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This International Women’s Day We Celebrate the Expansion of our Women And Justice Collection

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In anticipation of International Women’s Day, we’re excited to announce significant expansions of the Women & Justice Collection, our global database of gender justice caselaw, legislation, and reports from international mechanisms, regional courts, and 116 countries. Almost two years ago, we announced our plans for the Collection, which we inherited from the former Avon Global Center for Women & Justice. Since then, we created a website for the Collection’s new home at LII, where it has doubled in size thanks to our pro bono partners at global law firms White & Case and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. The first vetted and searchable database of its kind, the Collection provides free online access to these materials to advocates, researchers, practitioners, and lay people.

As part of the Collection’s expansion, our student research associates Ana Gomez, Cornell Law School Class of 2020, and Jenna Kyle, Cornell Law School Class of 2019, have started adding native-language summaries to make our resources searchable in their native language as well as in English. This spring, we are hoping to begin a partnership with our Democratic Governance & Rights Unit and African LII counterparts at the University of Cape Town. The Collection’s Editor in Chief, Jocelyn Hackett and her team of  summer research fellows will draw on our ever-increasing resources to collaborate on progressive training programs for judges from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), remote clerking for judges throughout the SADC, and building a database of pan-African human rights caselaw. We are currently seeking funding to send future research fellows to work as summer interns at African gender justice advocacy organizations and interview women throughout the country in which they work to assess women’s access to justice and socioeconomic autonomy.

You can find the Women and Justice Collection here.

Meet the LII’s New Student Leaders

This fall will mark the fifteenth year we’ve published LII Bulletin Previews–student analysis of the cases to be argued before the United States Supreme Court.  (From 1996 – 2004, students previewed cases to be argued before New York State’s highest court–the Court of Appeals.)

Even though the work of this year’s Bulletin Preview staff won’t be complete until the Supreme Court finishes hearing arguments for this term in April, we are already planning for next year.  The first step was choosing leadership from among this year’s class of associates. We are pleased to announce that Kathryn Adamson will be the Editor-in-Chief for 2019-2020 term of the LII Bulletin.  Her Executive Editor will be Angela Zhu.

Kathryn Adamson graduated magna cum laude from the University of San Diego, where she studied International Relations and Spanish.  At Cornell Law, in addition to working on the Bulletin Preview staff, Kathryn is an associate on the Cornell Law Review and an Honors Fellow for the first-year Lawyering skills program.  She has also participated in both mock trial and moot court while at Cornell. Her past legal internship experience includes time at the United State’s Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California and the California Court of Appeal.   

Angela Zhu studied Financial Engineering with a minor in Applied Math and Economics at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.  Like Kathryn, Angela donates her time to the Cornell Law Review. She is also the IT Director for the Cornell Law Students Association and is the President of the Cornell Association of Law and Economics.

I have really enjoyed serving as an associate on the LII Supreme Court Bulletin for the past months. I not only learned about areas of law that I would not encounter in classrooms, but I also formed friendships with other members. As an Executive Editor, there are a lot more responsibilities but I am excited about welcoming new members to the Bulletin and look forward to another great year of previews.

Angela Zhu

Kathryn and Angela will be joined by Isaac Syed as the Bulletin’s Outreach Coordinator, as well as ten of their classmates who will take the title “Managing Editor” and do the critical work of editing the Previews to be produced by next year’s associates.  Kathryn, Angela, Isaac, and the ME’s will choose those associates in the coming weeks through a competitive application process. All of our new leaders are excited about the greater responsibilities of their new positions and are particularly looking forward to welcoming new associates in the fall.   

Click here to access our Supreme Court Bulletin Previews, and find our students on Twitter and Facebook, too.

How CONAN Helps People Understand the Constitution and No, We Don’t Mean the Barbarian

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The Constitution Annotated, popularly known as CONAN, has been published by the Congressional Research Service since 1913 and provides analysis of the Supreme Court cases interpreting the Constitution. CONAN is highly regarded as a non-partisan publication that helps readers appreciate how Americans’ understanding of our governing principles has changed throughout our history on timely issues such as the scope of presidential power, limits on free speech, or the right to bear arms.

