New Year’s Traditions

A ball dropping in Times Square. Making resolutions. Drinking champagne. Singing Auld Lang Syne. If you’re Russian, giving presents.  And, of course, the LII emailing to ask for your support with a last-minute donation match.  

Again this year, a generous donor has offered to match all donations for the rest of 2021.  If you haven’t had a chance, we hope you’ll take a moment before the festivities to make a gift.  

DONATE NOW

The New Year causes us all to look both back and forward. A year ago at this time, we were mostly looking backward on the dismal year that was 2020 — and looking forward to some peace and quiet! Although we’d expected a certain amount of post-election wrap-up traffic on 3 U.S.C.  § 15 (Counting electoral votes in Congress), little did we know that within a week, we’d have a traffic spike on 18 U.S.C.  § 2383 (Rebellion or insurrection) and § 2384 (Seditious conspiracy), or  § 2385 (Advocating overthrow of Government) – nor, within two weeks, on the U.S.  Constitution Annotated pages on impeachment. We also had no idea that two weeks before year’s end, our parent institution would make international news for a COVID shutdown.

But if you’d asked us to think about it carefully a year ago, what we would have hoped – and maybe even been so bold as to predict – was that as we moved forward on original content and technical innovation, members of the public would continue to look to us to help them find and understand the law. And looking forward, what excites us the most about the future is the impact our projects will have for the people who make use of our work.  

And here’s where you can help right now. Twice as much. We couldn’t have gotten this far without the stalwart support of our readers. Please consider giving a gift that will allow us to provide the law to the public – hopefully on happier, more optimistic topics than in 2021, but regardless, on topics that continue to be relevant to people’s families, businesses, and civic lives.  

DONATE NOW

Thank you, 

Sara Frug

Co-Director

Legal Information Institute

Join the Ranks of the Almost Famous

I like to pass on to our team the specific things that donors say about how our work makes a difference. So, first thing in the morning (or nearly first thing) on every work day this time of year, I look at the donor comments from the previous day.     

Make a Gift (and maybe a Comment, too?)

When I see donors’ comments, I also see their names. While I admit that most just pass me by, some definitely get my attention. I often recognize the names of longtime supporters and even the occasional family friend (Betsy in Portland, I know you’re out there!). I admit those are my favorite. But my brain also stops automatically on any “famous” name, though in the vast majority of cases it’s just a “regular” person who happens to have a notable moniker (the addresses provided are the best clue, as well as the fact that many of these names belong to fictional characters, deceased folks, and even an entire UK territory!).  

This year I’ve been keeping track of these notable names, and we’re all getting a chuckle out of my informal “Almost Famous” list. I thought you might, too. Again, none of these people are the actual “celebrity” (term used loosely) but are instead just folks like you who appreciate free legal information online. So far this year, I’ve noticed:

• Not the gunfighter Jesse James or the politician Charles “Charlie” Wilson
• Not the sportswriter Peter King or the reality tv chef Michael Simon 
• Not the musical luminaries Richard Rogers and John Davidson
• Not the island of Diego Garcia
• Not box-office poison John Carter (of Mars)  [didn’t see that one?  Don’t worry, no one did.]
• And not comedians Chris Elliot, Kevin Hart, or Steven Wright (and especially not Stephen Wright)
  

The point here might simply be that I unapologetically recognize the names of more comedians than anything else; but, my hope is that this list demonstrates that actual humans (like me!) look at — and very much appreciate — every single donation that LII receives to support our work. 

If you rely on free and open access to law, please consider making a donation and maybe even leaving us a comment of support. If you ARE famous, we’ll never tell. If not, that’s perfectly okay too.  🙂

Donate

Thanks,
Craig Newton: Not the mayor of Norcross, GA.

Time to Feed the Elephant!

We often find the tale of the blind men and the elephant useful for explaining the many facets of the Legal Information Institute. In the story, each encounters a different part of the elephant – the tusk, the trunk, the legs – and comes away with a different perception of what an elephant is (it’s like a spear, like a snake, like a tree).  

You see where this is going, right?

GIVE

This old parable is a useful way of explaining how the LII is different things not just to our casual users, but even to our friends and supporters like you:  

• Some admire our expertise in legal informatics and how we use that knowledge to extract, organize, and present statutes and regulations in usable formats with helpful features.   

• Others appreciate our role as a source of unbiased explanations of legal concepts, constitutional principles, and Supreme Court cases.
  
• Still others value our contributions as leaders and collaborators in a global movement to provide open access to legal information and keep it in the public domain.

