{"id":53,"date":"2009-02-28T17:01:01","date_gmt":"2009-02-28T22:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/2009\/02\/28\/big-world\/"},"modified":"2025-01-31T14:56:58","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T19:56:58","slug":"big-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/tbruce\/2009\/02\/28\/big-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Big world"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last several months, I have spent an awful lot of time travelling. I met with a lot of people who work in legal information, both here in the US and abroad.\u00a0 And I had every intention of filling this blog with posts about interesting things I’d seen and heard<\/a> — a kind of travelogue of legal informatics.\u00a0 It’s been slow in coming.\u00a0 Actually, I’m not convinced that a travelogue per se<\/em> is what’s needed.\u00a0 Event-by-event reporting is easy.\u00a0 Drawing a map of everything that’s going on out there in the world of legal information<\/a> is not.<\/p>\n

It’s a big world now.\u00a0 People are doing legal informatics in a lot of places.\u00a0 And that phrase — “doing legal informatics” — now includes a breathtaking number of disciplines and perspectives.\u00a0 It used to be that we thought of ourselves as situated at the corner of law publishing and computer science.\u00a0 Now we need to add big chunks of information science<\/a> (itself a composite field), legal bibliography, digital librarianship<\/a>, e-government studies<\/a>, political science, and sociology of the professions.\u00a0 At various times during the last six months I’ve had fascinating discussions with representatives from each of those academic disciplines, and from the practical side of librarianship, government, and publishing.\u00a0 Each was working in a distinct context leading to different kinds of insights and solutions. Each worked within a different legal regime.\u00a0 Each had mapped a different part of the world.<\/p>\n

We badly need communication across borders — national, disciplinary, institutional. It’s important that we do that now.\u00a0 We have opportunities — and challenges — of unprecedented scale and scope.\u00a0 We can act on those most effectively if we can stitch together all the little maps, overlay them, get a more complex and mutually-informed view of the world. And stop reinventing the wheel in each of its out-of-the-way corners.<\/p>\n

It has taken well over a decade to reach this point.\u00a0 Legal and government information showed up on the Web in the early 90’s — our own efforts here at the LII<\/a> and Carl Malamud<\/a>‘s liberation of the EDGAR database<\/a> were leading examples.\u00a0 Those were quickly followed by open-access projects in Canada<\/a> and Australia<\/a>.\u00a0 Digital-government projects began in the US around 1995 or 1996, including many self-publication projects in courts<\/a> and legislatures<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 These efforts created significant pools of data based on open standards, and the availability of that data made it possible for information-science researchers<\/a> to pay far more attention to legal data than they could when it was behind proprietary barriers.\u00a0 Now we’re seeing lot more work\u00a0 on legal data by computer scientists working with language technologies, database specialists, semantic-Web engineers, and others. In Europe, work on integration of government information<\/a> was propelled (and, ultimately, funded) by the requirements of unification.\u00a0\u00a0 Everywhere, more and more courts, legislatures, and agencies are putting information on the Internet in more and better ways using improved technologies.<\/p>\n

A condensed narrative like the preceding demands oversimplification, and I apologize if I’ve slighted anyone out of sheer middle-aged forgetfulness.\u00a0 And this tale no doubt has its beginnings much earlier — you could, for example, point at the long cooperation between the statistical arms of various government agencies<\/a> and academia and industry as part of the story.\u00a0 But as with so many other things the rise of the Web was the start of a new wave.\u00a0 That long, slow groundswell — the product of many individual efforts over a decade and a half — is now peaking.<\/p>\n

The American press first saw fit to remark on it about a year ago, with the release of extensive caselaw datasets by public.resource.org<\/a> — Carl Malamud’s latest effort.\u00a0 A community has started to form.\u00a0 Just within the last year or so, we’ve seen:<\/p>\n