(Law) usually works not by exercise of force but by information transfer, by communication of what’s expected, what forbidden, what allowable, what are the consequences of acting in certain ways.”
Marc Galanter, “The Legal Malaise: Or, Justice Observed,” 19 Law and Society Review 537, 545 (1985).
Because Federal Courts only have constitutional authority to resolve actual disputes (see Case or Controversy) legal actions cannot be brought before the challenged law or government action has produced a direct threat to the party suing. Before then, the matter is said to be not yet “ripe” for judicial resolution. For Supreme Court decisions focusing on the “ripeness” issue, see, e.g., Reno v. Catholic Social Servs., 509 U.S. 43 (1993) and Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003 (1992). From Wex.
We’ve always thought of a link to our site as a kind of vote. It means something when somebody refers their readers to you. And Google Webmaster Tools does a good job of filtering out the link-farmers and telling us what we want to know about the 675,000 or more links that come into the LII. It’s a good starting point for figuring out who our audience is and what they want.
Some have an obvious meaning (the more than 100,000 from our friends at Justia, for example, or the 2475 from Jurist). But there are some that…well, they take a little figuring out. 24676 from www.theonering.net, a Lord of the Rings fan site, for example, or the 3792 from www.elflady.com. What could this possibly mean? We were even more worried when we went to the ElfLady site and found something called the Orlando Love Forum Board (shudder).
Turns out every last one of the hobbit-links is to Title 17 of the US Code (copyright, for non-Code-heads). This is part of a trend we’ve noticed, in which people make declarations about a legal position by linking to us. In this case, the hobbits seem to be protecting themselves from orcish rights-holders…. and asserting that they are making fair use of copyrighted material from films and books.
Oh, and we got 50 more links from the hobbits than we did from the law professors at Blawg Emperor Paul Caron‘s lawprofessors.typepad.com . Comparisons are meaningless, but we figure that either the law professors have less to protect or the hobbits are just that little bit cuter.
When the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) needs help with tax law, it turns to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute (LII).
Everyone has to pay income tax. It says so in Title 26, the section of the U.S. Code that governs tax law.
Title 26 has been available on the LII Web site for more than ten years. But now, LII’s Tax Code will be included in the IRS Tax Products CD/DVD package — a tax preparer’s main resource for all things taxable that includes tax publications and forms, research tools, and answers to frequently asked questions.
Paul Showalter, the IRS staffer who produces the Tax Products, called LII Director Thomas R. Bruce on February 7 to ask permission to use the LII material. With the nimbleness that makes the Web different from print, the LII closed the deal and transmitted their version of Title 26 to Showalter the same day.
“I decided to use the LII Tax Code primarily because it is the site that www.IRS.gov refers people to,†Showalter says.
The Government Printing Office (GPO) also makes the U.S. Code available online—but it’s slow and hard to read. The LII version is not only more readable; it also provides a table of recent updates to the law, a link to the GPO site, and the opportunity to easily download or print the material.
The IRS produces 26,000 of its Tax Product CD/DVD package, which is sent, free of charge, to thousands of tax preparers and other interested parties. They go to each member of Congress; to free tax clinics (such as those run by the AARP); to members of the IRS Corporate Partnership (companies who make tax information freely available on company intranets); to libraries; and to IRS employees and IRS walk-in offices.
“We work in a disconnected environment, and employees like easy access to products,†Showalter explains. “The Tax Products package is a great off-line research tool, and that’s why it was created.â€
An earlier version of the IRS Tax Products shipped in December. At the end of February, the IRS will ship their final release, this time incorporating the LII’s contribution.
LII’s user-friendly version of Title 26 is now available online. The LII also makes general tax information accessible.
