This year, I was lucky enough to be able to attend the annual LVI conference, held this year at Limmasol, Cyprus.  A truly beautiful place where Laris Vrahimis from CyLaw and the Cyprus Bar went out of their way to make a memorable event.  It was also an ongoing affirmation that the Free Access to Law Movement is alive and working.  But there was also a note of frustration and pessimism in the air.  The note of frustration was summed up in the question “where do we go from here?”  After 25 years of LIIs, this is a fair question.

It’s a very important question.  The LIIs across the world have been working on making primary source law available to their fellow citizens, and have gotten pretty good at it.  There are still far too few LIIs, but the ones that are around have the basics down pretty well.  But most are stuck at that basic level.  This is a problem with several levels.  The first is that the basics themselves are not all that easy.  It’s a lot of work to gather, process, and publish the law on the shoestring budgets that we all have.  And it is of crucial importance that the basic primary source law stay available.  This basic level must be maintained.

But what about everything else that ought to be done?  Here are three things to do.  There are places, like Cornell, that are doing some already, but there is room for every LII to think about and work on these steps.  

Access to Justice

The first item is assisting users with interpretive materials and guidance.  Fortunately, the Cornell LII, the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), and Justia have been doing things along these lines already.  For years now, Cornell LII has been developing WEX (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex), a free legal encyclopedia and dictionary.  They also have the Supreme Court Bulletin (https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert).  Justia has similar services in the form of the Justia blog and the Justia Verdict legal commentary site (https://verdict.justia.com/), as well as its crowdsourced court decision annotations.  In the case of the LII, the labor and expertise is supplied mostly through the students of Cornell Law School, under the supervision of Cornell LII editors.  In the case of Justia, it is lawyers and academics who wish to be published, and who are getting advantages from the Justia service in return for their efforts.  

CALI does not have decision commentary, but has developed their A2J guided interview software system (https://www.a2jauthor.org/).  A2J allows law clinics to develop online interviews that guide clients through all the information needed to address a selected legal issue, and provide needed information or even print court or other documents ready for filing.

Translating these kinds of services to other LII’s might be harder or easier depending on their individual circumstances.  Some LII’s may be in a position to recruit volunteer labor, in which case, generation of commentary and guidance for popular benefit could be a practical path.  As to the CALI A2J system, it is available to anyone.  However, its use requires a great deal of initial dedication and labor to produce an interview, and any interview produced will require maintenance.

Archiving

Maybe the least interesting thing that we can be involved with. It is certainly not going to generate interest (or donations) from the public.  However, it is of great importance.  How easy is it for 25 years of vital legal information to be wiped out in a small and terrible flash.  Even more insidious, is a slow bleed from bit rot. It’s the kind of problem that we won’t be aware of until it’s already upon us.  

Now it goes without saying that we all back up.  And we all back up carefully and regularly.  But as we move forward, and look to the long term, we know that real disasters will come upon us at some point.  We can assure ourselves that it won’t happen anytime soon, or on our watch.  But of course, that is exactly the sort of thinking that the librarians in Alexandria engaged in.  It did work for a long time, but not indefinitely.  The only real solution to data longevity is the old solution that the print world has been using since the development of the printing press: replication and distribution.  Many copies, distributed as widely as possible.

To the computer scientist, this seems horribly inefficient.  It is.  But they must overcome their horror, and understand that efficiency is not an end in itself.  Longevity is far more important.  And to live indefinitely, data must be immune from institutional failure.  The only way to guarantee that is not to rely on single institutions.  

A more serious barrier to widespread replication of data is distrust, both within institutions and nationally.  On the institutional level, there are understandable fears concerning reputation, prestige and funding.  If an LII allows other institutions to have a copy of the material they work so hard to develop, they will no longer get the credit they deserve.  In the long run, this will lead to a lack of support for the LII.  On the national level, some LIIs fear that sharing their data with institutions outside of their country will damage their standing with the governmental bodies they rely on for their data and for support.

