Usually, we use this space to feature a conspicuous bump in traffic to some part of our website and map it to a recent news event. This time, however, we’re going to do something a little bit different. In an article back in April, we told the story of how we’d used the extra student labor made available to us during the Summer of 2020 (as their other summer jobs shrunk or vanished entirely) to re-invigorate more than 1,000 definitions in our Wex collection.
In that same article, we introduced Nichole McCarthy, LII’s new Original Content Collections Manager. She spent the Summer of 2021 continuing the Wex Definitions Project, and her student crew improved upon the output from the summer prior. In total we have renovated around 2,500 Wex definitions, making each one longer and more comprehensive while linking it to more related content on our website such as statutes, US Supreme Court decisions, and other Wex articles. We also added dozens of new definitions.
All of that work makes those pages better in the eyes of search engines, resulting in our Wex pages being more findable to the general public. And the public has, indeed, found Wex. This graph shows Wex pageviews up 20% from July through September of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020.
Considering all that was in the headlines during this time last year–the election, the pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement all come instantly to mind–it’s amazing that Wex traffic is up dramatically this year. All signs point to the output of our Wex Definitions Project as the reason why.
Of course, traffic in-and-of itself is not our goal. The purpose of Wex is to provide useful, viewpoint neutral explanations of legal terms and concepts to anyone who needs them. We like to think that some segment of that increased viewership was spared a trip to other websites offering answers that are at the very least aligned with a political or social agenda and the very worst just flat wrong.
We still have more than 5,000 other definitions in Wex, all of which will be re-visited in the coming years, and most of which will be revised in the process. Meanwhile, we continue to explore better organizations and linkages within Wex to provide even deeper context for our readers. We’ll keep you posted along the way.
Like the university that we call home, our fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30. While Cornell’s Fiscal 21 proved to be every bit as trying as we all thought they would be, we are pleased to report that the Legal Information Institute is stronger than ever. Though our small staff continues to work remotely, we made substantial progress on new initiatives while simultaneously meeting the demands of a global audience that has never been larger.
Six months ago, the Cornell Chronicle wrote a lovely article about the LII and our website: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/01/institute-breaks-record-2020-making-laws-easy-access. The article highlights how events such as the storming of the US Capitol, civil unrest after the killing of George Floyd, and COVID-19 drove LII’s extraordinary website traffic in 2020. Those events and more translated to record traffic on law.cornell.edu in Fiscal 21. More than 40 million unique visitors came to the website over the last 12 months. They engaged in more than 68 million sessions and viewed more than 168 million pages of content–breaking the records we set in Fiscal 2020.
From links in blog posts authored by the National Constitution Center, the American Bar Association, FactCheck.org and many others, to more than 15,000 readers who arrived from the website of CalFresh, California’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, law.cornell.edu continued to be a go-to source for unbiased legal information. Educators at every level also continued to refer students to LII this year, via general information resources, library guides, and learning management systems. We were thrilled to be a part of the nationwide shift to online learning during the pandemic, with increased referrals from Canvas, Google Classroom, and K12 domains across the country.
Beyond the United States, LII served more than 6.9 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, the Philippines and China more than doubled their traffic, rising to #3 (behind India) and #6 (behind Canada and the UK), respectively. Pakistan rocketed up to snag spot #14, and for the first time, we registered 3 users purporting to originate from North Korea.
Even as events from the news drive particular traffic spikes that can last from a few minutes to a few days, most of our users (representing a supermajority of our traffic) use our website in a professional capacity to do their work. Every year we hear not only from lawyers, librarians, bankers, and accountants, but also from droves of loyal users across the entire spectrum of business, government, and education. Even in a “quiet” month when major law and politics stories are absent from the daily headlines, somewhere between 2 and 3 million people use the service we provide as an alternative to expensive online databases.
