Sponsor Us! It Helps Free Access to Law, and it Helps You, Too.

Friends:

The LII is launching a corporate sponsorship program.  We plan to replace all advertising on the site with simple notices recognizing our sponsors.  We estimate that each notice will be seen by more than 165,000 people each year. More details about the mechanics are here.

Why should you sponsor us?

• You want to associate your company or firm with free and open access to law.
• You want to associate your company or firm with an objective source of information about government and the rules under which it operates.
• You want to associate yourself with the oldest and best-known developers of Internet legal technology in the world — the people who built the first legal Web site, and the first Web browser for Windows, and have led experimentation in legal information technology ever since.

You’ll also help remove advertising from the site. The goal is to completely replace the ads with a single notice on each page that recognizes one of our sponsors.  Each sponsor’s notice will be shown on a percentage of the entire run of pages within a particular LII collection.  At a minimum, 165,000 people will see your organization as the sole sponsor of whatever page they are viewing (the exact workings are explained here)

How will this help you?  I suppose that as a long-time dweller in America’s Most Enlightened City I should talk about karma — and believe me, you can get some of the good kind, and a lot of personal satisfaction, by helping us and the 33 million people who depend on us

But there are more practical reasons as well.  You’ll make yourself known to an audience that is educated, engaged, and aware.  The people who visit the LII site are overwhelmingly interested in objectivity and accuracy.  They’re public-spirited.  They come from all parts of the political and cultural spectrum.  They all have some interest in law or the legal system.  

And they’re amazingly diverse — our individual supporters include a former President of the World Bank and the head buyer for a food bank in Michigan, a former Solicitor General of the United States and the owner of a business that makes custom machine parts in Rochester, NY, a journalist who’s won the Pulitzer once and been a finalist three times, and the lawyer for the public transport system in Philadelphia.  Our corporate sponsors include Fastcase, Justia, and Morrison and Foerster.

Sponsoring us will make you feel good about you, and make them feel good about you.  It shows that you want to help us help others to find and understand the law using a free and objective source.  If that sounds good to you, please contact us at sponsorship@liicornell.org, or call our Fundraising Director, Peter Kopp, at 607-255-9634.

LII Staff Profile: Charlotte Schneider

Charlotte joined the LII in 2012 as a part-time editor/publisher for the Supreme Court Bulletin and Previews. She also helped create the videos on our YouTube Channel. Since then, Charlotte’s roles have transformed into becoming one of our own virtual librarians for the site as well as coordinating our social media. Continue reading to find out more about who Charlotte is and what she does.

You’ve been working with us for 5 years now, how did you get started?

Once upon a time, I spent a semester as an intern in the Cornell Law Library. One of my projects was to make educational videos explaining some free law sites. One of those sites was the LII, and because the LII was in the same building, I was encouraged to reach out to Tom [Bruce] and Sara [Frug] to get some helpful information so that the video about the LII site would be that much more informative. I guess they liked me because the very same day that my internship ended, I got an email from Tom wanting to talk about a job. The email’s subject line was “An offer you can’t accept.” I never knew if that was a typo or an enticement, but 5 years later, I still have that email, and Tom still leaves me wondering, sometimes.

What is your primary job?

I am a librarian at Rutgers Law School, in the Camden location. Specifically, I am the Government Documents and Reference Librarian, managing the library’s Federal Depository Library collection. I do other stuff, too, but that list would probably be long.

Where did you go to school?

I got my BBA from UMass Amherst, my JD & MBA from UMass Dartmouth (School of Law and College of Business, respectively), and my MSLIS from Syracuse.

What’s your current role at the LII?

I am the librarian! I manage the Virtual Reference Desk and much of LII’s social media.

What is the Reference Desk?

The Reference Desk is what it sounds like, but virtual! It’s a forum that allows people to ask questions about legal information that can be answered by law librarians or knowledgeable members of the community.

What other roles have you held with us?

I started out helping with the Supreme Court Bulletin–editing the Previews and publishing them online, and helping out with the end of Term review. I have helped out with some data collection and updating of the Federal Rules and some state information pages. And I also made some of the videos you see on the LII’s YouTube channel.  

What’s your favorite question from the Reference Desk?

Actually, it depends. There are a few instances where other registered users will answer a reference question (before or instead of a librarian), and I think that’s just fantastic because that is exactly one of the reasons we went with the forum setup. There are other questions that turn into those teachable moments, and some others that are just really interesting exchanges. Some posts unearth hidden gems.

Most difficult question from Reference Desk?

I would say that questions might be more frustrating than difficult, if anything. In general, it’s difficult to do a proper reference interview in an asynchronous format, so some of the more frustrating questions are the ones where it is hard to decipher a question from what was posted or where there’s just some disconnect, or where the patron just keeps pushing back. Other times, there’s just only so much information you can give, and it just doesn’t feel like enough.

Favorite feature of the site?

I can pick one thing, but that will just get me to another thing, and then another, and before we know it, everything about it would be listed as my favorite. If I were to start somewhere, I might say the Table of Popular Names or the Parallel Table of Authorities.