Both of these are real problems that cannot be dismissed lightly.  However, as with the computer scientists, these hesitancies should not stand in the way of long term viability of the data that LIIs work so hard to develop.  To the extent we can do so, we need to distribute our data.  If this is just to places willing to act as repositories (with an agreement not to republish), that would be enough to insure the survival of the data.  For others, acknowledgement of their efforts through branding, etc. may be enough.  But in the end something like this needs to happen.  As a librarian, I can see that if every law library (law library defined as any institution that collects law) in the world had an electronic copy of all the world’s law, it would be very difficult to lose anyone’s law.  That would be quite something.  

A U.S. Problem: Administrative Decisions

I was very interested and encouraged to read  Pierre-Paul Lemyre’s February 22 post, “A Short Case Study of Administrative Decision Publishing” where Washington state’s PERC decisions are being made public.  For me, this is the next frontier of legal publishing that is badly in need of attention.  In the U.S., all 50 states and the federal government have elaborate administrative law structures that include administrative tribunals.  These tribunals are not a part of the regular judiciary, but are attached to the executive branch of government, usually the department with subject-matter jurisdiction.  In the past, the most important of these tribunals had their decisions published in print, usually by the GPO.  Of course, sending information to the GPO is not something agencies do very much any more, and from the way many government agency websites are organized, many either do not publish their ALJ decisions are hide them deep within their websites.  In the best of cases, they are not well searchable, and there is certainly no easy way to compare one department’s decisions with any other.

The result of the above situation is that only the ALJs and expert practitioners are even aware of the existence of ALJ decisions in any particular field.  Even among those practitioners, there is little or no knowledge of how other agencies adjudicate identical issues.  On the state level this situation is often worse (except in places like New Jersey, where there is a central Office of Administrative Law which hears all administrative cases and diligently publishes their decisions. See: https://njlaw.rutgers.edu/collections/oal).  

Imagine, however, the possibilities raised by gathering and publishing federal ALJ decisions in an integrated collection.  In New Jersey, where these decisions are published, there is a large body of administrative common law which lends the consistency of stare decisis to their decisions.  This applies not only to decisions within each agency, but on similar issues between agencies as well.  The unified cadre of ALJs certainly makes this possible, but even without that, the existence of a full set of decisions which can easily be browsed and compared gives great impetus towards uniformity and predictability in decision making.  It is a great aid to the agencies, the bar and the public.

Unfortunately, I despair of ever convincing the federal government to embrace this sort of arrangement.  However, this is exactly the sort of project that an LII can excel at.  The gathering will be difficult, but doing this will greatly improve the state of American law.

John P. Joergensen is the Senior Associate Dean for Information Services, a Professor of Law and an award-winning Director of the Law Library that serves Rutgers Law Schools in both Newark and Camden . 

Professor Joergensen organized the New Jersey Courtweb Project, which provides free Internet access to the full text of the decisions of the New Jersey Supreme Court and appellate courts, Tax Court, administrative law decisions, U.S. District Court of the District of New Jersey decisions, and the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Ethics Committee opinions. His work also included digitizing U.S. congressional documents, the deliberations of state Constitutional Conventions, and other historical records. In 2007 he received the Public Access to Government Information Award from the American Association of Law Libraries and in 2011 was named to the Fastcase 50 as one of the country’s “most interesting and provocative leaders in the combined fields of law, scholarship and technology.”

by G. Burgess Allison

The pioneer is a curious thing.  In the Old Days, pioneers were pretty easy to understand: There’s a mountain way over there that nobody’s crossed before—why don’t we cross it and see what’s on the other side?  But as we tamed our various geographical wilderni, pioneers had to tell much more difficult stories: No seriously, we’re gonna use electricity to talk to each other.  But of course we’ll have to hook up Really Long Wires between every building in the country.  (Well, until we switch to fiber.)

