Thank you

Thank you — all of you — for your generosity during our June fundraising appeal. 

Your exceptional generosity made this the most successful June campaign in the LII’s history by a very wide margin ( a 15% increase over its next nearest competitor, in June of 2014).

Your donations make it possible for us to do what we do in important, innovative ways.  The LII is, and always has been, more than an online service offering the raw text of American statutes and regulations.  We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make legal information easier to use and understand, and it’s your contributions that let us put those ideas into action.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be quietly rolling out two important improvements to our Code of Federal Regulations collection.  It will now use the e-CFR as its base text, making it the most up-to-date and usable version of CFR available online.  Experiments with the eCFR text have been underway for a few months, and we now think it’s reliable and full-featured enough to put in the “top spot”.  And — after three years of experimentation and development work with natural-language processing techniques — we’ve extracted and linked all of the defined terms in the text of CFR to the definitions that apply to them.  This is a very basic — but very important — step in helping people to understand the law.  Definitions are, after all, the first step for most people in figuring out whether a reg applies to them or not.

It’s your donations that make all this possible.  Thank you, once again.