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Anatomy of a Traffic Spike: Signs of the Times Edition

Rather than focusing on a single incident that spiked traffic to a particular page of our website, we thought we would instead share a slightly broader view of what legal topics are particularly on people’s mind as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. For pages with more than 10,000 views since April 1st, these are the parts of the law where viewership has more than doubled over the same period last year:

The Constitution: Always one of our busiest pages, the First Amendment is seeing about 125% as much traffic as it did this time last year. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is up just under 200%, and the Tenth Amendment shows an increase in viewership of 821%. The Constitution Annotated (CONAN) entry for the Tenth Amendment is up 2705%. Other popular parts of CONAN this month are “The Right to Travel” in section one of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is up 1168%, and also “Martial Law and Constitutional Limitations” in section two of Article Two, which is up 5276%. Our Wex entry on executive power was up 214%, and the entry on the Fifth Amendment was up 113%. (The Fifth Amendment itself, while the 15th most popular page on the website in April, was only viewed about a third more often than usual.)  

The Supreme Court:  A Supreme Court case from 1905 was viewed 4,316% more times in April of 2020 than in April of 2019. In Henning Jacobsen v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Supreme Court upheld a mandatory vaccination law against a challenge under the Fourteenth Amendment. Of the more than 13,000 views of this page in April, 4653 of them arrived from this CNN article. About as many, 4,500, came from a link in an email.  Perhaps teachers were asking students to read and think about the arguments for and against mandatory vaccinations? (We like when that happens!) 

The U.S. Code: Surprisingly, only one section of the U.S. Code met the criteria for inclusion in this article. That section, 15 USC 632, establishes the legal definition of a “small business” under federal law. Viewership was up almost 7,000%.  

The Code of Federal Regulations: Regulations governing small businesses were also heavily trafficked. In 13 CFR, for example, the section addressing eligibility for loans from the Small Business Administration was viewed almost 33,000 times in April, a leap of more than 38,000% from this time last year.  Another section addressing small business loans saw almost 30,000 viewers, an increase of 28,391%.  Other related parts of those regulations saw jumps of 18,000%, 3,628%, 2500%, and 2250% as well.  Sadly, the most viewed page in the entire CFR in April dealt with federal unemployment insurance. That section, 20 CFR 625.6, was viewed only 27 times in April of 2019, but has been viewed almost 85,000 times this April.  That’s an increase of more than 300,000%.  

That’s a very somber note to end on. All we can say is that we will continue to pay attention to the needs of our users and try to build features and resources to help them run their businesses and live their lives in good times and bad.

We appreciate what you do to help us help them.

Returning to Our Regularly-Scheduled Program

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In January, we started work with a Cornell Computing and Information Science team on a project we called “Save the Constitution Again.” 

The project has a long history, beginning in the mid-2000s, when LII first published a web version of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) U.S.  Constitution Annotated (“CONAN”). CONAN provides legal analysis and interpretation of the Constitution, focusing on Supreme Court jurisprudence and is a very highly regarded source of information about the fundamentals of the American system of government. Like LII, CONAN is prized for its objectivity. Two years ago (after more than a decade of waiting for the government to publish its XML source data once the plain-text publication was discontinued), a CS 5150 Software Engineering Practicum team helped LII “Save the Constitution” by working on a conversion from what was then the only available published format: PDF.  It was a great success, garnering more than 900,000 visitors in its first year and 1.5 million in calendar year 2019. But in September of 2019, the government published its own CONAN website, effectively orphaning our data source for the second time.  

We returned to CS 5150, proposing a project that would build upon the last one. Having made CONAN more accessible, we now wanted to focus on making its content easier to find and understand. The large project team split into small groups, each specializing in an aspect of the challenge. One group focused on splitting the source text into component parts. A second extracted information about the relationship between the Constitution and the Supreme Court decisions that interpret it. A third explored techniques for summarization. You already know what happened next: along with much of the rest of the world, the University shut down.

So we started meeting by teleconference and re-envisioned the scope of the project. The students weathered shelter-in-place, travel home, quarantine, and a 12-hour timezone range to continue their work. In the next few weeks, they’ll be wrapping up handover details and presenting their results – we look forward to getting their work in front of the public.

SCOTUS Does Good Thing after Doing Odd Thing

On April 27, the Supreme Court handed a significant win to advocates for Free Law by holding that the “government edicts doctrine” forbade legislatures from claiming copyright in any materials they produce in the course of their official duties, whether or not the materials in question carry “the force of law.” Writing for a 5-4 majority, Chief Justice Roberts explained, “The animating principle behind this rule is that no one can own the law. Every citizen is presumed to know the law, and it needs no argument to show that all should have free access to its contents.” (internal quotation and punctuation omitted). 

Now, where have you heard that before? Maybe here? How about here? Or, perhaps, here?  

So, that’s the “Good Thing.” Now, what about this “Odd Thing” we mentioned in the headline? In case you missed it, the Court postponed its March and April calendars several weeks ago. Then it announced it would hear oral arguments in about half of those cases in May via telephonic hearing. (The other half, it seems, will wait until the new term begins this Fall.) C-SPAN will have access to the live audio feed and has promised public access.  

If we hear more, we’ll let you know.

Free COVID-19 Legal Resources

In case you missed it on social media, please take a minute to look at the resources we’ve aggregated from around the Web to help people answer their legal questions arising out of COVID-19. The url is: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/covid-19_resources 

As you’ll see, none of the resources we link to there are of our own creation. Much larger groups than ours – most notably our friends at Justia and Fastcase – are diverting the labor of their content-creating teams to providing this public service, and we wanted to both acknowledge that effort and also maximize the visibility of the results.

We’re Okay

Dear Friends of the LII,

We wanted to let everyone know that we are weathering COVID-19, and all that comes with it, just fine for now. Most importantly, our small staff and their loved ones at home all remain virus free. We hope that everyone in our audience can say the same. 

Important for our mission, the LII remains financially healthy as well.  Because of your generosity during our year-end campaign (and throughout the year, really) along with our income derived from both advertising on the website and also corporate partners, we are certain to meet our funding goals through the end of our fiscal year in June. As has been the case for the last few years, we will cost Cornell University nothing more than the five offices we occupy within the Law School (and, of course, at the moment we aren’t even using those!).  

Meanwhile, you may have heard about a “Giving Tuesday Now” initiative set for May 5, 2020.  (Giving Tuesday is usually the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving.) A lot of very worthy causes are seeing costs going up, work becoming more difficult (while also more necessary), and financial support decreasing. It’s a nightmare scenario for many sectors of the nonprofit world.  

But, we’re okay. The website is running. Research and feature development in the US Code, CFR and Constitution Annotated continue, as does original content creation with the Supreme Court Bulletin Previews and Wex.  

So we won’t be soliciting donations on Giving Tuesday Now, and we are foregoing our usual June fundraising campaign in deference to other causes that are in dire straits. If you usually support us this time of year, we hope you will consider focusing your generosity on a food pantry, a local library, a shuttered playhouse or symphony orchestra, or any of the thousands upon thousands of worthy causes out there.

We will fire up our fundraising machinery again in November for our year-end campaign. Until then, we’ll send you the occasional newsletter update (like this one) telling you what we are doing and highlighting some of the interesting things and people we encounter in our work. So, please keep in touch.  

All the best,

Craig, Sara, Nic, Sylvia, Jim, Ayham, Val, and Neli