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Supreme Court this week

This week, the Supreme Court hears arguments in a wide range of cases.  As always, the LII’s Supreme Court Bulletin provides thoughtful analysis of the upcoming cases. Just click on the links below to read all about them:

Monday, November 1, 2010

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Bruce gives talk at University of Montreal

Last Thursday, LII Director Tom Bruce gave the inaugural talk in a series of workshops on legal information hosted by the University of Montreal’s CRDP.  Invited (and on occasion provoked) by old LII friend Daniel Poulin (pictured here), the founder of the LexUM legal-informatics research group and of CanLII,  Bruce spoke about the initial vision for open access to legal information, its flaws, and the realities of the present day. The general challenge now, he said, is similar to that posed by behavioral economics.  Our formal notions about how legal information is generated, structured, and searched are useful so far as they go, but in some respects fail to take note of what it is that people actually do.  This poses important challenges for our thinking about legal research in general,  and document modelling in particular.

Frug and Bruce show off something new at Federal Depository Library Council meeting

On Monday evening, Sara Frug and Tom Bruce gave a sneak preview of a new LII product for a small audience at the Federal Depository Library Council October meeting in Washington DC.  Luminaries in attendance included Michael Wash, CIO of the US Government Printing Office; Michael White, Managing Editor of the Federal Register, and Mary Alice Baish of the AALL along with many interested govdocs librarians and LII friends.  What were they showing?  Well, we could whisper something about the Code of Federal Regulations, but then you’d just want to know when it will be available to the public (our best answer:  Real Soon).

Work on this project has been undertaken as part of an ongoing agreement with the Federal Depository Library Program, who have been kind enough to make data available to us in exchange for expertise.  The project is the first we’ve undertaken that builds on the new FD/SYS initiative. We are very excited to be working with FDLP and GPO on a project that involves the largest contact surface between the American public and Federal law.

Today in VoxPop: Joao Lima describes Brazilian legal information portal

The LII’s guest-blog for the legal informatics community, VoxPopuLII, has an interesting piece by Joao Lima.  Lima heads the team that has built LexML Brazil, an integrated portal for legislation and law from many Brazilian jurisdictions.  An ambitious project aimed at achieving semantic interoperability across numerous federated collections of law, LexML Brazil is a state-of-the-art illustration of what can be done when the legal-information community takes advantage of the latest techniques from the digital-library and information science communities.  We recommend it highly.  The article also contains a list of related systems-building articles published in VoxPop over the last year, a virtual Who’s Who of legal-information systems builders.

Bruce at National Association of Bar Executives Communications Workshop

LII Director Tom Bruce is giving a talk about law.gov today at the National Association of Bar Executives Communications Workshop in Portland, Maine.  Tom’s appearing with LII BFF Ed Walters, CEO of FastCase.  We think it’s important that those who communicate and market on behalf of lawyers understand what law.gov is, and what it’s going to mean to the legal profession.  One hint:  it’s more than just “free legal information stuff”… think WebMD, and what an informed clientele might mean to lawyers generally.  Time will tell, of course, but we think that mass availability of law is going to change interaction between the public and the profession for their mutual benefit.

Benvinguda, amics (the LII welcomes new colleagues)

Today we welcome visiting researchers Núria Casellas and Joan-Josep (Pep) Vallbé from the Institute of Law and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.  So far, they’ve survived navigation across New York City during a major thunderstorm at rush hour, and at this writing are believed to be somewhere in the Catskills recovering from the experience.

Over the next two years, they’ll be working with us on a variety of projects aimed at creating rich legal data on the Semantic Web.  We particularly want to explore the possibilities for cross-jurisdictional retrieval of regulations,  answering questions like,  “If I know what the reg is in the US, how can I automatically retrieve the comparable regulation in Spain?”.  We’re particularly excited about projects like this because they can really help small businesses operate and compete in a global marketplace, and help guarantee that regulations on matters like food safety can be easily discovered by anyone, anywhere.  We’ve also talked about possible projects in the area of data privacy and a variety of other areas.  There’s lots to learn and explore.

Detailed information about Núria is here;  Pep’s blog is here.  We’re really looking forward to learning from them.

We partner with Nolo Press

How did we make Wex – our free, community-built legal dictionary/encyclopedia – even more comprehensive and easy to understand? By teaming with the smart folks over at Nolo and building their Plain English Legal Dictionary definitions right into each Wex entry. Have a look at the Wex entry for the term “common law” for a live example of the photo above, and here’s an alphabetical list of Wex entries if you want more.

We think adding Nolo’s definitions to Wex will help you understand the entries in Wex better; sometimes it’s nice to hear things explained in different ways, isn’t it? Plus it makes it easier for you to compare the community-built, editable Wex entry with a static definition.

Thanks again to the people at Nolo for partnering up with us on this one. Here’s the official press release announcement.  This is the first of what we hope will be a number of collaborative projects with Nolo.  They’re long-time leaders at making law accessible to the public, and it’s a privilege to work with them.

You call me a nitpicker like it’s a good thing

A few years back, we heard Frank Wagner — the Reporter of Decisions for the US Supreme Court — describe the job of a reporter of decisions as that of a “serial peripatetic nitpicker”.  We love serial peripatetic nitpickers. They teach us how to do our job better.

We’d like to salute three of them today.  These folks kept after us to add section-number ranges after each table of contents entry in the US Code, so that someone attempting to find a particular section by drilling down through the tables of contents could do so more easily.  They aren’t the only ones to have suggested it, but we think they were the earliest.  It’s a huge improvement in navigation and we feel smarter for having thought of it all by ourselves.

Seriously, we get a lot of help from people who ask for features and improvements or who give us feedback in other ways.  So our thanks go out today to Kami Bedard , Matt Manahan, and Steven Lauer for their suggestion. Good work, folks!

Maybe we should have a Nitpicker of the Month Award.  Who’s in?

LII demos CFR project for GPO, OFR staffers


On Wednesday,  the LII project team working on the new Code of Federal Regulations project demonstrated some prototypes for an audience of staffers from the US Government Printing Office and the Office of the Federal Register.  The CFR work is part of a joint project undertaken with USGPO, the Federal Depository Library Program, and the Cornell Law Library.  As yet we have nothing we’re ready to show the public — but we will soon, and we hope you’ll provide us with insights and feedback when we do.  Are we trying to pump up the suspense?  You bet we are…….

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