{"id":3962,"date":"2017-02-22T14:57:53","date_gmt":"2017-02-22T19:57:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/?p=3962"},"modified":"2017-02-22T14:57:53","modified_gmt":"2017-02-22T19:57:53","slug":"a-short-case-study-of-administrative-decision-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2017\/02\/22\/a-short-case-study-of-administrative-decision-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"A short case study of administrative decision publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>While open and free access to American judicial opinions has progressed substantially over the last few years, very little attention has been given to the state of access to administrative legal information. \u00a0Maybe Tom Bruce did not ask kindly enough in 2013 when he wrote \u201cDear Federal Agencies \u2026 put your goddamned ALJ Opinions Up\u201d <\/span>in this post<\/span><\/a>. In any case, three years later, the situation is still more or less the same: administrative decisions rendered by both ALJs and agencies are not systematically available online, and when they are it can be extremely difficult for third parties to automatically agglomerate them for reuse. \u00a0This situation prevails at both the federal and state levels.<\/span><\/p>\n

This context explains my enthusiasm for the <\/span>new decision search engine recently deployed by the Washington Public Employment Relations Commission<\/span><\/a> (Washington PERC) with the help of <\/span>Decisia by Lexum<\/span><\/a>. \u00a0The Washington PERC is the Washington State agency with jurisdiction over public sector labor relations and collective bargaining in Washington. \u00a0Like many agencies it renders several types of decisions, which were previously scattered over different sections of its website – some with search capabilities and some without – making them difficult to discover. \u00a0Understanding that providing useful access to its decisions is part of its mandate, and that online access is the only thing that really counts today, the Washington PERC decided to invest some resources (a very reasonable amount in fact) in enhancing the usability of its online decisions.<\/span><\/p>\n

The new Washington PERC decisions website complies with many of the best practices recognized for decision publishing:<\/span><\/p>\n