Law via the Internet : Day 1

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.