Law matters.

Law matters.

I see that theme over and over again as I read our supporters’ comments and stories. We are grateful for each supporter, each donation, each comment, and each story.

Whether it’s a solo practitioner in zealous advocacy for her client, the regulatory web facing small business owners, the daily grind of a career in government service at any level, or just Americans looking to stay informed and empowered, our supporters make it clear time and time again that they support us because we embody something they believe – law matters.

“Simply stated, you bring the power of the law into the reach of ordinary citizens. I am most appreciative. Keep up the good work!”

LII donor Mark D.

The Legal Information Institute started 26 years ago with a simple question: we’re all bound by the law, why don’t we all have access to it? This old video we made still rings true. When we started, creators and publishers of legal materials balked at the notion that the law needed to be easily accessible by the public. Now accessibility is the default, and those who would profit from putting the law behind paywalls must explain themselves.

That means that each day, more and more “ordinary citizens” are finding reliable yet free answers to their questions about newsworthy topics that relate to politics, the Constitution, or the Supreme Court, as well as the more mundane but no less important sections of the US Code and the CFR that govern our lives

High-quality, structured, machine-readable data is becoming the standard, and the result is a bevy of free and low-cost services, databases, and “legal tech” of every shape and form. Attorneys, students, and even the judiciary are becoming ever less reliant on high-priced subscriptions and poorly-designed government sites as Free Law takes hold.

Those aren’t mere conveniences: they increase access to justice.

“I visit your site frequently, especially when researching 49 CFR for my consulting work, and 38 CFR for veterans’ claims. Since my work with veterans on their disability claims is pro bono, having the laws readily available, easily searchable and free is extremely helpful. Thanks for all the good work.”

LII Donor Margaret Felts

Law matters. It’s what we do. It’s what so many of you do, too. Thank you for helping us.

How We Keep Things Running

We know you’re busy this time of year – thank you for taking the time to read this. Many of you have already pitched in or are planning to make a donation to help LII this year. It makes an enormous difference to the nine of us who provide this service and the millions and millions of people who use it. Thank you.

This time of year has been keeping us busy as well, and the feedback you’ve been sending us has been truly heartening.

“I look up Federal Rules and statutes on LII all the time. It is the easiest and best-formatted site for a quick lookup.” – recent donor William Hubbard

Not long ago, I popped by my colleague Val’s office and discovered her making final pre-publication checks for the Federal Rules updates before they went into effect on December 1st. Unlike the rest of the US Code, the Federal Rules are not made available in a machine-readable format until after they go into effect, so we have always reviewed each change and new rule individually and incorporated them by hand into the text so that users like you would have the changes as soon as they go into effect. The last step is the pre-publication review: where Val’s colleague Craig reads the new text aloud while Val reviews the copy we’ve edited and are ready to share with users like you. It’s painstaking work, and not really the kind of thing a tech-forward group like ours usually talks about, but then we get to hear from some of the two million law students, paralegals, judges, and lawyers who rely on those rules.

“I am an MS Taxation student and I am using this site every day. It is wonderful” – Anji, a recent donor

LII’s engineering team has been prototyping new features for the US Code and the Code of Federal Regulations for some time now. But when we went to bring these features to the public, we realized that our publishing software was too slow. Even though we could keep up with legislative or regulatory updates (there are usually no more than a few thousand in a day), it was a strain to regenerate the hundreds of thousands of web pages to deploy each new feature across every section – or even just the Tax Code. So the engineering team rebuilt our web publication pipeline from the ground up – Sylvia tuned the software that finds the processed text; Nic automated bringing in extra cloud hardware for processing; Ayham wrote a new search back end, and Jim wrote the software to generate the website from the content. Now, when we learn something new about the Code, we’ll be able to get it to you – and 20 million other readers of the US Code and CFR – without delay. We know you appreciate that.

“I use your site regularly. It is the most current, and easiest to use, free site for access to the US Code.” – an anonymous donor

Your support helps us help millions of people advance their educations, earn a living, make government more effective, or simply find and understand the law. We hope you will continue to help us help out.

DONATE NOW

Thank you,

Sara Frug
Associate Director
Legal Information Institute

Tell Us YOUR Story!

The best part about fundraising is the people we meet and the stories they tell us about why they support our mission.  We’re so grateful for each and every one (donors AND stories!), and we want to hear your stories. Our new friend Gretchen Eikermann sent us a donation last week and told us this story:

The reason I was using the website last night was to assist my niece, an 8th grader, with her homework. The homework was essentially to determine whether the narrator of A Telltale Heart would qualify for the insanity defense in any of its iterations for a mock trial this Friday. Although I specialized in defending persons suffering from mental illness and developmental disability as a Public Defender, I would have been hard pressed completing this assignment following her teacher’s instructions to use the inscrutable search results Findlaw produces as my reference. My niece called me utterly confused and panicked trying to figure out what the heck M’Naughten and Durham were. I sent her the link to your site’s Insanity Defense page and by the time I called her back to “explain the law” she had pretty much figured it out herself after reading your site’s clear and accessible, but not “dumbed down” information on the law of insanity defense. She is no longer panicked but excited for her mock trial.  I was excited that she was excited about the law.

We sit in a literal tower on a college campus in a little city in Upstate New York.  Over 40 million people use our resources each year. In the typical year, we only hear from a few hundred of you (most donors don’t leave comments of any sort.)  So, for every great story we hear, we’re sure there are lots we don’t. So we thought we’d ask.

Please consider taking a minute to email us your best story about how you’ve used the materials at www.law.cornell.edu or www.oyez.org by clicking here.

Or, if you’ve been meaning to support our fundraising efforts anyhow, you can click on the button below and leave your story in the Comment box on the donation page.

GIVE NOW

Thanks,

Tom, Sara, Craig, Val, Nic, Sylvia, Jim, Ayham & Neli