Cornell’s Legal Information Institute stands as one of those pioneers—one that was faced with telling a difficult story to a generally skeptical and plainly technophobic audience:  

No seriously, there’s this thing called the Internet.  (And—we’re off to a rocky start already.)  It’ll give us the opportunity to radically transform access to information of significance to the entire legal profession.  

Really?  Like Lexis and Westlaw?  Because we have that already.  

No, no, think broader than that.  And access will be free.  

Free?  Who’s gonna do headnotes and Key Numbers for “all information” … for free?  

Oh man, you just don’t get it.  The whole world is gonna change.

No I don’t.  Call me when the world has changed.

Here’s the thing about pioneers.  First and most importantly, after exploring the wilderness, after falling into traps and digging themselves out again, after making mistakes and learning lessons the hard way, they come back to the rest of us and tell everything!  Pioneers suffer all the personal pains of trailblazing, then return with the stories and findings, and with just a little bit of nurturing tell you exactly how to avoid all the difficulties.  With a tiny amount of encouragement, they’ll even offer to go out again and guide you along the way.

25 years ago, that’s exactly what we needed.  Tom Bruce and Peter Martin had the vision to see transformative change over the horizon, then set up shop to provide a home for experiments and new opportunities.  The LII was built to explore and try things out.  Some of those things would succeed, some would fail—but as we watched and followed the LII we learned that each effort was rolled out with a genuine enthusiasm and an open mind for the possibilities.  Don’t get me wrong, the Internet is not a judgment-free zone where every player wins a trophy.  This is an ENTJ wilderness with an embarrassingly-high score in Judging.  Technologies that don’t make it get pushed aside in a heartbeat.  Of course this is difficult for a laboratory like the LII.  Intellectually, you want to give each new technology time—time to show what it can do, time to make mistakes and attempt corrections, time to mature.  But realistically, tempus fugits faster on the Internet than anywhere else—the Internet does not embrace patience.  Any more than the legal profession embraces change.

Speaking of which … while the profession has well earned its reputation for resisting change (cf. IBM mag card typewriters), that does not mean the entire profession stuck its head in the technological sand.  Indeed, as an occasional speaker at the American Bar Association’s annual TECHSHOW conference, I was stunned at the audiences we drew on Internet-related topics: we filled the hallways when they put us in a smaller room; and we still went SRO when they put us in a bigger room.  So high was the enthusiasm (and so compelling was the pioneer spirit to share what people had discovered) that some already-robust panel discussions turned quickly into even-more-robust audience discussions as discoveries and new web sites were shouted from the audience.  The topic became lightning in a bottle.  One of the most popular programs at TECHSHOW became Sixty Sites in Sixty Minutes.  The excitement was palpable.

Certainly I was excited about what was happening as well.  In my own case, I was fortunate enough to have an outlet in the column I wrote for the ABA’s Section of Law Practice, Technology Update.  I tried, ever so hard, to explain to my readership just how big a change was coming.  The responses I got showed an intense level of interest, but a continued lack of information.  That in turn led to writing The Lawyers Guide to the Internet—which included Erik Heel’s groundbreaking list of online legal resources, The Legal List, and Lyonette Louis-Jacques’ list of law-related discussion groups, Lawlists.  While Lawyers Guide barely scratched the surface of Internet basics, it became the best-selling title in the ABA’s book publishing program.  Interest was high.

Two quick notes about Lawyers Guide:  First, it speaks volumes about how far we’ve come that Erik’s Legal List could actually contain every law-related web site and online resource.  Second, the first drafts of Lawyers Guide didn’t include this “new” technology called web sites—they hadn’t been invented yet.  They were added during the review of proof pages—not normally the time you would make such a significant change (with sincere gratitude to the ABA book program).  The only screen shot of a web page in the book came from the first and most prominent hypertext-enabled law-related web site.  At www.law.cornell.edu.

