In the specialized language of Google Analytics, a “landing page” is one where users enter your web site directly — that is, either from a bookmark or a link from another site, rather than by referral from another page on your site. They’re interesting to us because they give us a good feel for what our audience feels is worth looking at or recommending to others. From that vantage point, the top 5 Supreme Court cases at the LII are:
Daniel Poulin’s First Monday article makes a persuasive case for open access to law in developing countries. Daniel, the founder and director of CanLII, has wide experience in bringing open access to Francophone Africa, and it shows. Highly recommended.
LII co-founder and Co-Director Emeritus Peter Martin has written an interesting paper on court records and privacy — certainly an issue that is much on our minds here. The tension between openness in court proceedings (on the one hand) and the legitimate privacy interests of participants in the legal system (on the other) are very difficult ones, compounded by many, many private agendas.
We’ve touched on these issues here before, and no doubt will again. If you’re interested, you might take a look at the presentation from Peter Winn that we jointly sponsored with Cornell Information Science in January — and if you’re not interested, you might want to take a look at WhosARat.com. Thirty seconds of thought about what it means to criminal prosecution will get you interested, in a hurry.
Here’s the abstract:
For over a decade the public has had remote access to federal court records held in electronic format, including documents filed by litigants and judicial rulings. First available via dial-up connections, access migrated to the Web in 1998. That and a succession of other improvements to the federal “Public Access to Court Electronic Records” system or PACER prompted the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to proclaim in 2001 that “the advancement of technology has brought the citizen ever closer to the courthouse.” Unquestionably, what the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and Judicial Conference of the United States have built offers citizens, businesses, journalists, and scholars unprecedented access to the details of individual court proceedings. But to hold PACER in that frame is to miss much of its impact. Moreover, some of the gains one might hope or expect to flow from enhanced judicial transparency remain largely untouched by this system. The article explores PACER’s evolution, larger impact, and unrealized possibilities. It then proceeds to examine why state courts are, in general, approaching online access to court records so differently.
Also this month: new articles from Greg Alexander and Bob Hockett.
Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions was a breath of fresh air when it was first published, and it still is. It’s about the sociology of the professions — a subject that seems a little far afield. But we spend some time thinking about how all this legal information is going to alter the contours of the profession, and Abbott’s book is a guidepost — it talks about the role of information and knowledge in defining professional boundaries, and about the commodification of knowledge. Ever think about why Quicken Willmaker Plus is like an eighteenth-century aspirin? Thought not. Seriously, though — this one’s fundamental if you want to know how all this public information is going to affect the profession.
No doubt every legal blogger in the US is going to say something about the fact that today, April 15, is the annual due date for personal income tax filings in the US (it’s also the date on which Wordsworth found his inspiration for I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud, but there’s not nearly as much to say about that.)
We like tax law, because it’s complicated and geeky. It’s also a place where the public frequently comes face to face with the law — Amazon lists over 68,000 books with the words “income tax” in the title. And it’s a longstanding arena for disputes over professional jurisdiction between lawyers and other groups (like accountants, for instance, or financial planners). Those things alone would make tax more than usually interesting. But let’s start with the numbers:
Popular linking destinations within the tax code include:
But that’s all the really boring stuff. The tax code is…well, it’s unique. More than any other chunk of law we can think of, it’s created a language of its own. We say things like “it’s a Subchapter K”, or “we’re forming a 501(c)(3)”, and people who are not tax lawyers have some idea what they’re talking about. It also holds a prominent place in many systems of what we guess you’d call “alternate jurisprudence” — the beliefs of those who, like militia groups, see something fundamentally different when they look at the way the US is governed. The IRS deals with many such arguments on its page debunking a number of claims by tax protesters; it’s one of our favorite pieces of public legal information. Wikipedia strongly distinguishes between tax resisters and tax protesters — a valid distinction we confess we hadn’t thought about, but probably also one of those places where Wikipedians have agreed to disagree. You can find other debunking pages linked from the Wikipedia articles.
All in all, a lot of things to distract you from the fact that you forgot to file that extension….
Most of the time, the LII thinks about law on the Internet rather than the law of the Internet. But we often work with our friends at the University Computer Policy and Law Program to sponsor things here at Cornell. They’ve got a great archive of video material — including presentations by Dan Solove, Yochai Benkler, William (“Terry”) Fisher, John Palfrey, Fred Schneider, and many more. These will be particularly interesting to you if you’re trying to explore law-of-the-Internet issues with undergrads or other non-law folks. Highly recommended.
Back when the Internet was struggling from the primordial ooze of the ARPAnet and shedding its gill flaps on the way to becoming something known as the NREN, Hank Perritt started to think about what that might mean for publishers and other information providers — particularly legal publishers. The “value chain” he posited twenty years ago is obvious stuff now — but remember that in those days we were still arguing about whether there should even be commercial use of the Internet (yeah, I know, I’m dating myself here).
So take a look at “Market Structures for Electronic Publishing and Electronic Contracting”, in Building Information Infrastructure: Issues in the Development of the National Research and Education Network (Harvard University and McGraw-Hill 1992) . The publication date on the book is 1992, but I remember seeing a draft of this article as early as 1989. Seems like it’s out of print and hard to get now (I can’t find it in Amazon), but any good academic library will have it, and you can find it on e-Bay.
Hank has done a lot of good stuff since, but this one (also something of an oldie) is a personal favorite of ours — it says a lot of things about legal information by talking about GIS data. See “Should Local Governments Sell Local Spatial Databases Through State Monopolies?“, 35 Jurimetrics Journal 449 (1995).
Readings about legal information — especially electronic legal information — are oddly scattered across a bunch of different literatures. There’s some material in law reviews, some in the communications literature, some in sociology, library science, computer science, auto repair…. Maybe not auto repair, so much. Though there are some things about running a large legal web site that remind us of doing body work on a 1967 Impala .
One of these days, we tell ourselves, we’ll put together a Scuttle site that will act as a place to collect these resources, all in one spot. But we thought it might be good to put some attention on legal-information classics. No doubt the first one we encountered was Ethan Katsh‘s Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law — published a few years before anybody came up with this thing called the Web, probably the first thing we ever read that considered the subject, and still a very fresh look at how mass media change law. Like everything else mentioned here, we recommend it highly.
Our collections are popular with public-school teachers; around 554 public schools have links to the LII (there are surely more; we searched for linkers with “k12” in the domain name). The most prolific is the Kentridge High School Library in Kent, WA (a Seattle suburb), whose site for commercial law is better than some graduate law libraries we’ve seen. Most popular things to link to? Supreme Court decisions, and the WEX legal encyclopedia. Surprisingly, not many are yet teaching from the LIIBULLETIN writeups of upcoming Supreme Court cases, but give ’em time….
The LII’s link census seems like an odd place to go to find out what’s on people’s minds. But there are some interesting tidbits there, especially when you look at links to the US Code. Seems that people are concerned about going bankrupt (Title 11, 2101 links), belonging to the National Guard (10 USC 311, 860 links), and telemarketers who bother them while they’re trying to finish blog posts (47 USC 227, 738 links). There are some fascinating questions awaiting a social scientist who wants to work with our data; any takers?
B-screeds
