Annual Report 2022

Impacts

Traffic 

LII is reaching more people than ever. In Fiscal ‘22, 45 million people visited the website, engaging in 74 million sessions and viewing 177 million pages of content. Though delighted, we were frankly a bit surprised. If you read our FY21 annual report, you’d have seen an acknowledgment of the Cornell Chronicle article on the traffic spikes we experienced around the major events of 2020-21 (Covid, Black Lives Matter protests, and January 6th insurrection). And if you’d asked us to make a prediction, we’d have expected traffic to decrease. Even though it was clear that the U.S. Supreme Court was headed for controversy, the coverage from the Court’s own website, along with news outlets, blogs, and, for any given issue, advocacy organizations with deep subject matter coverage typically keeps our own traffic to Court-related content at a relatively steady level. 

Yet, LII sustained a traffic spike on decision day for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that was roughly equivalent to the traffic level of January 6, 2021. Our copies of Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the U.S. Constitution Annotated on abortion, and LII’s Wex article on privacy trended alongside Dobbs itself.  For the weekend that began with the release of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Friday, June 24, more than 1.1 million people came to the website and viewed almost 2 million pages of content.  (That is 270% more visitors and 130% more pages viewed than during the same weekend in 2021.)

Surrounding this large traffic spike were smaller trends — often showcasing the work of Cornell Law students: the LII Supreme Court Bulletin preview for West Virginia v. EPA began trending on June 23rd, bringing the total pageviews for the fiscal year above 14,000 after fewer than 200 at the time of initial publication. The Wex article on separation of church and state (updated by the students on the Wex Definitions Team in the spring of 2021) trended alongside Kennedy v. Bremerton School District when it was decided on June 27th. And the preview of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen received over 1000 pageviews on decision day, finishing the term with over 27,000 hits. Perhaps most impressively, LII Supreme Court Bulletin previews received an average of over 22 minutes of users’ attention — many times the average time on page for the vast majority of LII content.

Who entrusts us with their readers

We are proud to say that nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, news outlets, and all levels of government continued to extend their vote of confidence in our resources by sending us their readers. In the past year, we received referrals from the Small Business Administration, the Texas Workforce Commission, and the government of Massachusetts. The American Bar Association, iCivics, and the Tenant Resource Center all sent us traffic. We received referrals from learning management platforms like Google Classroom and universities across the United States. Although we’ve yet to top the January 6th related peaks in links from news articles, we received referrals from news outlets including the Washington Post, NPR, CNN and Fox News.

Global reach

Beyond the United States, LII served more than 9.4 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, China increased its traffic by better than 58%, rising above Canada and the UK to reach #4 (behind India and the Philippines). Nigeria captured the #10 slot, and North Korea registered visitors for a second year, though this time only two readers instead of three. 

But the traffic report only goes so far. We rely—flourish, really—on feedback from our readers, most of whom use LII for their work, but whose work varies quite broadly. This year, we were grateful to hear from so many who were willing to let us share their testimonials:

An indispensable source for scholars who are not lawyers. 

John M. Abowd, Edmund Ezra Day Professor Emeritus of Economics, Statistics and Data Science at Cornell University

I’ve long relied on LII working for a tiny federal agency without a large budget. Over the past year, I found myself using it with my child to help with remote learning. Thank you!

Dorothy Avery

A retired lawyer with experience in a wide range of specializations, I still do considerable pro bono legal work. Now on a fixed income I can do so in part because you make that so much easier. Keep up the great work.

Kathleen F. O’Reilly

Thank you so much. I point my students in college to your site as reliable info. YAY!

Stella H.

Legal resources provided by LII have aided me in law enforcement for more than 25 years. I greatly appreciate the service.

Steven Douglas

Whenever I have needed to find administrative law filings by the Federal Communications Commission affecting the amateur radio service and other wireless services that were difficult to find elsewhere, the excellent indexing of the Legal Information Institute has always provided me that for which I had sought.

Brent L Carruth, PhD

Invaluable resource for people who don’t subscribe to pricey legal search engines.

Mark Weston

I use your site regularly to review historic Supreme Court cases regarding the Constitution, to properly understand the Oath I swore when accepting my commission. Thank you for a resource an engineer can understand.

Douglas M.

I have used this resource for 20 years. Thank you!

Chrysti Gilbreth

Thank you for your invaluable service!  You enhance Cornell’s reputation.