The LII was site #1 in what I called Burge’s Bookmarks.  And it was featured so many times in the Sixty Sites programs that we eventually retired it to Hall of Fame status—to make room for sites and capabilities that were newer and less well-known.

The LII was, and remains, the best of the wilderness.  A place where pioneers are welcomed, to experiment and try things out.  A place where the Rest Of Us can come and see what the pioneers are up to.  And a place where the pioneers are so excited about what they’re doing that they just can’t help but share what they’ve learned.

Thank you LII, thank you Tom and Peter … now back to work, there’s so much more to be done!

I love technology. 🙂

G. Burgess Allison is a Fellow in the College of Law Practice Management and is an active member of the American Bar Association’s Law Practice Management Section (LPMS). He wrote the “Technology Update” column in Law Practice Management magazine for 18 years, and authored “The Lawyer’s Guide to the Internet.”, the best-selling publication in the history of the ABA’s book-publishing program. He has served on the Council for LPMS, and as Publisher and Technical Editor for LPM magazine. Burgess has a J.D. from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from the University of Delaware.  Prior to his retirement,  he was the IT Director for MITRE’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD).

[ This post was contributed by Daniel Poulin, the founding director of CanLII, the first open-access publisher of law outside the United States, and a good friend of ours for many years ].

The Origins

In the eighties and nineties, the nascent Internet was closely connected with a culture of sharing. In those times, sharing did not meant “sharing economy” in today’s sense (Airbnb, Uber, etc), but making something available for free on the Internet. The dream was that over time even more things would be available for free and that everybody would benefit from it. It is the context in which I personally became interested in making Canadian law accessible for free on the Internet.

My first models were FTP sites accepting anonymous connections. I vaguely remember one at Stanford giving access to computer fonts and executable programs. I thought that the same approach could serve legal purposes and I was not alone thinking so. Indeed, at the beginning of the nineties, several American university professors, researchers and technology specialists started to use the Gopher technology to publish legal documents, generally case law collections. These offerings were not necessarily up-to-date or coherent, to say nothing about being complete. We were nevertheless in awe to discover that legal information could be made freely accessible as simply as that. I decided to do the same at the Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP) of the University of Montreal and I set up a Gopher server.

I was started, yet the real epiphany for me was a presentation by Peter W. Martin and Thomas R. Bruce about the Legal Information Institute in fall 1992 in Montreal. Even better than a Gopher site, they were developing a World Wide Web site and they were ambitious. This was exactly what I wanted to do. I briefly met with them after their talk. I remember that my worries about converting decisions in HTML were brushed off by Tom in the offhand manner he always had with perceived technical difficulties. I was not alone in being impressed the LII work. As a matter of fact, in the following years, Internet publishing started adding up in American law schools (see Fig. 1).

Fig 1: Screen shot of the CRDP Gopher server circa 1993 listing legal Gopher sites

However the general enthusiasm for legal publishing did not last long. By the end of the nineties, most of these initiatives had been abandoned, although the model set by Peter W. Martin, Thomas R. Bruce and their small team at Cornell remained, and had also found followers abroad, in Canada and Australia and, few years later, in the UK.

A web server was launched by Lexum at the U. of Montreal in summer 1994 to publish the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada. In 1995, the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) was set up in Sydney and they soon joined in with a web server as well. In retrospect, it seems that these three initial teams, which are still active today, LII, Lexum and AustLII were all characterized by a mix of research activities, technical developments and publishing. The pure play publishers in law schools probably never found a way to obtain the institutional and financial support required to keep going.

At the turn of the century there were a handful of groups in academia who were actively exploring the potential of the Internet to serve the law and were maintaining free access to law resources. This was the nucleus which was to grow and become the Free Access to Law Movement. Soon BaiLII, PacLII, HKLII and CyLAW and several others were to follow the LII model and start publishing.

