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.
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.
Today’s oral arguments involve immigration and corporate citizenship. Our LIIBULLETIN writeups are at http://bit.ly/2YKPWw
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 Savvy LII friends know that the document is updated by CRS at least every two years… so why are we so out of date?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.
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.
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
The Supremes hear oral argument in three cases today, and as usual we’ve got analyses from the LIIBULLETIN crew:
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.
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.
We promised more, and now it’s over in Tom Bruce’s b-screeds blog: more on the Berring kerfluffle. Other good statements on the subject have appeared in SLAW.