For many years, the LII published CONAN on our website and regularly updated it each time the Government Publishing Office (GPO) released a new version. But then GPO stopped making the underlying code publicly available, choosing instead to release only a print version and an unwieldy 2800 page PDF online. Without the software “roadmap” that facilitates not only re-publication but also the sort of feature-rich improvements that distinguish our collections, our online CONAN fell out of date. But, in 2018, with help from open government advocates Josh Tauberer of GovTrack and Daniel Schuman of Demand Progress, the LII re-created that XML software map, put it on the web and then used it to improve upon the government’s online version. In addition to being fully up-to-date, LII’s CONAN is easy to find online, to navigate and to search. It’s also accessible to people with disabilities; and, it links directly to close to 9000 Supreme Court cases on our site. Subsequent versions will use Semantic Web technologies to assist interconnection and data integration with other online resources.

“We have created an enhanced version that will not only be better in and of itself, but also act as a resource for improving other parts of our collections, notably our set of Supreme Court cases,” explained LII Director Tom Bruce. “For example, we can make use of citations in footnotes to establish relatedness between cases, allowing us to show which of the cases that are related to a particular case by citation are actually the most related with respect to a particular topic. We think it is going to be quite something.”

SCOTUSBlog and Roll Call wrote about our new resource, and The American Association of Law Libraries spread the word in their newsletter. Looking at our traffic stats, we can tell it’s been very popular among educators, from high schools across the country to Duke University and the U.S. Naval Academy. It’s also been used by journalists covering current events and linked to in articles by the Washington Post and the Atlantic among others. Most recently, CNN included a link to Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 that explains the power that Congress has in deciding how money should be appropriated from the Treasury for government projects in an article covering the national state of emergency declared by the President in order to build a wall on the southern border.

Since we made it available to the public this Constitution Day (September 17, 2018) CONAN has now been viewed more than 570,000 times!

We set out to refurbish this resource without being quite certain of the audience because we knew there WAS an audience and thought someone ought to do it form. CONAN is an invaluable document that helps us understand how our interpretation of the Constitution has evolved over the years. Now, a few months in, we are glad to see how quickly it’s been adopted and grown in popularity. And we’d like to say thank you – without your support, this would not be possible! The Library of Congress refers to the Constitution Annotated as “one of our most important resources in answering questions about the Constitution and its history.”, and we look forward to making it even easier to find and understand.

You can find the Constitution Annotated here.

A Note From our Director: Thank You

Friends:

Just a quick note to say thanks to all of you who made contributions to the LII during our end-of-year fundraising campaign. Your gifts make it possible for millions of people around the world to find and understand the law. You should be proud.

How proud should you be? Good question. We know that your contributions help many, many people in ways that you may not expect. Some of the impact is direct:

I have relied on your website for reliable, quality information for years as a policy researcher for the White House and the NC Lieutenant Governor and Senate, as well as many clients, both nonprofit and governmental. Keep up the great work.

Thank you for providing access to education law, so parents can find & understand the regulations that apply to ed. assessment and placement. We are the parents of a child in the 10th grade. Although we’ve provided multiple, full IEEs at our own expense, our schools refuse to acknowledge any disability. Our son’s poor, basic literacy skills place growing limitations on his current & future access to education. We can’t afford private intervention.

As a retired federal prosecutor who helped put dozens of people in prison and now as a member of the public without a law office, I strongly support free, universal access to the law as the best way to create respect for it. This is the 21st century equivalent of the musty law libraries in thousand of county courthouses across the land.

Some is indirect. A lot of people in our audience make use of what they find here to help others:

Access to your resource helped me to assist a victim of crime in an application for a US visa. My client is a father who, I am arguing, suffered “direct and proximate harm” from his son’s murder. I used your resource to help explain my request for support to a local law enforcement agency.

Your info has helped me win many VA claims for my clients as well as give great info to pro se Veterans. Thank you!

As a solo practitioner, your website has given me the opportunity to conduct legal research on a wide range of topics, without the expense to the client.

This year, we’re especially grateful to you because so many of you pitched in. It was easily the most successful fundraising campaign in our history. Over 4,000 of you helped out, contributing far more than in any prior campaign. More, we’re excited by your endorsement of our work. We meet very few of you in person — but your contributions and your comments remind us of the importance of what we are doing together.

There is one more thing you could do for us. We learn a lot about the impact of our work from the comments that supporters leave when they make online donations. We need to learn more, and so we’ve come up with a survey for donors and non-donors alike. If you could do us a favor and take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be extremely helpful.

Start the survey…

Again, thank you, from all of us. Your generosity means a lot.

T.