Rosemary Pye, JD ’74

Project Updates

Wex

Fiscal ‘22 saw clear results from the emphasis we have placed in recent years on improving Wex, our collection of original, straightforward explanations of legal terms and concepts. Our students have now revised or created more than 4,000 Wex entries since this renovation initiative began in 2020. As a direct result, the public is finding Wex in much higher numbers than ever before. Wex usage in Fiscal ‘22 jumped over 40%, from a little more than 16 million pageviews in FY21 to almost 23 million in FY22. The most popular Wex pages over the last fiscal year were articles explaining the Second, Fifth, and First Amendments to the US Constitution, followed by the definitions of “contract,” “federalism,” “due process,” and “defamation,” as well as our summary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade opinion.

Supreme Court Bulletin

As always, the thirty-six students who research, draft, and edit our Supreme Court Bulletin Previews provided the public with important analysis of the arguments made by the parties in every case that court heard. Unsurprisingly, the highest-profile cases yielded the most pageviews, with tens of thousands of people reading our students’ explanations of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and West Virginia v. EPA, along with others from the term such as Carson v. Makin and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. We want to acknowledge the many Law School faculty who assist our students in understanding these cases as they do their research and writing.

The other half of our Bulletin service, where we immediately publish and circulate to subscribers all Supreme Court opinions from a direct feed from the court’s administrators, was also busy in Fiscal 22. Our collection of US Supreme Court opinions saw 40% more traffic during Fiscal 22 than in Fiscal 21. As an interesting insight into how many news services now publish new opinions, as well as the progress the Supreme Court itself has made in publishing its own output, it’s worth noting that our most viewed opinion of FY22–with more than a million unique pageviews–was Roe v. Wade, which returned to the spotlight for obvious reasons.

Women and Justice Collection

Our Women & Justice Collection at the Legal Information Institute provides open access to legal resources related to gender justice from around the world. The first vetted and searchable database of its kind, the Collection hosts domestic, regional, and international caselaw, legislation, and other legal instruments. Each resource is accompanied by a plain-language, one-paragraph summary to help ensure that everyone can understand the laws that govern them. Student researchers edit summaries provided by pro bono law firm associates from White & Case and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; translate summaries; and perform comparative law research for the Collection’s NGO partners. NGO partners include the Democratic Governance & Rights Unit (DGRU) at the University of Cape Town and Cornell’s Death Penalty Worldwide. A representative research project from FY22 summarized evidence laws of 12 southern African countries (Botswana, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe) for local bench guides for the Judicial Institute for Africa at the DGRU.

State regulations

Our new state regulations collection, made possible by Public.Resource.Org’s multi-year Code Improvement Commission project, continues with the collaboration of LII, Fastcase, Inc., Justia, Inc., and others. In the past year, we revamped the collection to take advantage of a new, more consistent raw data source. We refined our tools for ingesting, processing, standardizing, enriching, and publishing the regulations of the 50 states in a user-friendly and accessible format, while maintaining access and timely updates for an audience that grew from just a half-million pageviews in FY21 to more than 4 million in FY22. Most importantly for our effort to improve the discoverability and readability of the regulations, we worked with two teams of M.Eng. students to analyze and mine the text of the regulations for legally significant features (e.g., definitions) that are not marked up explicitly in the text. These applied research projects both leverage what we have learned from our prior work with federal regulations and enable us to take in a much broader range of drafting conventions among the many agencies across the 50 states. We look forward to bringing the resulting features to the public on the LII website over the next year. 

Collaboration

LII staff members continued to serve as a resource to the free access to law movement and legal technology projects, collaborating with a number of groups in government, non-profits, and industry—including the Government Publishing Office, the Center for Computer Aided Legal Instruction, and a range of startup companies. We continued to serve as a formal advisor to the National Science Foundation-funded project FAI: Using AI to Increase Fairness by Improving Access to Justice, and two of our technologists with experience in legal informatics research joined the FAI research team, exploring techniques and providing feedback on evaluation. 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”.

Finances

Though a part of Cornell Law School, LII receives no direct funding from Cornell and is entirely self-funded.  As always, none of this would be possible without support from friends like you.  As we are fond of saying: 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 again this year for your support of LII.

What Are the Resources at Public.Resource?

We’ve written quite a bit in this newsletter and in others about Public.Resource.Org. While one might get the impression that “PRO” exists primarily to engage the kind of litigation that led to, for example, its 2020 Supreme Court win in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, there is much more to the organization than going to court to fight for Free Law. While we’ve also written recently about the PRO-led coalition that puts the regulations of all 50 states on our website, we thought we’d use this installment in our series of spotlighting other free legal resources online to talk about some of what PRO makes available to the public directly through its webpage.  

PRO is largely the work of one person, Carl Malamud–though he’s always quick to give credit to other contributors to his projects, no matter how small their role. The homepage at public.resource.org features mostly Carl’s activism on behalf of freeing the law from behind paywalls. There, you can explore current and past PRO projects and watch videos where Carl articulates the problems and his solutions. 