The Evolution of LIIs

The approach initially developed by the LIIs, continued and further developed by several other academic groups, was apparently taking off. It was already successful in several common law countries. Colleagues in various European countries were starting to pay attention to the LII model. The older and better-established LIIs were involved in empowerment projects aiming at establishing free access in developing countries. We started to envision a constellation of LIIs covering the world. At the Law via the Internet Conference in 2002, a founding document was drafted (the Montreal Declaration on Free Access to Law) and an informal organization of legal information institutes, the Free Access to Law Movement, was established to further develop the LII model and to reach out to all those interested in maximizing access to public legal information.

More than twenty years later, taking stock of progress made, we can only note spectacular changes in many countries. In Canada, the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) now constitutes the first source of legal information for legal professionals. CanLII will soon have 2 million decisions published, frequently in both French and English. All statutes and regulations enacted over the last 15 years from all fourteen Canadian jurisdictions are also available. According to a survey of legal professionals prepared for CanLII in 2012, 56% of respondents start their legal research on CanLII. Four years later, CanLII’s usage statistics doubled again.

Beyond CanLII, to understand the strength of the Canadian free access to law system today, one must consider the favorable policies adopted by the Canadian Judicial Council and subsequently implemented by all Canadian courts. First to be noted there is the adoption of a neutral citation system. The existence of an authoritative way to cite judgments outside the privately-owned sphere of commerce now constitutes a central element of the legal information system in Canada. Courts add a citation they own and control to all their distributed decisions (something like “2017 QCCA 16”). This identifying element pertains to the decision and must follow it. Furthermore, decisions distributed by courts are final. There are no rules precluding the citation of a court decision in a counsel’s authorities beyond the principles of Stare Decisis as they apply in Canada. As a result, all court decisions, taken from a court’s own website, from CanLII or of course from a law report can be cited in court when relevant. Since decisions’ paragraphs are numbered, pin-point references are available. Today, counsels mix references to law reports and to CanLII in the authorities they submit to a court, and judges do the same in preparing their reasons for judgment (See Fig. 2).

Fig 2: Use of citations to CanLII (based on neutral citation) in a decision from the Ontario of Court of Appeal, 2015 ONCA 495 (CanLII)

The outlook is similar for Australia. Today, clearly, AustLII is the main outlet for case law in Australia. It must be recognized that the principals at AustLII were the first to establish almost country-wide comprehensive free access in 1997. It took four more years to reach that stage in Canada. Cornell’s LII demonstrated how the law can be published for free, but it is AustLII’s team that showed how this model can be expanded to its full-scale.

Several other legal information institutes are now well-established and would call for a more complete description. Unfortunately, such a description goes far beyond what is possible to do in a short blog post. SafLII and AfricanLII are superb achievements in improving access to legal information in Africa, and both are developing the legal information institute approach in conditions difficult to imagine for a Canadian living in Montreal. PacLII is doing similar work to serve the needs of some twenty developing countries in the South Pacific. BaiLII, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, would also merit being more fully described here, for its very small team is maintaining a good offering with very limited resources. CyLAW, established in collaboration with the Cyprus Bar Association is illustration of competence and institutional viability in a smaller state. Other extremely valuable initiatives can be found on the Free Access to Law Movement web site.

To sum up, the pioneer work done at Cornell 25 years ago led to the establishment of viable, efficient free access to law resources in several countries, especially countries belonging to the common law tradition. However, the full–fledged internationale of LIIs has never materialized. Many factors can contribute to explaining that. First, in countries of the continental law tradition, case law plays a less central role as a source of law, the publication of legislative material is often taken in charge by the legislative authority (which is not a bad thing), and doctrinal comments and treaties play a much larger role. Altogether these differences have made the development of a LII more challenging. Second, most of the LIIs which reached sustainability started in universities; many are still attached to academia. One must admit that such academic ventures are more valued (or face less prejudice) in North America and Australia than, let’s say, in France. Third, Martin and Bruce were — and still are — “entrepreneurs”. They were doing whatever was needed to finance their LII (consulting for government bodies or the industry was not out of question), they were taking risks and they were persevering. The principals at AustLII, SafLII and Lexum were venturers too (even swashbucklers for some). Some deans could have been less understanding in accepting the activism required to maintain an LII. A related and final ingredient required for survival and growth was the capacity to obtain the required financial support. In this regard, all of us in developed countries were privileged. In the developing world, international development organizations supported some LIIs for a limited time but the end of their funding brought many free legal information concerns to shut down their servers.