Whatever part of the elephant you perceive when you come to our website, our goal is that you encounter a reliable source of trustworthy information that helps you find what you need to do your work, understand the news, or just live your life. Our hope is that you appreciate how your support has helped create that same experience for the more than 36 million other visitors to law.cornell.edu so far this year.   

GIVE

We take no money from Cornell University. Instead, we rely entirely on funds we bring in ourselves. Your support pays our small staff, covers the costs of cloud servers and software, allows us to compensate our student workers, and even lets us venture into the world to share our expertise and help others bring their open access legal initiatives to life.  

And we appreciate it more than we could ever express.  

With Gratitude,
Craig Newton, Co-Director

Knowledge is Power: Open Access, Equity, and Cornell’s Land Grant Mission

Join us for a panel talk hosted by LII as part of International Open Access week!

In the context of a university such as Cornell, open access is often viewed through the lens of academic scholarship. But it can be, and is, so much more. Many Cornell programs further Cornell’s land grant mission by providing open access resources to the general public. A panel of representatives from some of these programs will discuss their work, its impacts, the importance of open access to their mission, and how they strive to make their respective fields more accessible and equitable through their work with open access projects.
Moderator: Craig Newton, Co-Director, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law
Panelists:

• Sara Frug, Co-Director, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law
• Jim DelRosso, Assistant Director, Catherwood Library, ILR School
• Christopher Wood, Managing Director, Center for Avian Population Studies and Director, eBird

Dial-In Information

Friday, October 29, 2021 at 11:30am to 12:30pm

Click below to join the panel:

https://cornell.zoom.us/j/96580546684?pwd=T3FVdTV2ODNJVjFDZG83R3A2UmJDdz09

Tune in for for a full week of panels, presentations and resources on building structural equity to knowledge with Open Access across Cornell University and beyond:

https://guides.library.cornell.edu/OAWeek

Spotlight on Free: Caselaw Access Project

Back in 2015, Harvard Law School announced the launch of the Caselaw Access Project (CAP), a project of its Library Innovation Lab. This is a collection of almost seven million cases covering about 360 years of American judicial opinions. Though we know that more than one librarian felt a little queasy at the sight of venerable old case reporters having their spines severed and bindings undone so that their pages could be fed through high-speed scanners, this effort to digitize and democratize all of American case law was very much a welcome announcement.

You can find the results at case.law. 

Though it’s easy enough to search the CAP database by keyword or citation, for example, the folks at the Library Innovation Lab and throughout the librarian community have other plans in mind for the 36.3 million or so pages in the collection. Their blog tracks and explains feature development in the database. For a lawyer who thinks very old legal opinions are good for nothing but ending sentences that begin with “It is well-settled that…,” each and every post in that blog will be an education. Similarly, a recent article in the online magazine of the American Association of Law Librarians describes projects in data mining, linguistics, link rot, citation analysis, natural language processing, named entity recognition, and topic modeling that are all being conducted using the CAP database.   

CAP is not, and does not pretend to be, a one-stop shop for legal research. It appears, for example, that not everything that courts have done after the project went online has made its way into CAP. For instance, our current favorite Supreme Court Case, Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org is in CAP with a note in the sidebar that the “case source” is the commercial legal research service Fastcase. However, some recently-published federal appellate decisions that cite the case, such as Freeman v. Wainwright  and Craft Smith, LLC v. EC Design, LLC do not (yet) seem to be.  

In the end, CAP is a potential (and potentially powerful) tool to add to the free online legal research sources you should know about. While you may well find that it doesn’t answer all of your prayers for a free case law search engine, you should be aware that researchers in several fields are using its large data set and API to do work that is likely to make its way into the tools that the next generation of lawyers will use.  

Student Spotlight: Bulletin Previews Back in Full Swing

October, as it always does, brought the start of a new term at the U.S. Supreme Court.  And, as we always do, the LII welcomed a new team of students to our Supreme Court Bulletin Previews staff. Leading the crew this year are Rachel Skene and Stewart Rickert.  

Rachel is the Editor-in-Chief. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Puget Sound in 2017 with bachelor’s degrees in both International Relations and Affairs and also French Literature. Rachel taught in France and Oregon before enrolling at Cornell Law School.  

Stewart is the Executive Editor. He graduated magna cum laude from Wake Forest University in 2016 with a degree in Economics and Political Science.  Stewart worked as an investment banking analyst before coming to Cornell Law School.  

