Bruce Thomas – Page 13

Bruce hangs with CanLII crew at Canada’s legal 411 crib

Since he’s in town for the dg.o conference in Montreal this week, LII director Tom Bruce is taking the opportunity to visit old friends at CanLII. CanLII was the first “namesake” organization to adopt the LII name in the mid-90’s, and has grown into the definitive open-access national law resource for Canada. It’s relied on by all Canadian lawyers — who, incidentally, support the service through fees collected directly by their Bar Association.Bruce will be giving a small seminar for the CanLII staff. He plans to talk about the relationship between repositories that are relatively rich in subject-specific metadata — like the LII and CanLII — and search engines of general application, like Google. The trick is to figure out how to provide a seamless and enriched search process for people who first access our web sites via the large public search engines, but could then enjoy faster and more accurate searching using localized, specialized search. It is unlikely, however, that a sharp and curious crew like the CanLII folks will stick to the topic — an exploration that will be fun, educational, and productive for all involved.

LII and CeRI do legal information science at dg.o 2008, Montreal

Tom Bruce, the LII’s director, and the multidisciplinary team from CeRI (Bruce, Cynthia Farina, Claire Cardie, and Steve Purpura) are giving workshops and presentations at the Digital Government (dg.o) 2008 conference in Montreal this week.Bruce is co-chairing a workshop entitled “e-rulemaking at the crossroads”. The workshop will consist of presentations from a variety of research teams working in the area of electronic rulemaking: public participation in the notice-and-comment process by which Federal regulations are constructed and reviewed. Presentations range from the policy-oriented to the very, very technical — e-rulemaking is a very useful place to do research in advanced language technologies and machine learning. The policy work draws heavily on Bruce and Farina’s service on the ABA Section of Administrative Law’s Special Committee on the Future of e-Rulemaking, for which Farina is reporter.

On Tuesday, Farina and Purpura will each present papers entitled (respectively) “A Study in Text Categorization for e-rulemaking” and “Active Learning for e-Rulemaking”. The former will present research results from work done with rulemakings from the Department of Transportation and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industrial Security. The latter is a very technical paper comparing the accuracy of different categorization algorithms used to match comments to a taxonomy of issues raised by the regulation. Not, perhaps, the easiest thing to understand, because there’s lots of scary math involved — but a valuable first step toward increased public participation in the regulatory process.

We’re already learning a lot from people at other institutions. Particularly interesting is Peter Muhlberger‘s project at Texas Tech, some work on ontologies from Carnegie Mellon, and a paper on segmenting SEC filings that looks as though it describes useful techniques for getting better metadata out of Federal Court decisions — all of which can lead to new and better services from the LII.

Readings in Legal Information, pt. 7

Some of our colleagues think this is a contrarian pose, but honest: The Reader’s Digest Legal Problem Solver is one of the most intriguing legal-information books you can find. Especially noteworthy is its method of organization, which uses dictionary format to combine definitions of hard law words (“promissory estoppel”) with longer articles keyed on terms a naive user would be likely to use. Thus, the article for “neighbor” might discuss nuisance, boundary disputes, rights of way, and so on. An interesting way of steering the naive user’s preoccupation with fact patterns toward legal concepts and definitions — genuinely novel and useful. Alas, it’s out of print, but you can find lots of used copies.

Human Interest?

Of course, it is term-paper season, but it seems as though the biggest reason people look at the LII’s Supreme Court collection is an interest in the Justices themselves. Those coming to the site by way of a search on “supreme court justices” or something similar accounted for around 15,000 of the 367,540 visits to the collection last month. They spend roughly twice the average amount of time on the site, too. Unsurprisingly, the next-largest cluster of searches we can identify involves Roe v. Wade.

As far as individual Justices go, Sandra Day O’Connor is the most-searched-for, with Clarence Thomas a distant second. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is in third place. Interestingly, searchers typically type out Justice O’Connor’s name in full (“Sandra Day O’Connor”), but favor a terse, lower-case approach to Scalia (“scalia”). Only one of the 367,540 searched for “nino”.