“I find the Legal Information Institute’s explanations invaluable in my work as a reporter having to cover numerous legal issues. “
Our biggest accomplishment during Fiscal ‘21 was, without a doubt, the creation of a new online collection of the regulations of all 50 states. To create the collection, LII teamed with Public.Resource.Org, Fastcase, and Justia, Inc. to form the Code Improvement Commission. We then obtained the raw texts of the regulations from all 50 states, and our team of technologists set about creating and honing the tools needed to process, standardize, enrich, and publish those large and disparate corpora in a user-friendly and accessible format. This collection reflects an initial and ambitious first step to move “down the jurisdictional stack” away from the collections of federal law that have always been LII’s domain.
But simply publishing the regulations is not the end goal of the five-year project on which the Commission has embarked. Before the Commission disbands in 2025, LII plans to add more features to its collection to improve the findability and readability of state regulations, as well as to connect them to both other relevant governance and also information about the activities and objects being regulated. We will also allow bulk access to the formatted data for others to ingest, study, and improve.
Executive Orders
As website traffic died down after the presidential election and its aftermath and the inauguration approached, news outlets began to cover the anticipated flurry of executive orders. Because the publication process for new executive orders involves a delay of a few days before the formal publication in the Federal Register, we monitored the White House’s website for new orders; formatted, hyperlinked, and retrofitted them for web-accessibility-compliance; and published them when they were announced, making each new executive order far easier to locate, read, and contextualize for our readers.
“I am a public health attorney. I love how easy it is to find and use federal statutes on your site and move from Section to Part to Subchapter to Title so that I can understand a section in context. There are many good resources for other laws – but yours is the only one that I use for federal statutes. Thanks!”
LII staff members continued to serve as a resource to the free access to law movement and legal technology projects. We continued to collaborate with a number of groups in government, non-profits, and industry, including the Federal Depository Library Program, AfricanLII, an e-regulations project for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid studies, as well as serving as a formal advisor to the National Science Foundation-funded project FAI: Using AI to Increase Fairness by Improving Access to Justice. 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”.
We’ve expanded our use of law students to explain the law to the public.
LII employed 109 students and recent graduates in Fiscal ’21 to revise and create new content for Wex and the Supreme Court Bulletin Previews. We also took a quantum leap forward in our ability to employ even more in Fiscal ‘22 and beyond. In April, we added Nichole McCarthy to our staff as our first ever Original Content Collections Manager. In addition to managing our current cohort of student workers, Nichole is tasked with a pair of huge challenges:
To design and implement a better system of organization within Wex to help readers get to additional primary and secondary resources on our website and beyond that relate to the article they are viewing; and
To create new kinds of original content, as well as a viable structure for recruiting, training, and managing larger networks of pre-law undergraduates, law students, and volunteer experts from around the country (around the globe?) to populate and maintain those collections.
We are excited for the increased capacity this gives us to recruit more student labor than ever before!
2. Masters of Engineering Students Continue to Imagine Future Possibilities.
Every year, LII hosts students from Cornell’s engineering and information science programs. Two projects stand out from this year: an exploratory data analysis of state regulations and what we’ve been calling “the art project”. Our new state regulations publication is the largest document corpus we’ve ever worked with. Because this is the first time we’ve had access to standardized data at the state level, we have a great deal to discover by applying all of the techniques we’ve honed over the years to discover topics, citation networks, definitions, named entities, and other characteristics of the corpus that help readers find, contextualize, and understand the regulations.
The “art project” was our most speculative project to date. We’re curious about the potential for using artificial intelligence technologies to generate multimedia resources that could make legal information less intimidating to civics students and other non-law-trained audiences. A talented M.Eng. student with a strong interest in art took up the challenge of applying artistic styles to photographs and animating the resulting images using the latest lip-syncing models. We look forward to extending this work in the future.
Though a part of Cornell Law School, LII is entirely self-funded. We not only “paid the bills” in Fiscal ‘21, we also added to our strategic reserve and completed fundraising for the Tom Bruce Legal Information Innovations Fellowship endowment. We look forward to bringing the first Fellow to campus in Fiscal ‘22. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of friends like you. We want to be sure to finish off our retelling of this remarkable year on a note of gratitude: 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!
