VoxPopuLII

skip navigation Search Cornell About LII / Get the law / Find a lawyer / Legal Encyclopedia / Help Out VoxPopuLII New voices in legal information All VoxPopuLII authors All VoxPopuLII posts Public access to legal information information retrieval free access to law Legal metadata Legal knowledge representation Legal semantic web liis Semantic Web and law Legal citations digital law The Balancing Act: Looking Backward, Looking Ahead 25-for-25 No Responses » Dec 19 2017 by Sara Frug LII has had quite a 25th year. In this series of blog posts,  many of the luminaries of open access to law and legal informatics have shown us our history from the point of view of the past, present, and future of their own endeavors. It’s been thrilling – legal informatics and open access to law today are far richer pursuits than I think we could have imagined – and as we’ve seen in the 25-for-25 posts from Tom Bruce and Peter Martin , we could imagine quite a bit. This series has also been a chance to refine our thinking about how we will carry out LII’s mission – using technology to help people find and understand the law – into our own future. Last week, Craig Newton talked about the future of LII from the point of view of the “big tent” approach to project adoption, LII’s work with students, and the evolution of the ways in which LII’s audience reaches and interacts with our work. Today I’ll add a few thoughts about some things we’ve had to balance and how we might use them as the future develops. Collaboration, creativity, and reliability LII was co-founded by two people who both possessed a rare combination of prodigious intellect, extraordinary imagination, and unfaltering work ethic. They foresaw that, in order to enable others to follow as LII grew, they would need to support a “ deep, equal-status collaboration between legal experts and technologists ” for everyone who joined them. And quite a few people joined in. LII has worked with academic researchers, government agencies, for-profit companies and non-profit organizations, post-doctoral fellows, technologists-in-residence, undergraduate and M.Eng. engineering students, and by now more than 600 J.D. students. We have mustered support from a wide variety of sources beyond Cornell Law School: individuals, corporate philanthropy, grants, and advertising. The law belongs to all of us, and helping people find and understand it takes a lot of different kinds of us. Early on, LII’s founders made a deliberate choice to develop and protect a creative space for disciplined experimentation. Tom Bruce puts it this way: “we felt then – as we do now – that the best test of ideas was to implement them in practical, full-scale systems offered to the public”. This collaborative, creative work – bringing our diverse perspectives together when trying, for example, to understand who might be affected by a statute, regulation, or Supreme Court case; planning a research study to evaluate the comprehensibility of government documents; or thinking about how to design the user experience when the scale of a set of search results varies by five orders of magnitude – is only successful to the extent that it actually helps people. Offering free legal information resources of first resort is a standard by which we measure our success. It also creates a set of maintenance responsibilities that we did not have in the early days. When we succeed in implementing a popular service, we are expected to maintain it at high quality for a long – indeed, indefinite – period of time. As we look ahead, we will continue to struggle over the tension – and competition for resources – between different ways of fulfilling our mission. We can, and do , and will continue to maintain resources that millions of people have come to expect us to provide. We equally must, and do , and will continue to support the development of the truly innovative products and services that we can envision. The cosmos and the chickens During a break at the Jurix legal informatics conference in Poland a few years ago, I stood at a tall table listening to two even taller northern European academics talk about their work – some truly brilliant advances in automating the extraction of legal argumentation from case law. One asked about what we’d been doing at LII, and I talked about using linked open data to connect the world to the law. He asked what I meant, and it occurred to me to point to the artificial potted plant on the table. I said: “we’re asking questions like ‘what is the legal context of this plant?’”. That was good for a surprised look, and I followed up with a bit of improvisation about where and how the plant might have been manufactured, safety codes for the factory, labor regulations for the workers, environmental regulations for the materials and waste products, import/export requirements if it was manufactured abroad, and so forth. For a moment, I think we could all see the cosmic beauty of what John Sheridan has called “ deeply intertwingled laws ” extending its web down to the molecular level and below. At LII, we have always balanced top-down conceptual work with a relentless bottom-up perspective. But a great deal of work remains to be done. In his 25-for-25 post, Elmer Masters lamented that “ it’s a whole easier for me to find out what order I should watch the Fast & Furious movies in (hint: not the order they were released) than what rules apply if I want to raise some chickens in my backyard. ” Looking ahead, although LII is unlikely to operate at a scale that will enable us to hold a comprehensive answer to that question, the work we have been doing will make it straightforward for any individual, company, or government entity to connect the information they have at their beck and call to primary sources at the federal level and to original content we create. We will be able to collect the knowledge we need by aggregating the results of everyone’s efforts. So we really will be able to look at the law from at the ground level – the level of the chickens, if you will. (Plus ça) change at breakneck speed That Jurix conference marked a turning point in legal informatics: for the first time, we saw highly practical work with regulatory materials not only presented to scholars but honored with academic conference prizes. Since the beginning of a legal technology boom that saw venture capital pour into startup companies a decade ago, we’ve also seen new technology reach the mass market at a pace that constantly presents new challenges for the law. Whether it’s the taxation of cryptocurrency , the confidentiality implications of that smart clock on a lawyer’s desk , or the regulation of self-driving trucks , the number and variety of new things-in-the-world with which the law must contend is staggering. At the same time, the maturation of human language technologies, machine learning, and artificial intelligence gives us an unprecedented set of tools with which to address these challenges. But a lot has not changed. If you had asked me three years ago, I would have said the odds were good that we’d see a significant decline in traffic to the LII website as our data was harvested, repackaged, and presented directly by search engines, through social media, and in standalone apps. In reality, unprecedented numbers of people have come to the LII website during the last year to read the law for themselves. As we have done for 25 years, we still rely on our readers to help us evaluate the quality of our work and give us insight into the ways in which people from all walks of life approach and understand the law. And I’d predict that 25 years from now, that direct connection with our audience will still inform our work. The past and the future It’s been quite a year – and quite a quarter-century. Thank you for following us on our trip down memory lane – we hope you’ll join us on the road ahead. Sara Frug is LII’s Associate Director for Technology. Posted by admin at 1:27 pm 25 for 25: So What('s Next)? 