The Future

The next question is to try to figure where all this is going: the LII at Cornell, the other LIIs, the Free Access to Law Movement. Divination is not my specialty, but I will try to single out some of the results of the last 25 years that appear to be more durable and mix them with observable trends today which may contribute to determining the future of the free access to law idea.

The very first thing to say is that governments and courts are much more present and active than before. For instance, in all Canadian jurisdictions, statutes and regulations are freely accessible on the web and most courts and tribunals publish their decisions on their web site. Commercial legal publishing has gone through a major transformation over the last twenty years: most publishers specializing in case law reports have disappeared or been acquired by bigger competitors. The survivors linked to major global publishing groups are bundling all they have, such as jurisprudence and various doctrinal writings, case law and legislation, and they offer integrated information products by practice domain. This kind of offering finds takers and business seem to be good. Finally, free access to law seems to have found its footing. CanLII’s funding is provided by the legal professions which obtain through CanLII a national common legal library serving their missions to ensure the competence of their members and to serve the public.

To conclude, let’s say that free access to law is possible and sustainable. Capture and control of official legal information by private interests is avoidable. The well-established nation-wide systems in Canada and Australia, to name only these two jurisdictions, demonstrate that trustworthy, efficient publishing of law is compatible with public domain status and that public legal information can be made accessible for free.

Technical standards are key. The adoption of neutral citation and related policies by the courts played a significant role in ensuring that country-wide free access to law publishers, such as CanLII and AustLII, achieved their potential. More standardization would help deliver even more benefits.

Funding and benefits can be linked. Canada with its communist public health system is sometimes perceived as a middle-of-the-road society; not squarely socialist like those small countries in Northern Europe, but not entirely liberal either. Then, go figure, CanLII is privately funded by the legal professions and operated under contract by a for-profit company, Lexum. The reason private interests can serve a social mission is that those who pay are those who get the most out of the benefits. The business of the for-profit company is to help make the law accessible, not only as a service provider to CanLII, but also through all the other products it sells.

– 0 –

Since inception, Cornell’s LII has favored quality over quantity. LII’s siblings, Lexum (then CanLII), AustLII and BaiLII, and later on PacLII and SafLII, have gone for volume, to make a difference in access to law in their respective countries. This is not to minimize the practical significance of Cornell’s LII: it has made a difference too, but not the same way. Instead of trying to offer comprehensive access to USA law, which would have been an overwhelming objective, the principals at the LII decided to put their talent into achieving excellence within the more defined boundaries of specific collections, such as the US Supreme Court decisions, the US Code and now the Code of Federal Regulations. These are not tiny corpuses. All are significant bodies of law heavily used not only in the US but abroad as well. Even though other legal information initiatives produced innovations, none aside from Cornell’s LII put knowledge development as the central product of their activities. Even 25 years after starting, LII is still on the edge, figuring how to accelerate the development of a legal semantic web. Beyond the fact that they were the first LII, this constant contribution to knowledge may be the real reason for the ongoing influence and prestige of the institute established 25 years ago by Peter and Tom.  

Twenty years later, the model initiated at Cornell has flourished. Members of the LII family have found their own ways. Looking at the global picture, one can only be pleased to see how an idea born in academia, and in large part at Cornell Law School, has influenced many legal information systems for the better. Even more surprising, it seems that we have not yet seen the end of it. The Cornell LII remains, after all these years, a hotbed of innovation with friends all around the world.

