We received a mysteriously weighty box via UPS yesterday.  In it, we found 100 copies of the 2009 IRS Tax Products DVD (First Release).  The IRS distributes this DVD to its regional offices, third partytax-assistance operations, and corporations that help out their employees by distributing tax forms and materials internally.  They distribute thousands of them — and every one contains the LII’s version of 26 USC, the Internal Revenue Code.  This is the third year that the IRS has made use of our version of the Code, and we’re very, very pleased.  Thanks, tax guys!

For reasons that are a mystery to us, our news aggregator periodically kicks out a blog post from very far back in time.  Yesterday it resurrected a post from the “Keep Me In Suspense” blog, a resource site for writers of mystery fiction.  Turns out they just love the LII.  And we love people who find unusual uses for us.  Here’s what they said:

The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University (http://www.law.cornell.edu) is an EXCELLENT source of background material on legal issues. This page: http://topics.law.cornell.edu/wex/all leads to overview articles on a host of legal issues. Have questions about child support? Start there. How about probate and wills? You guessed it – go there first. Many of the initial questions I’m asked could be answered if the person searched for an article here first. The general page breaks the law into federal and state issues and gives a helpful overview. I STRONGLY encourage you to start your legal research here.

How cool is that? We know that we’ve received mentions in at least one published mystery novel, and now we’re looking forward to others. Thanks, guys.

Around here, the biggest mystery is how we manage to keep this operation funded. If you haven’t yet made a tax-deductible contribution to the LII this year, we’d ask that you do so now. Your C-note would be greatly appreciated.

[NB: the observant among you will find our Mystery Reason for selecting the particular Hardy Boys illustration we did. If you were producing an audio book, it’s very odd that you would select as the reader a man whose reputation (and MacArthur genius grant) was based on his work as a silent clown….]

Over in VoxPopuLII, our Catalonian collaborator Joan-Josep Vallbe (known to one and all as “Pep”) talks about the role of organizational management and KM systems in judicial administration.  He argues for the use of techniques that capture and model knowledge from non-documentary sources as helpful to judicial process, and we’d agree — in fact, we’d extend the idea to processes such as the drafting of regulations and the preparation of guidance and compliance documents.

From time to time, we like to give some recognition to projects that make use of our materials.  This month, we salute the StandDown Texas Project and its director, Steve Hall.  In its own words:

The StandDown Texas Project was organized in 2000 to advocate a moratorium on executions and a state-sponsored review of Texas’ application of the death penalty. To stand down is to go off duty temporarily, especially to review safety procedures.

The site advocates a moratorium on capital punishment in Texas, and provides news and commentary about capital cases throughout the US.  Good work, Steve — and thanks for the links.

Somehow, there was a two-week gap between our postings on Law via the Internet Day 1, and this posting about Day 2.  But we lacked time to post about Day 2 before leaving Durban for a week and a half in places (including the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve) that lack reliable access to the Internet.

Details of the second day are reported in great detail by Christine Kirchberger in her excellent blog.  Highlights included a talk by Graham Greenleaf of AustLII on sustainability strategies for LIIs, a presentation by Justice O’Regan of the SA Constitutional Court, and a dinner speech by the LII’s co-founder and co-director emeritus Peter Martin about the 40-year history of important developments in online access to law.  We were most taken with Justice O’Regan’s remark that the privacy of public records is the responsibility of courts that must act with full knowledge that judicial opinions will be indexed by Google.

All in all a most successful conference, with much to offer on policy and technology.  It should be a great source of pride to its hosts at SAFLII.

LII co-founders Tom Bruce and Peter Martin are in Durban, South Africa, attending the tenth Law Via The Internet Conference. It’s an exhilarating and humbling experience, seeing what so many are doing to make law available and accessible around the world.  It’s especially interesting to see those who have no investment in old ways of doing things create new and innovative solutions — we were particularly taken with Kenya Law Reports’ Bench Research Hotline , a service that provides Kenyan judicial officers with research services via a call center.  It’s a creative way of strengthening judicial infrastructure.  Geekier presentations included Fabio Vitali’s very useful presentation of the Akoma Ntoso legal-XML framework and a report on the emerging URN:Lex standard for uniquely identifying legal documents on the Internet, to which LII Director Tom Bruce is a contributor.

There’s a lot more to report (and we will, when things calm down a bit– last night, we were preoccupied with finding a turkey dinner in South Africa on Thanksgiving Day).  For legal information news junkies, we recommend VoxPopuLII author Christine Kirchberger’s detailed narrative of the first day’s doings.  If you want to follow along, the conference is tweeted as hashtag #LVI2009.

This message — and the mural image at the left — come to you from Durban, South Africa.  The LII founders are meeting with LIIs from all over the world here at the annual Law via the Internet conference, a gathering of the more than 20 namesake LIIs that have sprung up since we began our own operation 17 years ago.   South Africa provides powerful reminders of why we do what we do. Yesterday, we saw an exhibit at Durban’s apartheid museum — about the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.  It took us away from our usual perspective– and was both powerful and humbling.

There are a lot of reasons to support open access to law.  I talk about some of them in my blog (and in the letter to our regular donors) that appears this week at http://blog.law.cornell.edu/tbruce .  As we always do at this time of year, we ask for your support in continuing our work of providing free access to law, and helping others to do so.  There are two things you should do. 

• Make a donation, at http://www.law.cornell.edu/donors
• Tell everyone you did– in your Facebook status, via Twitter, in person. 

We’ll be grateful.  And you’ll be helping to make law accessible to people around the world.

Over in VoxPopuLII, Tom Boone has a great new article on the effects of duopoly on usability in the field of legal research.  This adds to a chorus of postings in various places over the last week or two, all talking the effects of the market structure of legal information in America on public access, usability, and other aspects of the system.  Of course, after the events of this week, nobody is really sure if it’s going to be a duopoly any more…..

Old LII friends Rick Klau and Anurag Acharya at Google have created a new repository of caselaw accessible via Google Scholar.  Anurag blogs about it here.   This is a very welcome development, both for us and for open access to law in general, and we applaud it.  It’s not Wexis yet, but it’s a very good start, and a great benefit to the public.  No doubt there will be more — and more interesting — things to come.