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The LII helps catch America’s Toughest Sheriff

arpaio-gest.jpgLast week,  the Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff,  Joe Arpaio, claimed authority to make street arrests of illegal immigrants under a Federal law that doesn’t exist.  He claimed that we were the source of this information.  We weren’t.  Please read what we have to say about it here.

It’s rare that we get such a dramatic demonstration of the value of open access to law and of services such as ours.  It presents a unique opportunity for us to demonstrate our impact.  Please help by passing this along to others.

Viktor Mayer-Schonberger on Peer Production

croudsourcing.jpgOver in VoxPopuLII, Viktor Mayer-Schonberger has some ideas about peer production, open source, and the legal information sphere that are worth a look. He’s an old friend of the LII, and we are assisting him on a project involving the analysis of citations in Supreme Court opinions.

Viktor is the author of the just-released  “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in a Digital Age“.  Unfortunately, we can’t seem to find the video archive of the talk he gave at Cornell a couple of years ago, in which he outlined the thesis of the book.  Since that thesis consists, in part, of the idea that the Internet retains far too much, we imagine that he is pleased about this — even though it was an excellent talk.

LII’s 18 USC 871 makes CNN appearance

Hitchcock in Strangers on a TrainIt’s not in the same league as Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearances — we have always particularly liked the man with the double bass in Strangers on a Train — but the LII’s version of 18 USC 871 shows up at about 2:22 into this clip from CNN (annoyingly, WordPress does not allow us to embed it without adding a plugin, so you’ll just have to click the clicky thing). LII programmers Brian Hughes and Dave Shetland are eagerly awaiting Emmy nominations for their supporting roles.

WEX: we offer sponsorships

If you’ve been paying close attention to WEX — our collaboratively-constructed legal encyclopedia and dictionary — you’ve noticed a few interesting things over the last couple of weeks.

  • We’ve changed over to a new format that incorporates a tabbed layout.  That makes more room for our authors and collaborators to add more, better, and different information to the collection (take a look at the “in other words” tab for the definition of “Chevron deference” to get an idea of where we’re headed.   Expect more tabs, representing new kinds of information, soon.  Right now, it all looks a little empty — but we hope you’ll help us change that.
  • We’re adding a lot of definitions. Now that our team of dedicated Wexers has hit its stride, there will soon be hundreds more terms in the dictionary.  We have chosen to focus on basic terms that will serve as building blocks for future authors, which we hope will make Wex-authoring job much easier.
  • Finally, we’ve added sponsorship slots — places where people who support us can make themselves known to our audience.

We think sponsorship offers good value to individuals and businesses who want to reach out to those who seek legal information:

  • People who come to the LII identify themselves, by definition, as people with a particular need for legal information or services.
  • It’s a diverse audience where you might find clients for a legal-services business, firms interested in services for the legal profession, or consumers with an identifiable interest in other kinds of products (we are waiting eagerly for the day when a company that sells steel-toed shoes will sponsor our section on workplace-safety laws).
  • It’s a big audience, too: about 100,000 unique visitors to the site each day, brought there for the most part by our very high search-engine rankings for popular law subjects.
  • Pricing is extremely reasonable.

Best of all, LII sponsorships offer an opportunity to do well by doing good.  Every dollar that comes to us goes to support and improve our current collections, and to add new material to the site.  We think that sponsorships will help you, even as they help us make the LII bigger and better.

Information on sponsorships is here.  We hope you’ll consider it carefully, and let us know what you think.

Take a bow, Dave Shetland

Theater people get reviewed in the pages of big-city newspapers and national magazines; legal-information wranglers have to go further afield.  In our case, pretty far afield indeed:  Addendum 2 of Attachment 1 of OPR09000754 , the RFP for a new front-end to the United States Code as it is published by the Law Revision Counsel of the House of Representatives (the RFP closed last week, and the LII was not a bidder… but we do have some plans for a new presentation of the US Code, and it’s the second major project in the queue right now, so… in a few months, maybe?).

Addendum 2 says, in effect, “if you want to know how to build an updating feature based on the Classification Tables,  or incorporate the Notes, take a look at what the LII did”.  Or, in this case, what Dave Shetland did — he’s the guy with primary responsibility for the LII’s US Code as well as for most of our work in XML modelling over the last several years.

Take a bow, Dave.

We start our June fundraiser

As we do twice each year, we’re asking for your help in keeping this free service free. This year, we’ve gone to an abbreviated June fundraising campaign (two weeks instead of a full month) and a much less obtrusive ask on each page of the site (a dynamic header as opposed to popups). It’s low-key, but no less important: we count on you to help.

If you’re so inclined, you can donate here. We hope you will.

Julie Jones on interfaces

slotsmall.jpgWe’ve long complained that Google’s search paradigm encourages behavior not unlike that of a slot machine addict.  You put in some terms, you pull the handle, you see what you get, you put in some terms, you pull the handle… pull the handle… pull the handle… oh, sorry.  Got lost there for a moment.  The problem with the slot machine paradigm, of course, is that you can only change your bet (by changing terms) or get someone to rig the machine (by changing the underlying algorithms).  The feedback you get from the machine is, perhaps, not so useful.

Over in VoxPop, Julie Jones looks at the question of better interfaces for legal research —  a  step away from the slot machine, and toward something better.  Have a look.

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