“I am retired and volunteer for a NPO, but I could not live without this valuable resource. Thank you.“
While the Thomson Reuters copyright suit against Ross is just getting started, the Supreme Court recently put an end to a long-running copyright dispute between Google and Oracle. Before the case was argued in the fall, Cornell Law students Thomas Shannon, Andrew Kingsbury, and Tyler Schmitt did an excellent job previewing the case for our Bulletin subscribers here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/18-956
This is not an article about what is sure to be the most annoying part of the upcoming “Friends” reunion. It is, first and foremost, about ROSS AI.
Back in October, I wrote about my experience using the legal research Chrome extension from ROSS AI. It was meant to be the first in a regular series of features about other Free Law tools available to you out in the world. And we’ll get back to that next time. Meanwhile, something has happened; and you need to hear about it.
ROSS went out of business. That’s the short version.
The longer version is that Thomson Reuters (TR), owners of Westlaw, had sued ROSS earlier in 2020. The complaint alleges, in short, that ROSS had obtained in bulk from a third party copyright-protected Westlaw content (such as headnotes, Key Numbers, and other organizational/editorial content added to the cases by Westlaw editors) and used that material in developing its AI-assisted platform.
Predictably, ROSS immediately issued a press release denying the allegations, stating that any copyright-eligible material from Westlaw it obtained through its third-party partner “would have been useless to ROSS.”
The litigation proceeded apace. Briefing on a motion to dismiss was completed (but the motion not yet heard) by the time I wrote my review of the Chrome extension. (The court would subsequently deny the motion in an order dated March 29, 2021.)
In December of 2020, ROSS announced that it would cease all operations by the end of January, 2021 and concentrate solely on fighting the TR lawsuit. ROSS’s founder wrote, “With our company ensnared by this legal battle, we have been unable to raise another round of funding to fuel our development and marketing efforts.”
Before we go any further, it’s important to say that I do not know whether or not the allegations in TRs complaint have merit or will be borne out by the evidence. Also, I understand just how common this is, and that many of the lawyers among our subscriber base have seen similar stories of young companies driven to extinction by the direct and indirect costs of defending themselves against allegations of intellectual property infringement or theft brought by very companies they are seeking to usurp. I’m also aware that some of us in the bar have worked for those large and well-resourced companies. And, at the risk of being redundant, I also understand that sometimes these allegations prove to be true and actionable.
America is a country based on laws. The law belongs to all of us. It governs us, protects us, and forms the basis of our great democracy. Our highest ideal is justice for all. This depends on the people—all people—having access to the law. But for Westlaw, the public law is nothing but a commodity to be bought and purchased and a fiefdom to be protected at all costs.
It’s quite a coincidence that the case I was researching when I first wrote about ROSS was the Supreme Court’s recent clarification of copyright law’s Government Edicts Doctrine, Georgia v. Public Resource.Org. Will that opinion have any impact on this case? It could directly impact what the court ultimately determines to be the validity or the scope of the copyright TR claims.
Beyond this particular litigation, the Georgia v. PRO case could indirectly impact the for-profit legal publishing industry by changing the perceived incentives for companies like TR to enter into contracts to be the original publishers of statutes, regulations, or case law.
And Georgia v. PRO is not the Court’s most recent word on copyright. Earlier this month, it decided Google v. Oracle. In that case, the Court articulated what many believe to be an expanded understanding of the doctrine of Fair Use. Will ROSS be able to use that opinion to support the declaratory judgment it seeks that any alleged copying was fair use?
There is much more to say about the intersection of the Government Edicts Doctrine, Fair Use, and publishing the law–whether for profit or not. As our team and others explore these topics, we’ll be sure to share the best parts with you.
