In law it is a good policy to never plead what you need not, lest you oblige yourself to prove what you can not.
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). Letter to Usher F. Linder, Feb. 20, 1848. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, p. 453, Rutgers University Press (1953, 1990).
If you’re not otherwise occupied with traditional potato salad, fireworks, or blowing anvils, this isn’t a bad day to re-read the Declaration of Independence. We did, and we found this paragraph, #4 of the many grievances listed by the colonists against the King:
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
That the colonists should consider a complaint about informational distance to be on a par with the dissolution of the legislatures, imposition of unfair taxes, and the lack of a judiciary is revealing. These days, the de facto depository of our public records is the Internet, no longer physically distant but perhaps equally fatiguing in other ways. Outmoded publishing policies and practices — and a failure to recognize the public need for legal information — keep us at a remove from our public legal information that is greater than it should be. We’re a click away in theory, but the practical distance is much greater.
And as to those rumors: of course this isn’t the first time we’ve read the Declaration in its entirety. And we certainly did not get kicked out of Mrs. Nungezer’s seventh-grade social studies class that day for passing notes (an early form of experimentation with packet-switched networks).
And now we’re off to shoot bottle rockets and light sparklers. Happy Fourth.
The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket: and the glorious uncertainty of it is of more use to the professors than the justice of it.
Charles Macklin (1690–1797), Irish actor, dramatist. Sir Archy MacSarcasm, in Love à la Mode, act 2, sc. 1 (1759). (In 1735 Macklin quarrelled with a fellow actor named Hallam and accidentally killed the man by thrusting his cane through Hallam’s eye. He was tried for murder, conducted his own defense, and won an acquittal.)
A standard of review used by appellate courts to review decisions of lower courts. A judgment will be termed an abuse of discretion if the adjudicator has failed to exercise sound, reasonable, and legal decision-making skills (something that never happens here the LII).
See, e.g. Wilton v. Seven Falls Co., 515 US 277 (1995) and General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 522 US 136 (1997).
We think Matthew Burton’s essay, “Why I Help the Man, and Why You Should, Too” is perhaps the most important thing anybody’s said about open access to legal information in the last few years. Highly recommended reading, and it fits well with what we’re up to over at CeRI. Those with an ongoing interest in these issues might want to take a look at the Open House Project group in Google Groups, which seems to be a magnet for like-minded transparency hackers.
The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
Raymond Chandler (1888–1959). Sewell Endicott, in The Long Goodbye, ch. 8 (1953).
Over the last year or so we’ve been delighted to get to know the folks at ITTIG, the closest thing Italy has to the LII. Like us, ITTIG brings together legal and technical expertise to create legal-information systems that serve the public (unlike us, ITTIG is government-funded).
Yesterday, we were excited to receive a new book by ITTIG’s Enrico Francesconi. Technologies for European Integration describes work in legal-information interoperability growing out of efforts in the EU to bring together the independent bodies of legal information from each of the member states. It’s a great survey of what’s been done in Italy — and a reminder of how much more there is to do in the US.
Congratulations, Enrico.
Today marks the anniversary of two important US Supreme Court decisions. Reno v. ACLU (announced on June 26, 1997) is close to our heart, as it was the first major Supreme Court ruling regarding the regulation of materials distributed via the Internet. The case involved the Communications Decency Act, passed by Congress in an attempt to protect minors from explicit internet material by criminalizing the intentional transmission of certain messages and images. The Court ruled that the Act violated the First Amendment because its regulations amounted to a content-based blanket restriction of free speech.
In Lawrence v. Texas (announced five years ago today), the Supreme Court struck down a Texas consensual-sodomy law in a prosecution involving two men who were having sex in a private home. The Court ruled that intimate consensual sexual conduct was part of the liberty protected by substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. Lawrence has had the effect of invalidating similar laws throughout the United States that purport to criminalize homosexual activity between consenting adults acting in private.
If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.
Justice Felix Frankfurter, concurring, United States v. Mine Workers.
James Grimmelmann’s Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: an Opinionated Primer is a first-rate overview of the issues surrounding the recent copyright fracas over the Oregon Statutes. Grimmelmann provides all the relevant background in a well-organized format that should make the issues clear to practically anyone (especially in the open-access community) who is wondering what all the fuss is about. Plus, he says nice things about us. Thanks, James.