All 36 students who make up the Bulletin Previews staff (12 third-year and 24 second-year students) are eager to bring you comprehensive and viewpoint-neutral analysis of each case before it’s argued. If you don’t already subscribe to this free service, you can sign up here:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/subscribe

Meanwhile, in case you missed it, we wanted to feature our work on an interesting case the Court heard earlier this month. In United States v. Zubaydah, the Court will decide how much deference a trial court should give the federal government when the latter seeks to invoke the state secrets privilege when withholding evidence from discovery in civil litigation. You can find our Preview here:  https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/20-827.

Anatomy of Traffic Spike: Hard Work Pays Off

Usually, we use this space to feature a conspicuous bump in traffic to some part of our website and map it to a recent news event.  This time, however, we’re going to do something a little bit different.  In an article back in April, we told the story of how we’d used the extra student labor made available to us during the Summer of 2020 (as their other summer jobs shrunk or vanished entirely) to re-invigorate more than 1,000 definitions in our Wex collection.  

In that same article, we introduced Nichole McCarthy, LII’s new Original Content Collections Manager.  She spent the Summer of 2021 continuing the Wex Definitions Project, and her student crew improved upon the output from the summer prior.  In total we have renovated around 2,500 Wex definitions, making each one longer and more comprehensive while linking it to more related content on our website such as statutes, US Supreme Court decisions, and other Wex articles.  We also added dozens of new definitions.

All of that work makes those pages better in the eyes of search engines, resulting in our Wex pages being more findable to the general public. And the public has, indeed, found Wex. This graph shows Wex pageviews up 20% from July through September of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020.  

Considering all that was in the headlines during this time last year–the election, the pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement all come instantly to mind–it’s amazing that Wex traffic is up dramatically this year.  All signs point to the output of our Wex Definitions Project as the reason why.  

Of course, traffic in-and-of itself is not our goal. The purpose of Wex is to provide useful, viewpoint neutral explanations of legal terms and concepts to anyone who needs them. We like to think that some segment of that increased viewership was spared a trip to other websites offering answers that are at the very least aligned with a political or social agenda and the very worst just flat wrong.    

We still have more than 5,000 other definitions in Wex, all of which will be re-visited in the coming years, and most of which will be revised in the process. Meanwhile, we continue to explore better organizations and linkages within Wex to provide even deeper context for our readers. We’ll keep you posted along the way. 

FY21 Annual Report for Friends and Supporters

Like the university that we call home, our fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30.  While Cornell’s Fiscal 21 proved to be every bit as trying as we all thought they would be, we are pleased to report that the Legal Information Institute is stronger than ever. Though our small staff continues to work remotely, we made substantial progress on new initiatives while simultaneously meeting the demands of a global audience that has never been larger. 

Impacts

Traffic

Six months ago, the Cornell Chronicle wrote a lovely article about the LII and our website:  https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/01/institute-breaks-record-2020-making-laws-easy-access.  The article highlights how events such as the storming of the US Capitol, civil unrest after the killing of George Floyd, and COVID-19 drove LII’s extraordinary website traffic in 2020.  Those events and more translated to record traffic on law.cornell.edu in Fiscal 21. More than 40 million unique visitors came to the website over the last 12 months. They engaged in more than 68 million sessions and viewed more than 168 million pages of content–breaking the records we set in Fiscal 2020.   

From links in blog posts authored by the National Constitution Center, the American Bar Association, FactCheck.org and many others, to more than 15,000 readers who arrived from the website of CalFresh, California’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, law.cornell.edu continued to be a go-to source for unbiased legal information. Educators at every level also continued to refer students to LII this year, via general information resources, library guides, and learning management systems. We were thrilled to be a part of the nationwide shift to online learning during the pandemic, with increased referrals from Canvas, Google Classroom, and K12 domains across the country.

Beyond the United States, LII served more than 6.9 million readers across the world in 242 countries and territories. Although the composition of the top countries by traffic is remarkably stable year over year, the rankings shifted a bit: this year, the Philippines and China more than doubled their traffic, rising to #3 (behind India) and #6 (behind Canada and the UK), respectively. Pakistan rocketed up to snag spot #14, and for the first time, we registered 3 users purporting to originate from North Korea.

Even as events from the news drive particular traffic spikes that can last from a few minutes to a few days, most of our users (representing a supermajority of our traffic) use our website in a professional capacity to do their work. Every year we hear not only from lawyers, librarians, bankers, and accountants, but also from droves of loyal users across the entire spectrum of business, government, and education. Even in a “quiet” month when major law and politics stories are absent from the daily headlines, somewhere between 2 and 3 million people use the service we provide as an alternative to expensive online databases.

“I find the Legal Information Institute’s explanations invaluable in my work as a reporter having to cover numerous legal issues. “

Rachel H.

