LII co-founders Tom Bruce and Peter Martin are in Durban, South Africa, attending the tenth Law Via The Internet Conference. It’s an exhilarating and humbling experience, seeing what so many are doing to make law available and accessible around the world.  It’s especially interesting to see those who have no investment in old ways of doing things create new and innovative solutions — we were particularly taken with Kenya Law Reports’ Bench Research Hotline , a service that provides Kenyan judicial officers with research services via a call center.  It’s a creative way of strengthening judicial infrastructure.  Geekier presentations included Fabio Vitali’s very useful presentation of the Akoma Ntoso legal-XML framework and a report on the emerging URN:Lex standard for uniquely identifying legal documents on the Internet, to which LII Director Tom Bruce is a contributor.

There’s a lot more to report (and we will, when things calm down a bit– last night, we were preoccupied with finding a turkey dinner in South Africa on Thanksgiving Day).  For legal information news junkies, we recommend VoxPopuLII author Christine Kirchberger’s detailed narrative of the first day’s doings.  If you want to follow along, the conference is tweeted as hashtag #LVI2009.

This message — and the mural image at the left — come to you from Durban, South Africa.  The LII founders are meeting with LIIs from all over the world here at the annual Law via the Internet conference, a gathering of the more than 20 namesake LIIs that have sprung up since we began our own operation 17 years ago.   South Africa provides powerful reminders of why we do what we do. Yesterday, we saw an exhibit at Durban’s apartheid museum — about the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.  It took us away from our usual perspective– and was both powerful and humbling.

There are a lot of reasons to support open access to law.  I talk about some of them in my blog (and in the letter to our regular donors) that appears this week at http://blog.law.cornell.edu/tbruce .  As we always do at this time of year, we ask for your support in continuing our work of providing free access to law, and helping others to do so.  There are two things you should do. 

• Make a donation, at http://www.law.cornell.edu/donors
• Tell everyone you did– in your Facebook status, via Twitter, in person. 

We’ll be grateful.  And you’ll be helping to make law accessible to people around the world.

Over in VoxPopuLII, Tom Boone has a great new article on the effects of duopoly on usability in the field of legal research.  This adds to a chorus of postings in various places over the last week or two, all talking the effects of the market structure of legal information in America on public access, usability, and other aspects of the system.  Of course, after the events of this week, nobody is really sure if it’s going to be a duopoly any more…..

Old LII friends Rick Klau and Anurag Acharya at Google have created a new repository of caselaw accessible via Google Scholar.  Anurag blogs about it here.   This is a very welcome development, both for us and for open access to law in general, and we applaud it.  It’s not Wexis yet, but it’s a very good start, and a great benefit to the public.  No doubt there will be more — and more interesting — things to come.

For the last couple of years, we’ve been involved with our sister organization CeRI  (the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative) in looking at the ways people interact with Federal regulatory agencies.  The most visible artifact of that involvement was the ABA committee report on regulations.gov, which has already led to some important improvements in that system and in the ways that people can find out about and act on new Federal regulations.   Now, CeRI has a new website (www.regulationroom.org) that is meant to significantly enhance the process of public participation.  Right now, it’s in beta — with lots to learn about what people want and how they interact with the system, and a series of experiments planned for the next several months.  Check it out.

Today’s oral arguments involve immigration and corporate citizenship.  Our LIIBULLETIN writeups are at http://bit.ly/2YKPWw

For several years now, the LII has published the 2000 version of the Congressional Research Service’s Annotated Constitution of the United States.  Savvy LII friends know that the document is updated by CRS at least every two years… so why are we so out of date?  The short answer is that we’ve tried many times to get the updated versions, with no success.  Today , Senator Russell Feingold sent a letter to the GPO formally requesting that they make CONAN (as it’s known) available online in a continuously updated version.   This is very, very good news, and we hope that GPO will honor the Senator’s request.  Hat tip to Susannah Leers and Courtney Minick for telling us and (we suspect) to the Sunlight Foundation for doing the behind-the-scenes work on this.

Over in VoxPopuLII, Stephanie Davidson talks about survey methodologies.  This is a subject near and dear to our hearts at the LII.  We’ve wondered for a long time how we might apply qualitative methods (and quantitative ones, too) to the problem of assessing LII effectiveness.  This is an opening round in what we hope will be a long discussion about how one knows whether an online legal information resource is doing what it’s supposed to as well as it can.