At the top of the page is a second tab labeled “law.resource.org.” Clicking on that will take you to a new page. From there, you’ll find hyperlinks to official state codes, thousands of global safety codes, and even the public safety codes of India. Many of these collections are actually housed at the Internet Archive though furnished by PRO. Some are “bulk access” downloads of the text or data associated with the entire collected statutes of a particular state (like this), and others are individual volumes of a state’s codes (like this). And, yes, of course the Official Code of Georgia Annotated is among PRO’s offerings.  

Fair Use & Free Law

We’re examining subsequent developments in Free Law related to the Supreme Court’s Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org decision on the occasion of its secondary anniversary. An accompanying article highlights three pieces of ongoing litigation that all cite to that case; but, this one dives a little deeper on one particular issue– fair use.  

In the PRO case, the Supreme Court noted that the copyright defense of fair use was far from a perfect solution for testing the limits of copyright. In hypothesizing about a world where the non-binding work product of courts and legislators enjoyed the “instant and automatic” protection of copyright unless expressly disclaimed by the state, the Court noted that “citizens, attorneys, nonprofits, and private research companies would have to cease all copying, distribution, and display of those works or risk severe and potentially criminal penalties.” The Court continued,  “Some affected parties might be willing to roll the dice with a potential fair use defense. But that defense, designed to accommodate First Amendment concerns, is notoriously fact sensitive and often cannot be resolved without a trial.” It concluded, “The less bold among us would have to think twice before using official legal works that illuminate the law we are presumed to know and understand.”  

In each of the three active copyright cases involving Free Law copies of standards or model codes incorporated by reference into law, fair use is likely to play an outcome-determinative role. In NFPA v. UpCodes, the trial court denied the plaintiff’s request for a preliminary injunction specifically because the fair use defense was too fact-specific to be overcome in an early motion before development of the factual record. In ICC v. UpCodes, the fair use defense was among the reasons (but not the sole reason) the court denied the plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment.  

But it is in ASTM v. Public.Resource.Org where fair use gets its most thorough day in court. In ruling that the defendant could not be liable for copyright infringement of any industry standard authored by the plaintiff that was both incorporated by reference into law and accurately reproduced by the defendant because that re-publication was fair use, the court included a 187-page Appendix that runs through the fair use analysis for each of the 217 standards that PRO reproduced. 

Federal law, particularly 17 USC Sect. 107, articulates four fair use factors:  

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

On the first factor, the court noted that the most important inquiry was whether or not the defendant stood to profit from the copying and concluded that PRO had no profit motive but was instead driven by its mission to make the law freely accessible to the public.  It also considered on a standard-by-standard basis in the Appendix whether each standard “provides information essential to comprehending one’s legal duties,” as part of the inquiry whether facilitating public access to that standard might be construed as a transformative use of the copyrighted work.

On the second factor, the court again analyzed each standard individually with an eye toward whether its text was incorporated “into law in a manner akin to copying all of the standard’s text into law,” or was instead “incorporated into law in a more nuanced way, such that the standard’s text is not an easy substitute for what is incorporated into law.” The court explained that the former would more likely weigh in favor of fair use than the latter.

On the third factor, the court also needed to consider for each of the 217 standards in controversy whether PRO had reproduced more of the standard than the law had actually incorporated and found that “most of the standards at issue have been incorporated by reference into regulations that do not specify that only certain provisions of the standards are incorporated by reference into law, nor do the regulations indicate which specific provisions of the standards relate to regulatory compliance, suggesting that ‘a greater amount of the standard’s text might be fairly reproduced.’”

The court was able to take a more holistic approach to the fourth factor–the economic harm to the plaintiff. Noting that it had been 14 years since PRO had first started reproducing the standards in question and that 4 years had elapsed since the plaintiff’s expert had first opined on the possible future harm, the court found that on the evidence before it “a reasonable jury could not return a verdict” that PRO’s actions had caused or would likely cause economic harm to the plaintiff with regard to the specific standards at issue.  

The district court’s detailed and thorough analysis is a stark reminder of the Supreme Court’s warning that fair use is not the ideal vehicle for solving these disputes. As the Supreme Court warned, the fair use defense is extremely fact-specific and creates high-stakes litigation that can seldom be resolved short of a trial. And yet, the limitations of the Government Edicts Doctrine keep driving trial courts to resort to the fair use analysis to solve these disputes. Perhaps one day both the authors of standards and model codes on one hand and Free Law advocates on the other will get a clear set of “as a matter of law” rules that will guide these disputes; but, until then, it seems that the fair use defense will play exactly the role that SCOTUS warned us about.