What are they looking for? pt. 1

Google Analytics gives us an awful lot of information about the use of our site (we sometimes wish we were a little better at figuring out what the data actually means, but we’re learning). Here are the top ten search terms that lead people to our WEX legal encyclopedia:

first amendment
bankruptcy
death penalty
pollution
emancipation
welfare
civil rights
equal protection
labor laws
child custody

We hesitate to draw any larger conclusions from this…but it’s certainly true that emancipation laws (which specify the age at which children may declare themselves independent of their parents) figure in a lot of the e-mail that we get.

"Brand-name" Supreme Court cases

A surprising number of cases in the LII’s Supreme Court collection are asked for by name — that is, as the end-point of a search for the names of the parties. The top five brand-name cases are:

This ordering probably isn’t strictly accurate — people find an astonishing number of ways to search for a particular case, and there are nearly as many searches for “Gore vs. Bush” as there are for “Bush v. Gore”. No surprises in the rankings, really, though we might have expected Brown v. Board to place higher (it comes in sixth), and Roper v. Simmons ranks higher than we might have predicted — though the juvenile death penalty is probably a fairly compelling topic for school reports.

US Code updates via RSS

We now offer notification of changes to the US Code via RSS. It’s a beta service, and we’re eager for your reaction to it. You can access the service by clicking the standard RSS icons next to the listing-by-Title on our main US Code page (we plan to put icons on every US Code page, but haven’t done so yet).

A couple of notes:

First, the RSS feed is tied to the Classification Tables published by the Law Revision Counsel’s Office at the House of Representatives. This means that you’ll be notified of changes as soon as their ultimate location in the Code is known, which is usually significantly after the law is passed by Congress. For up-to-the-minute updating, you’ll still need Thomas. A really good, if dated, guide to US Code updating is here.

Second, the service is offered on a Title-by-Title basis because (based on observation) we don’t think the volume in any Title (even 26) is likely to become overwhelming. We could be wrong about that — and we might also be able to format the information in the feeds in a way that makes it easier for you to find exactly what you want.

That’s the great thing about an experimental service — we can change it, and we’re eager for your suggestions. Let us know.

LII Director Bruce teams with Carl Malamud for podcast

On May 1, LII Director Tom Bruce and open-access advocate Carl Malamud of public.resource.org were featured on the popular practitioner’s podcast Lawyer2Lawyer. Also included in the podcast, but recorded separately, was Andy Martens, Senior Vice President of New Product Development for Thomson West. No doubt the discussion was less lively than it might have been had all three been present simultaneously, but it’s still a good run through the issues. Tom also said that “it was good fun trying to talk faster than Carl”. We’re grateful to L2L hosts Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams (pictured) for the opportunity to appear on the show.

You can listen to the podcast here (also available in WMA format)

Readings in Legal Information, pt. 6

An interesting topic about which little has been said: information-seeking behavior by lawyers. We all know it’s different, both in its drive for a comprehensiveness (as opposed to simple utility), and in the ways in which it serves advocacy. But there hasn’t been very much research on how, exactly, that works — or on how lawyer information-seeking practices differ from those of information seekers in other fields (actually, we might back away from that claim a little — this area is ripe for a literature review that we have not had time to do).

Much of the little that is out there describes a transition from printed books to online research, something that now looks a bit dated. But there are a exceptions to that, good starting points all:

Kuhlthau and Tama, Information Seeking Behavior of Lawyers.
Makri, Blandford, and Cox, Studying Law Students’ Information Seeking Behaviour to Inform the Design of Digital Law Libraries (which has a rather useful bibliography).

Readings in Legal Information, pt. 5

Marc Galanter’s Why the Haves Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change is one of the most-cited law review articles of all time, and we’ve quoted from it here before. It discusses the advantages that accrue to repeat players in our legal system. For legal information junkies, it’s interesting to note how many of those advantages are information-based — that is, rooted in one party having access to information that the other one doesn’t.