law.gov at Yale, courtesy of the Information Society Project

 Yesterday, the Information Society Project at the Yale Law School hosted a spirited lunchtime discussion of the law.gov project(the Yale Law Library was very well-represented, too).  LII Director Thomas R. Bruce and law.gov mastermind Carl Malamud made (unusually, for them) brief statements about the nature and progress of the project, and then answered questions from the attendees.Running throughout the session were questions about how bulk legal information works as you move lower and lower in the hierarchy of the legal system; how does a small city, for example, afford the expertise and effort necessary to put municipal codes online? How might publishing technology serve town and village courts?  As yet, there aren’t solid answers to this, but the general hope is that open-source, open-standards technology is affordable enough to spawn small enterprises that might be able to service this very wide market.