Bruce Thomas – Page 8

regulationroom.org debuts

For the last couple of years, we’ve been involved with our sister organization CeRI (the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative) in looking at the ways people interact with Federal regulatory agencies. The most visible artifact of that involvement was the ABA committee report on regulations.gov, which has already led to some important improvements in that system and in the ways that people can find out about and act on new Federal regulations. Now, CeRI has a new website (www.regulationroom.org) that is meant to significantly enhance the process of public participation. Right now, it’s in beta — with lots to learn about what people want and how they interact with the system, and a series of experiments planned for the next several months. Check it out.

Supreme Court hears two today

Today’s oral arguments involve immigration and corporate citizenship. Our LIIBULLETIN writeups are at http://bit.ly/2YKPWw

Help us make our case

Every year during December, we seek donations from those who believe that law should be accessible to everyone. That can be a hard case to make; the world does not often give us dramatic illustrations of the fight against legal deception — like the one provided by Sheriff Joe Arpaio — or the opportunity for our donors to wager against the prominent academic law librarian who has placed our life expectancy at under ten years (we’ve been around for 17, which means that next year we’ll have been on the scene longer than most first-year law students).

The LII’s impact is spelled out in a lot of stories — yours. They may seem boring or everyday to you (“I use the LII every day in my job”), but every single one is valuable to us. It may seem like a strange thing to say, but we need you to tell us what we’re doing. It’s only by asking our audience that we really find out what people value about us, who those people are, and why they keep coming back here in such large numbers.

So, if you could take five minutes today and send Tom Bruce (tom-dot-bruce -at- cornell-dot-edu) a few sentences about who you are and why you use the LII, that would be very much appreciated. Or put a few words in the comments on our announce blog (where this will initially be posted) or on our Facebook page. Your stories are more helpful to us than you can imagine.

Feingold requests that GPO post Annotated Constitution online in XML format

For several years now, the LII has published the 2000 version of the Congressional Research Service’s Annotated Constitution of the United States. Savvy LII friends know that the document is updated by CRS at least every two years… so why are we so out of date? The short answer is that we’ve tried many times to get the updated versions, with no success. Today , Senator Russell Feingold sent a letter to the GPO formally requesting that they make CONAN (as it’s known) available online in a continuously updated version. This is very, very good news, and we hope that GPO will honor the Senator’s request. Hat tip to Susannah Leers and Courtney Minick for telling us and (we suspect) to the Sunlight Foundation for doing the behind-the-scenes work on this.

Davidson on Survey Methodologies

Over in VoxPopuLII, Stephanie Davidson talks about survey methodologies. This is a subject near and dear to our hearts at the LII. We’ve wondered for a long time how we might apply qualitative methods (and quantitative ones, too) to the problem of assessing LII effectiveness. This is an opening round in what we hope will be a long discussion about how one knows whether an online legal information resource is doing what it’s supposed to as well as it can.

Newly updated US Code Titles 15-18

Our friends from the Law Revision Counsel’s Office of the House of Representatives just gave us updated versions of US Code Titles 15-18, current to January of 2009 (that’s why you want to use the update feature at the right whenever you’re doing Code research). They’re on the LII US Code site: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode

Supreme Court hears three today

The Supremes hear oral argument in three cases today, and as usual we’ve got analyses from the LIIBULLETIN crew:

Graham v. Florida (8th amendment, juvenile justice)
Sullivan v. Florida (consolidated with Graham)
Bilski v. Kappos (very high profile business-process patent case)

Bruce at Stanford

Wednesday, LII Director Tom Bruce did a guest appearance in Paul Lomio‘s Advanced Legal Research class at the Stanford Law School. Just like the substitute teachers we had in middle school, Bruce attempted to cover his ignorance of the subject by entertaining the class with movies: West’s recent marketing piece featuring Bob Berring, and a sneak preview of a new 3-minute video describing the LII’s mission and history (and it’s pretty good, if we do say so ourselves). A lively discussion of the issues raised by these two very different ideas about why we have legal information services and who uses them ensued. Students know a lot….

If you’re interested in these issues, you might want to look at the public discussion on slaw.ca (a bit hard to find all of it in one place), at Bruce’s response here, and at an earlier blog post responding to the same arguments from West employee Dan Dabney. On YouTube, you can also find videos describing the 17-year history of the “volunteer” LII movement worldwide (1,2,3) featuring the Canadian and Australian LIIs — de facto national resources for law in their respective countries.

We miss our LIIBULLETIN announcement

We’re on the wrong coast. We’re travelling. Doing presentations. Teaching classes. Talking about the future of legal information. Too many exciting and unusual discussions are taking place…. so we almost completely missed our customary tweeting and announcement of Supreme Court oral arguments this week. Better late than never, we suppose: so check out the excellent LIIBULLETIN writeups here.

LII in SFO

Last night, LII Director Tom Bruce met with an assortment of Cornell alums for a lively discussion of the ways in which public access to legal information is affecting the legal profession and the relationships between lawyers and clients. Our friends from Justia.com came along. Interest was high and interaction lively.

A special shout-out to Mike Margolis and Margolis and Tisman, LLP for hosting this event. We are hoping to show up in the Bay Area twice a year, with events and discussions open to all our friends, so let us know if you’d be interested in attending.