What motivates you to stay involved with us?

Mostly, the mission; also, the people. A little bit because I am quite attached to my LII email address.  

Can you say in a few words about the importance of making the law available and accessible to everyone, without cost?

Nearly everything that we do is governed by some kind of law, whether federal, state, or even more local, or some combination of these. Since ignorance of the law is no excuse for disobeying the law, people must be able to know, find, and understand these laws by which they are bound. And in order for there to be equal justice for all, everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status, must be able to access this information.

Do you like to skateboard?

I do! Some people at the 2014 CALIcon in Boston may have caught a glimpse of the joy it brings me!

Interesting facts about you? First job, weirdest job, etc

First job… here’s the Jersey Girl in me: beach badge checker. All the kids were doing it, so I woke up extra early every morning and I got paid to sit on near-empty beaches. Life’s a beach.

Weirdest job… I guess weird is relative. I will probably always think it a little weird that I worked as a switchboard operator at the local hospital on my college vacations. It did take me a few months on the job to get comfortable paging doctors and calling codes but once I was okay being the voice heard throughout the hospital, it turned out to be a pretty cool job.

Interesting facts: I play in a pool league year-round, and I play on a softball team in the Fall and Spring seasons. I love to garden, cook, and bake. I grew up on horse farms and around horses.

Buzz from the CALI Conference

It’s conference season again, and we’re back from the 2017 Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction conference, where presenters and audience members were fired up about algorithmic accountability and, well, drumming.

Librarians, as a group, are highly attuned to developments in information retrieval, and during the past several years, long-standing legal information providers have been joined by numerous startup companies in applying new technologies to legal research. In past years, legal informatics conferences covered these topics. This year, University of Colorado Law Library Director Susan Nevelow Mart presented a talk entitled “The Human Element in Search Algorithms: Bias and Accountability in Legal Databases”, based on her article “The Algorithm as a Human Artifact: Implications for Legal {Re}Search“.  

Mart presented the results of her research on search query performance across six services: Castext, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Lexis Advance, Ravel and Westlaw. The research found less than a 10% overlap in results across all six databases, and on average, 40% of the results were unique to one of the six.

The research has implications for practicing attorneys, scholars, students, and technologists. And it’s helping us refine our own thinking about how we inform people who use our website about what we’re doing behind the scenes to try to help them get the information they need.

Current Events Quiz

Can you match laws to current events?  We put together this five-question quiz as a fun way of showing how current events drive people to our website to read the laws behind the headlines.  See how you do–answers are at the bottom.

 

1. Traffic on this page spiked on January 29, 2017 with 95,434 pageviews:
   1. The First Amendment to the US Constitution
   2. 8 USC 1182 – Inadmissible Aliens
   3. Wex article – Executive Power
   4. The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution

    

2. Two days later, Twitter sent more than 50,000 of the 146,000 people who came to this page:
   1. 50 USC 3021 – National Security Council
   2. 8 USC 1187 – Visa Waiver Program for Certain Visitors
   3. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26
   4. Wex article – Second Amendment

    

3. 14 CFR 250.5 saw a huge traffic spike on April 11, 2017.  What is it about?
   1. Income taxes on foreign subsidiaries of US businesses
   2. Sanctuary cities
   3. Oil and gas exploration in national parks
   4. Compensation for airline passengers denied boarding

    

4. Facebook users came to our site more than 90,000 times on February 14, 2017 to read which of the following:
   1. Wex article – Executive Power
   2. The law declaring Valentine’s day a federal holiday
   3. The statutory definition of treason
   4. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution

    

5. Links from the February 9th edition of the online Washington Post sent thousands of visitors to our website to read the regulation concerning:
   1. Proper retirement of American flags
   2. Use of public office for private gain
   3. Placarding requirements for vehicles transporting HAZMAT
   4. Disclosure of executive compensation under the securities laws

    

Answers:

1. After the President’s executive order on immigration, users flocked to our site to read 8 USC 1182 and other statutes related to immigration.  (Answer b)
2. A statute no one paid much attention to until the President announced his attention to appoint his advisor Steve Bannon to the National Security Council, 50 USC 3021 deals with the composition of the NSC.  (Answer a)
3. 14 CFR 250.5 addresses compensation of passengers denied boarding by airlines.  Its popularity in April was tied to news accounts of an incident aboard a United Airlines aircraft.  (Answer d)
4. On February 14, 2017 the American public was reading about the circumstances surrounding the resignation of Michael Flynn as the National Security Advisor.  Apparently as a result of those stories, the definition of treason found in 18 USC 2381 was a topic of debate on social media and a major source of traffic on our website. (Answer c)
5. On February 9th, the Washington Post was sending us traffic from multiple stories covering Kellyanne Conway’s televised statement about Ivanka Trump’s merchandise.  Those articles linked to 5 CFR 2635.702, which addresses the use of public office for private gain.  (Answer b)