New Collections

1.  State Regulations 

Our biggest accomplishment during Fiscal ‘21 was, without a doubt, the creation of a new online collection of the regulations of all 50 states. To create the collection, LII teamed with Public.Resource.Org, Fastcase, and Justia, Inc. to form the Code Improvement Commission. We then obtained the raw texts of the regulations from all 50 states, and our team of technologists set about creating and honing the tools needed to process, standardize, enrich, and publish those large and disparate corpora in a user-friendly and accessible format. This collection reflects an initial and ambitious first step to move “down the jurisdictional stack” away from the collections of federal law that have always been LII’s domain.

But simply publishing the regulations is not the end goal of the five-year project on which the Commission has embarked. Before the Commission disbands in 2025, LII plans to add more features to its collection to improve the findability and readability of state regulations, as well as to connect them to both other relevant governance and also information about the activities and objects being regulated. We will also allow bulk access to the formatted data for others to ingest, study, and improve. 

2. Executive Orders

As website traffic died down after the presidential election and its aftermath and the inauguration approached, news outlets began to cover the anticipated flurry of executive orders. Because the publication process for new executive orders involves a delay of a few days before the formal publication in the Federal Register, we monitored the White House’s website for new orders; formatted, hyperlinked, and retrofitted them for web-accessibility-compliance; and published them when they were announced, making each new executive order far easier to locate, read, and contextualize for our readers.

“I am a public health attorney. I love how easy it is to find and use federal statutes on your site and move from Section to Part to Subchapter to Title so that I can understand a section in context. There are many good resources for other laws – but yours is the only one that I use for federal statutes. Thanks!”

Denise C.

Collaborations

LII staff members continued to serve as a resource to the free access to law movement and legal technology projects. We continued to collaborate with a number of groups in government, non-profits, and industry, including the Federal Depository Library Program, AfricanLII, an e-regulations project for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid studies, as well as serving as a formal advisor to the National Science Foundation-funded project FAI: Using AI to Increase Fairness by Improving Access to Justice.  We also maintained representation on the editorial boards of two journals: the Journal of Open Access to Law, and Law in Context, which “publishes socio-legal articles that explore the social, historical, economic, political, and technological aspects of the operation of law”.

Student Work

1. We’ve expanded our use of law students to explain the law to the public.

LII employed 109 students and recent graduates in Fiscal ’21 to revise and create new content for Wex and the Supreme Court Bulletin Previews. We also took a quantum leap forward in our ability to employ even more in Fiscal ‘22 and beyond.  In April, we added Nichole McCarthy to our staff as our first ever Original Content Collections Manager. In addition to managing our current cohort of student workers, Nichole is tasked with a pair of huge challenges:  

1. To design and implement a better system of organization within Wex to help readers get to additional primary and secondary resources on our website and beyond that relate to the article they are viewing; and 
2. To create new kinds of original content, as well as a viable structure for recruiting, training, and managing larger networks of pre-law undergraduates, law students, and volunteer experts from around the country (around the globe?) to populate and maintain those collections.

We are excited for the increased capacity this gives us to recruit more student labor than ever before!

2. Masters of Engineering Students Continue to Imagine Future Possibilities.

Every year, LII hosts students from Cornell’s engineering and information science programs. Two projects stand out from this year: an exploratory data analysis of state regulations and what we’ve been calling “the art project”. Our new state regulations publication is the largest document corpus we’ve ever worked with. Because this is the first time we’ve had access to standardized data at the state level, we have a great deal to discover by applying all of the techniques we’ve honed over the years to discover topics, citation networks, definitions, named entities, and other characteristics of the corpus that help readers find, contextualize, and understand the regulations. 

The “art project” was our most speculative project to date. We’re curious about the potential for using artificial intelligence technologies to generate multimedia resources that could make legal information less intimidating to civics students and other non-law-trained audiences. A talented M.Eng. student with a strong interest in art took up the challenge of applying artistic styles to photographs and animating the resulting images using the latest lip-syncing models. We look forward to extending this work in the future.  

Finances

Though a part of Cornell Law School, LII is entirely self-funded.  We not only “paid the bills” in Fiscal ‘21, we also added to our strategic reserve and completed fundraising for the Tom Bruce Legal Information Innovations Fellowship endowment.  We look forward to bringing the first Fellow to campus in Fiscal ‘22.  Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of friends like you.  We want to be sure to finish off our retelling of this remarkable year on a note of gratitude:  we would be irrelevant without real people using the information we publish to solve real problems, and we would be impossible without your generous financial support each year.  Thank you!

“I am retired and volunteer for a NPO, but I could not live without this valuable resource. Thank you.“

Vicki P.