Free Law Litigation since Georgia v. PRO

April 27th marked the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in favor of open access to the law in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org. So it seems like a good time to examine how that ruling has influenced subsequent litigation relevant to Free Law efforts.

To recap, the Supreme Court examined the Government Edicts Doctrine and in a 5-4 vote held that the annotations prepared by LexisNexis at the direction of the Georgia Legislature and adopted as part of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated could not be the subject of copyright because the legislature, vested with the power to make law, could not be an “author” for the purpose of the copyright statute. The Court explained at length why legislators cannot claim copyright in their “non-binding legal works” just as they cannot hold copyright in the statutes themselves.  

As is often the case with Supreme Court decisions, many questions remain.  One issue, already the subject of prior litigation, has been impacted by this guidance from SCOTUS. That issue is whether outside entities who (unlike LexisNexis in the Georgia case) were not working under contract with and under the supervision of a state government can still claim copyright in works like industry standards or model codes when governments incorporate those works by reference into statutes or regulations.  

There are three active pieces of litigation on this issue, all at different stages, where the court has looked to the rule and reasoning of the Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org.  

• American Society for Testing and Materials v. Public.Resource.Org., Inc., 13-cv-1215 (D. D.C.) 

This case features Public Resource.Org (PRO) defending its publication of various industry standards privately developed by the plaintiffs and later incorporated into law in various jurisdictions. Initially, the trial court granted the plaintiffs summary judgment, but the Court of Appeal for the D.C. Circuit remanded the case for further development of the factual record. After both parties again moved for summary judgment, the Supreme Court decided Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org.; and, the trial court requested more briefing in light of that ruling. The trial court held that the Government Edicts Doctrine did not apply to privately-authored standards, even once those standards are incorporated into law, because they were not authored by a government official or agency. Nevertheless, the court’s mixed ruling was largely favorable to PRO, finding that its publication of most of the standards at issue was protected under the copyright doctrine of fair use. (See the accompanying article, Fair Use & Free Law)

• International Code Council, Inc. v. Upcodes, Inc., 17 Civ. 6261 (S.D. NY)

The International Code Council (ICC) is a standards development organization that develops model codes with the intent that jurisdictions will adopt them into the law. ICC accused defendant UpCodes of copyright infringement when the latter published on its website various ICC-authored model codes that had been incorporated by reference into the building codes of several jurisdictions. Just weeks after the Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org decision, the court here denied the parties’ competing motions for summary judgment. In harmonizing what SCOTUS had just done with various relevant prior decisions related specifically to the issues of model codes and incorporation by reference, the court deemed it significant that it was the intent of standard developments organizations like ICC that their model codes be adopted by governments and incorporated directly into the law. Consolidated with another case involving a related dispute between the parties, trial on the copyright claims awaits review of the dismissal of that other case by the Second Circuit Court of Appeal.   

• National Fire Protection Association v. Upcodes, Inc., CV-21-5262 (C.D. Cal.)

In this case, a second standards setting organization (the NFPA) also sued UpCodes over the latter’s publishing of its standards that have been incorporated by reference into the law and sought a preliminary injunction. While the court found that differences in the facts between this case and Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org called into question whether the Government Edicts Doctrine should even apply, it nevertheless denied the injunction because NFPA had not carried its burden of proof at that early stage of litigation to demonstrate that it was likely to prevail against UpCode’s defense of fair use.  
This continuing litigation provides specific examples of what seemed to be clear in the immediate aftermath of the Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org decision: that it, like most decisions, left open more questions than it answered.

Putting the pieces together: How the research fits in

As we’ve mentioned more than once recently, in 2020, Public.Resource.Org included LII in a five-year project to free the regulations of all 50 U.S. states. The first step was to conform the content to meet the standards set forth in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines so that they would be fully machine readable and therefore equally accessible to text-to-speech users as to visual website users. But that was just the beginning.

LII has always focused on helping people find and *understand* the law. In the early days, we enhanced understanding by showing the structure of and interconnections between legal texts. We later made progress on connecting legal texts to the real-world objects they address. Most recently, we have brought to bear emerging human language technologies to help simplify and summarize legal text.  

Members of LII’s engineering team participating in the Law-and-AI research project Fairness in Artificial Intelligence, led by scholars Kevin Ashley and Diane Litman, have been exploring techniques that provide alternate approaches to summarizing complex legal texts. We have also been working with students to refine the techniques we innovated for the CFR and research new approaches to address the much broader range of definition styles used across the dozens of departments of each of the 50 states. Taken together, these projects provide the next set of tools to help us increase understanding of state regulations — and all of the other legal texts we publish.

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