Bon anniversaire et amitiés au LII de la part de nous tous chez Lexum,

Daniel Poulin is the founding director of CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute.  He is widely known for innovation in both legal publishing and in the business apparatus needed to sustain open-access efforts over the long term. He is now Emeritus Professor of the Law Faculty of the University of Montreal, and President of Lexum Information Juridique, a legal-information technology company spun off from his original research group at the University of Montreal.

[Note:  the second post in our “25 for 25” series is from Peter W. Martin, the LII’s founding co-director,  and former dean of the Cornell Law School.  Peter is, as well, a pioneer in the use of computers in law teaching, where he was the first to teach for-credit distance-learning courses (in copyright and Social Security law) across multiple institutions — another, less well known, LII first.  He is also the author of the immensely popular online guide, “An Introduction to Basic Legal Citation“.]

Tom Bruce has explained how he secured the Sun computer that launched our Internet escapades. I’ve been charged with adding further detail to the LII’s origin story.

Honesty compels a confession of how unclear we were at the outset about the role the Internet would play in our collaborative enterprise, but my files do contain notes on a January 1992 talk heralding the publication potential of the Internet. The venue was the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools; the presenter, Mitch Kapor, then chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Three previous years spent designing and building an electronic reference work on Social Security law had persuaded me that:

• law publishers were not reliable partners for such novel endeavors;
• hypertext (not present in either Westlaw or Lexis at the time) had enormous value when applied to legal materials;
• electronic media had the potential to erode barriers that had limited law schools to the role of consumers of information products; and
• a zone of digital innovation could be established within a U.S. law school with only modest amounts of external funding.

A New York non-profit, the National Center for Automated Information Retrieval or NCAIR, spending down funds generated by the establishment of LEXIS, had supported my Social Security project. In April 1992, with the endorsement of Dean Russell Osgood, Tom and I submitted a proposal to NCAIR seeking a handsome sum for establishment “of an institute of legal information technologies” at Cornell. At NCAIR’s request, we scaled back our multi-year proposal and asked only for start-up funds. Critically, those included salary monies to buy Tom freedom from his duties as the school’s director of educational technologies. Upon securing that funding, we declared ourselves co-directors of an institute – coining a name that has stuck for 25 years and has, as Tom notes, been taken on by many others.

The two labels proved to be startlingly important. To the external world “institute” suggested significant scale and permanence. Within the academic environment that surrounded us – where boundaries of academic discipline and status framed most activity – “co-directors” expressed a partnership that straddled both, making possible the most exhilarating and fulfilling collaboration of my career.

The agenda we sketched for NCAIR included disk publication of important U.S. statutes (electronic course supplements) and experimentation with use of the Internet as a mode of electronic publication and exchange. Unquestionably, we did not anticipate the pace, scope, or longevity of those experiments. Much of what followed was a consequence of fortuitous timing. Looking back, one can see that by 1992 several critical factors had aligned.

First, thanks to LEXIS and Westlaw, U.S. legal insiders (lawyers, judges, legislators, and participants in legal education) had grown familiar with computer-based legal information.

Second, the bodies from which legal texts emerge – courts, legislatures, administrative agencies – had begun using computers in drafting and revision. Most continued to consider the resulting word processing files simply a more efficient means of producing print, but some offered journalists, lawyers, and interested others dial-up access to the digital originals. In 1990 the US Supreme Court took a further step, distributing its judgments electronically on the morning of release to a small number of redistributors. A dozen or so media companies and law publishers subscribed. But so, too, did one university, Case Western Reserve, placing the decision files on the Internet at an ftp site. This was a far cry from effective public access. To retrieve the syllabus and opinions in a specific case one had to have a dial-up connection to the Case Western site or be part of the scientific community then connected to the Internet. One also needed to know the docket number, download multiple files, and have compatible word-processing software.