25-for-25 No Responses » Dec 08 2017 The purpose of this “25 for 25” series has been to celebrate 25 years of the Legal Information Institute, to recount its greatest achievements, and to place its accomplishments large and small in the greater context to which they belong.   That was overdue and fun to read and, I assure you, quite flattering for all us.  ( Ed Walters , we’re still blushing.) Elmer Masters ended the most recent of these posts by hoping to write about our leadership when another two-and-a-half decades have passed.   I decided to wait two-and-a-half days instead. Back when I practiced law for a living , a question I learned to ask myself while writing was, “So what?”—or, to phrase it more politely , “Why am I telling you this?” or “Why does this matter?’  Maybe I learned it as an English major long before that.  Anyway, it’s a thing. And it’s a thing I brought with me and have used repeatedly over the last four-plus years I’ve been Associate Director-ing here at the LII.  Whether it’s allocating scarce resources or writing a newsletter article , I have to ask myself “so what” all the time.  I say it out loud in meetings probably far too often. Many of the guest bloggers who’ve sung our praises have answered the “so what” question about our impact and our value—our legacy, if you will.  But a legacy is what’s left at the end , and we are just getting started. Here are just a few brief insights into the things on our mind as we look at we are right now and where we might be headed: The LII as a big tent We now do this , and this , and this , and even this .  Why?  Because we were asked to.  In each case, somebody—respectively, Jerry Goldman, Peter Martin, the (now-defunct) Avon Center, and (the also now-defunct) Sunlight Labs— built something really cool and then asked us to care for it and feed it and put a roof over its head.   And we did!   You’ve read a lot in this space over the last eleven months about how the LII has served as a beacon for others in the free law movement—many have steered by that beacon and, as it turns out, some have steered toward it. So what? We don’t expect that phenomenon to end abruptly or soon.  There will be more projects to adopt from their creators and to adapt to our purpose.  Though the tent is big, it’s likely to get crowded.  Whether these additions show up as new features on our site or as entirely new sites, in each case anything we do will advance our mission of making law easier to find and understand.  But each new project we adopt will come with its own demands, be they technical, administrative, managerial, or economic.  Like a puppy under the Christmas tree, these are gifts that eat .  We’ll need to innovate in new ways that are just as likely to require business acumen as technical or legal skills. Students, students, students First, it’s important to note that we work with computer science and information science students, as well as law students.  But when it comes to creating new secondary content, my focus is usually on the law students. And we hire a lot of law students.  In fact, in our own unofficial estimation we are the largest single employer of Cornell Law students each year.  We have in excess of 40 law students on the books right now working on the Supreme Court Bulletin Previews , Wex , and even over at Oyez .  On the Oyez website, we also employ students at the institution from which we adopted it, the Chicago-Kent School of Law. So what? That we were able to navigate the administrative and managerial challenges of hiring and supervising law students from another institution bodes well for our future.  Though it’s my alma mater as well as my employer, I’ve never believed that Cornell Law School holds a monopoly on bright, energetic, and enthusiastic law students.  Knowing that we can employ qualified and capable student labor from anywhere whenever our reach exceeds our grasp allows us to reach farther and grasp for more. Audience Increasingly, our busiest days are fueled not only by additional traffic coming from search engines but also from links contained in social media posts.  These days, the difference between a day of heavy traffic day and a day of very heavy traffic is usually the number of visitors arriving via links from Twitter and Facebook. So what ? One of the reasons we’re such a common source for hyperlinks in social media is because folks find us on a search engine when they want primary reference material to help make their point.  While this phenomenon currently accounts for a small (but growing) source of traffic, aren’t these exactly the kind of users we should be particularly interested in?  Say what you will about social media, but that’s where debate is happening.  That people are pointing to the US Code, the CFR, the Constitution, or whatever else they find on our site to justify their stance on the issues of the day is a very good thing . What happens when a social media user’s friends or followers click on that posted link?  We know that these visitors behave differently from users arriving via their own internet search or from a link in a news article or another website .  They don’t stay nearly as long, they view fewer pages, and they are for more likely to “bounce” from the site without interacting with it at all.   How do we give them the context they need to place that one little piece of the law they’re looking at into the bigger statutory or regulatory framework that is required to understand it ?  On a more pragmatic level, how do we give them a page they can read and digest on their phone ?  (We get more traffic from Facebook Mobile than Facebook.) None of these challenges are 25 years away.  With technology, the operative cliché is “the future is now.”  In terms of the challenges we face, there’s a lot of truth to that.   So, thanks for spending the time over the last 11 months helping us look back on our success and for sticking around as we look forward to how we can continue to be the flagship for open access to the law for decades to come. Craig Newton is the LII’s Associate Director for Content Development . Posted by admin at 11:18 am You with the law show? 25-for-25 No Responses » Dec 05 2017 by Elmer Masters The Legal Information Institute is 25 years old. For a quarter of a century the organization built by Peter Martin and Tom Bruce at Cornell has been a beacon for those interested in free and open access to the law. The LII website provides unparalleled access to decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, including oral arguments via Oyez!, the United States Code, and the Code of Federal Regulations. LII manages several student led publications at Cornell that provide valuable analysis of judicial proceedings of the Supreme Court and the NY Court of Appeals. Its work influences policy on open access to federal legal information. But if you’re reading this, you probably already know that. You probably al