At this point last year, we had no idea what was going to happen. No one did. But we knew our donors had treated us generously (thanks again!), and we were on pace to record a surplus when our fiscal year wrapped up at the end of June. We also knew that the dual threat of economic uncertainty and remote work meant that many law students were seeing their summer job plans shrink dramatically or disappear altogether. We decided to offer summer employment to any Cornell student who approached us, and to advertise that offer aggressively within the (virtual) halls of Cornell Law School. This would be a classic “win-win” scenario, where more students would find meaningful, law-related summer employment, while we (and you!) would get more new original content than we are usually capable of producing. It seemed like a classic opportunity to, as the old saying goes, take the lemons we’d been handed and make some lemonade.
We began feverishly planning an ambitious student project to make use of the extra labor. We wanted to refurbish as many of the short definitions in our Wex legal reference as possible.
It all (somehow) came together, and since this time last year we have seen dozens of students on the Wex Definition Team research and draft more than 1,000 improved Wex definitions.
As the dust settled on a busy summer and the stream of new and improved Wex entries slowed to a trickle as classes started in September, we were tired and proud. We also had a couple of new problems. First, we’d seen the results that vigorous student employment could yield, and we were hungry for more. Second, all that time we’d just spent in Wex identifying definitions to be improved upon and publishing those improvements left us keenly aware of the untapped potential of that collection.
So did what any small team of professionals would do when faced with such a challenge: we asked for help! We were able to raise sufficient funds to hire our first ever Original Content Collections Manager. Just a few weeks ago, we were able to welcome Nichole McCarthy to our team!
Nichole views access to information as a form of advocacy when it prepares individuals and groups to make informed decisions. She has demonstrated her passion for information services through more than 7 years of human services advocacy experience – serving both non-profit agencies and the State of New York. Trained as a librarian, she has worked in public, academic, and specialized libraries and previously supported the Law Library of Congress as a Metadata Intern. She has also worked as a librarian at a law firm and as a volunteer archivist for KRIA: The Icelandic Constitution Archives, where she archived over 1,000 webpages. In addition to her M.S. in Library and Information Science, Nichole has a B.A. in Women’s Studies and a M.S. in Criminal Justice Administration.
Nichole’s first task is to train and manage the sizable cohort of students who will make up the Wex Definitions Team this summer.
Longer term, Nichole is tasked with a pair of huge challenges:
To design and implement a better system of organization within Wex to help readers get to additional primary and secondary resources on our website and beyond that relate to the article they are viewing; and
To create new kinds of original content, as well as a viable structure for recruiting, training, and managing larger networks of pre-law undergraduates, law students, and volunteer experts from around the country (around the globe?) to populate and maintain those collections
Nichole’s arrival and mission is just one of the brands of lemonade we are making out of the big bushel of lemons that the pandemic has handed us. We’ll keep you posted as we refine our recipe!
While it seems like much longer, we started off 2020 just a year ago by presenting the prior year as a series of significant numbers. Without intending to minimize what we all went through since then, here’s 2020 “by the numbers” for LII:
3,751,971 referrals arrived from 49,349 websites, including:
139,396 from educational platforms and institutions,
187,951 from federal, state, and local government,
252,738 from news organizations,
351,293 from Wikipedia, and
1,391,868 referrals from social media.
1,351,432 pages of state regulations content made their way to the public. With sponsorship from Public.Resource.Org and a raw data feed from Fastcase, LII developed and made available to the public a comprehensive collection of state regulations. We had long hoped to facilitate access to law below the federal level, and the raw data feed let us build a comprehensive collection from the start, so we can see how federal law plays out at the state level.
$130,000 dollars went into the Tom Bruce Legal Information Innovation Fellowship Fund. Once it reaches $400,000, that endowed fund will pay for a Fellow to spend the summer in Ithaca each year advancing the state of the art in legal informatics and related fields.
1,041 donors responded to a short donor survey. Those results will not only help us focus our efforts on the website and improve our communications with you, but also provide valuable insight into how people use and perceive Free Law resources.