Nonetheless, the availability of primary legal texts in digital format straight from the source and unencumbered by copyright (another favorable factor) spared electronic publishers, including upstarts like us, the cost of digitizing print – a huge expense burdening early legal database research and LEXIS and Westlaw during their first decades. Together with the spread of PCs and the emergence of CD-ROM as a high-capacity distribution medium, this opened the U.S. legal information market to a disruptive wave of fresh competition.

Disk distribution offered important functionality, including hypertext and copy and paste, that the major online systems did not then deliver. Software exploiting this potential had appeared by the early 1990s. By 1992 work was underway to bring the best of them to a scrollable graphical user interface, capable of displaying and printing legal documents with all the information carried in print by font size, style, graphics, and layout. This development was in turn made possible by Microsoft’s release, only a year and a half before, of Windows 3.0.

Neither the major legal information vendors nor U.S. public bodies responded nimbly to the opportunities opened by disk distribution or the Internet. And that created space for our uninhibited, experimental non-profit.

We ventured into that space during the summer of 1992, with a handful of disk publications and the Gopher server Tom has described. Gopher could not, however, deliver important features we had been able to realize in the LII disk publications. It was a desire to bring the quality we had achieved on disk to the Internet that led us to html and the Web in early 1993. Way back then, the Web, also in its infancy, was the tool of a technical community that worked on UNIX machines that had high bandwidth connections to the Internet. Our principal audience as we then conceived it consisted of legal insiders working with PCs and dial-up connections. For them no Web browser existed nor was one in sight. So Tom set to work and created the first Windows-based Web browser, Cello.

By then the infrastructure that would allow the explosion of the World Wide Web was in place. The capacity and speed of the Internet’s backbone had just been dramatically improved. Congress had removed the ban on commercial traffic over that backbone imposed by NSF’s “acceptable use policy,” and privatization was underway.

These developments put distribution of legal information to a broader public within reach, but only those who were aware of and had access to the Net. In 1992 and 1993 that was a small population. During 1992 the word “Internet” appeared in only twenty-two New York Times articles and not once in the American Bar Association Journal. In December 1993, when the product “Internet in a box” was announced, estimates of Internet users had climbed into the 15-20 million range (a ten-fold increase over the course of only a year or two). By then the LII was an established Web destination, and Tom and I had begun to appreciate that the public that valued our growing collection of legal information was far broader than the set of legal insiders we initially had in mind.

As early as 1995 all the ingredients that enabled our initial experiment to germinate, grow, and reach a global audience had come together. Although the LII enjoyed significant first mover advantage, the period since then has been filled with repeated challenges and hard choices – as public bodies, commercial entities with business plans that incorporated public access to legal information, new search engines and other finding aids crowded into the sector the LII once shared with only a few others. Casualties furnished a steady reminder that in this rapidly changing environment, survival, let alone impact, could not be taken for granted. Long gone, for example, are the fine treaty collection hosted by the University of Tromsø, the index to federal agency material offered by Villanova, and Indiana’s law meta list. In some cases disappearance was the result of being displaced by something better, in others of having attempted too much, and still others of shifts in allegiance or priorities of key personnel or the host institution.

Successfully threading a path through these and other obstacles, the LII has had to address a set of critical and recurring questions, concerning:

• the institute’s relationship with Cornell;
• whether to work in consort with any of the increasingly numerous commercial and public players in this field, and if so on what terms;
• how to staff, organize, and fund expansion in scale and longevity beyond the initial experiment; and
• how to continue to innovate while maintaining the information services essential to holding and growing the LII’s audience.

As the years have gone by, these questions have not grown less difficult. In the 13 years since retirement removed me from the founding partnership, Tom and his team have addressed them with such success that I have high confidence that this venture, begun so long ago, will continue to break fresh ground, while meeting important public needs, long past this 25th anniversary.

Peter W. Martin, the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Cornell, co-founded the Legal Information Institute with Thomas R. Bruce and served as its co-director until 2003.