable is a useful way of explaining how the LII is different things not just to our casual users, but even to our friends and supporters like you:
- Some admire our expertise in legal informatics and how we use that knowledge to extract, organize, and present statutes and regulations in usable formats with helpful features.
- Others appreciate our role as a source of unbiased explanations of legal concepts, constitutional principles, and Supreme Court cases.
- Still others value our contributions as leaders and collaborators in a global movement to provide open access to legal information and keep it in the public domain.
Whatever part of the elephant you perceive when you come to our website, our goal is that you encounter a reliable source of trustworthy information that helps you find what you need to do your work, understand the news, or just live your life. Our hope is that you appreciate how your support has helped create that same experience for the more than 36 million other visitors to law.cornell.edu so far this year.
We take no money from Cornell University. Instead, we rely entirely on funds we bring in ourselves. Your support pays our small staff, covers the costs of cloud servers and software, allows us to compensate our student workers, and even lets us venture into the world to share our expertise and help others bring their open access legal initiatives to life.
And we appreciate it more than we could ever express.
With Gratitude,
Craig Newton, Co-Director