964 Wex definitions were improved by Cornell Law students, including timely updates to articles such as “blanket search warrant,” “electioneering,” and “Citizens United.”
7 apps in the Cornell Tech Law App Showcase for which LII language and data science specialist, Dr. Sylvia Kwakye, served on the judging panel. In addition to immigration topics (asylum, Green Cards, visas, citizenship, and immigration relief), app topics also included divorce case assessment and assistance dog rights.
4 presentations at this year’s virtual Law Via the Internet Conference. Craig Newton spoke on Georgia v. Public.Resource. Org; Sara Frug presented on a panel on free access to scholarship and on another panel on the potential for free access to law publishers to help downbias legal data sets that support artificial intelligence applications; Neli Karabelova presented on a panel discussing how to communicate user impacts.
122 student employees, many of whom were displaced from other summer jobs by the COVID-19 pandemic.
We know what you’re thinking. We’re thinking it too. Heck, the entire world is thinking it: thank goodness 2020 is over!
Except it isn’t. Almost, but not quite. There are still {a few hours} left in 2020. And this is important, because it means that there are still {a few hours} left for you to help us in our 2020 fundraiser. And, because a generous donor has offered to match all donations for the rest of 2020, your procrastination will be doubly rewarded.
A lot of you have generously donated already. We are deeply grateful for it— as we are every year, of course, but we are even more grateful this year, since we know how rough a year it has been for everyone. Even for those among our readers who didn’t have to fear for their lives working in person as teachers or police officers or small business owners, the seemingly uninterrupted stream of bad news, ill-timed technical glitches, and interruptions made for an isolating and stressful time for everyone – ourselves included.
But in rough times, people interact with the law. Which is why, despite all the craziness that 2020 has thrown our way, we have carried on doing what we do best: providing free law to those who need it. Free access to law makes it possible to meet information needs we often don’t even know about until they become urgent. During lockdowns, we helped people find the law about public health and small business development. During protests, we helped people find the law about the federal government and policing. And during a long and contentious election season, we’ve helped people understand facets of election law most of us had never before realized would become relevant – until suddenly it was.
But we can only do all this with your support. So before we all give 2020 a hearty shove out the back door tell it to come back never, please consider giving a gift that will allow us to provide the law to people on what we dearly hope will be the happier, more optimistic topics in demand in the forthcoming year.
It’s almost Christmas, and many of our thoughts are turning to time off, eggnog, spruce trees, Dickens stories, and the law.
Wait, what?
As we do our work at LII, many of our most fruitful questions fall under the category of “what is the law of where I’m standing right now?” And at this time of year, even for those of us from other traditions, such questions are often along the lines of: “what is the law of this holiday, this ornament, this string of lights, this Christmas tree?” Now, if you’re wondering what’s the point of asking such a question, consider that although most people think of Christmas trees as a festive holiday tradition, for many small businesses, they are, more centrally, a federally regulated agricultural crop. So, if you search the Code of Federal Regulations, you can find a formal definition of a Christmas tree (“any tree of the coniferous species, that is severed or cut from its roots and marketed as a Christmas tree for holiday use”.) You can also find definitions of who counts as a producer, regulations for the establishment of a Christmas tree promotion board, and multiple other things that are far more legally complex than tinsel and tree-top angels.
It’s not just trees; Christmas comes up in a lot of other places. It’s a federal holiday, of course, during which the government especially encourages displays of the U.S. flag, but anglers are unwelcome in the Guam National Wildlife Refuge. (Small!) Christmas gifts are exempted from the ban on gifts between federal employees and their supervisors or subordinates. And, although Christmas light sets are not consumer commodities under the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, Christmas decorations are.
Christmas also comes up in a variety of far more serious contexts. Religious displays on public property have made their way to the Supreme Court. Forest management regulations set forth the rules for cutting down trees on federal and state lands. The Indian Schools Equalization Program provides funds for a round trip home. Wage and hour laws preserve the status of full-time students over their vacations. (Again, small) Christmas presents are used as an example of nonrecurring gifts that are exempted from income calculations in financial assistance programs.
Especially at this time of year, it means a great deal to us that we can help people find and understand where the law meets their circumstances, however common or unusual those circumstances might be. By supporting free access to law, you help people from all walks of life fulfill information needs we can only begin to imagine – to keep their businesses open, their refrigerators stocked, their spirits up. Whether you celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, enjoy it as time away from work, use it as an opportunity to fill in for those who are celebrating, or have a professional or personal interest in it as a legal matter, we hope you will take a moment in this season to help us continue to provide free access to law to everyone who might need it.
LII is a site for law, but most visitors to the website are not lawyers. A journalist in Missouri recently donated and said “I use this resource all the time.” Another in Florida told us that our explanations of the law are “invaluable” for her work covering legal issues. A Texas CPA specializing in tax compliance and consulting left us a note with her gift saying she uses the LII to answer her clients’ questions. A forensic psychologist in Utah called our website “a superb resource” for his practice when he made his donation.
Beyond our users, our research also suggests that most of our supporters are not lawyers—or, if they are lawyers, they practice law without the benefit of expensive legal research databases. So, both the government attorney who recently told us her access to paid research services is “very restricted” and the other federal worker who said she uses our US Code collection routinely and recommends our website to unrepresented parties support us right alongside the autism researcher who uses our website when filling out grant paperwork.
And, of course, there are those who can (and do) use other legal research methods but either prefer the features in our collections or simply appreciate the availability of free resources for use by all. Take, for example, the public health attorney in Michigan who appreciates the structure of our U.S. Code despite noting the “many good resources” available to her, or the lawyer in Virginia who relies on our free Supreme Court Bulletin Previews to stay apprised of the Supreme Court’s doings but donates because he “truly believes” in our mission of “access to the law for everyone.”
Our supporters represent dozens of professions (or more!) and range in age from students to retirees. We hear each year from as many self-described “ordinary citizens” as we do from members of the bar. And we appreciate each and every one of them.
Whether you share our deep commitment to Free Law or merely appreciate that we’re the top search result when you go looking for the precise wording of FRCP 26, we hope you’ll consider showing your support for what we do.
In the midst of all the chaos this year, the United States Supreme Court did something remarkable. We’ve already told you about Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org and its impact on opening up state-law materials; but, now is the perfect time to look a little more closely at what the Court said and why it was so good to hear.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts explained that “no one can own the law. ‘Every citizen is presumed to know the law,’ and ‘it needs no argument to show … that all should have free access’ to its contents.” We’ve been beating that drum since 1992, and it’s wonderful to hear it echo at the Supreme Court. We wouldn’t have arrived here without your generous support.
But it’s something else the Chief Justice wrote that I want to focus on. He invited readers to “imagine a Georgia citizen interested in learning his legal rights and duties.” He notes that readers of the “economy-class version of the Georgia code available online” would come across laws that have been invalidated by courts. “Meanwhile,” he noted, “first class readers with access to the annotations will be assured that these laws are, in crucial respects, unenforceable relics that the legislature has not bothered to narrow or repeal.”
By posing that scenario, the Chief Justice was clear that the public deserves free access to complete and correct resources that fully enumerate and explain citizens’ rights and obligations. And he assumes that citizens will go online to access them. This is a HUGE shift from where we started out, when it seemed not just fashionable but downright “responsible” for judges, lawyers and academics to question the utility and reliability of free online legal resources available to the general public. Only lawyers needed the law, the argument went, and trusting its dissemination exclusively to a duopoly of deep-pocketed publishers to keep it out of the hands of everyone else seemed more like a solution than a problem in that worldview.
But even in those early days, we knew that all of you are “first class readers” who use the law to do your work, solve your problems, participate in society, and generally live your lives. It has always been our top priority to bring you accurate, updated, and unbiased primary and secondary sources of legal information to help you do all that. And, it turns out, the Supreme Court agrees that’s a very good idea.
