[open-government] Fwd: Berkman Center: Law.gov Workshops Next Week - Thursday 6/17 and Friday 6/18

Mon Jun 14 18:17:10 UTC 2010

Jonathan et al.,

I attended the law.gov workshop in Boulder, CO in April.  The project is
worthwhile and I recommend that people attend.  If for no other reason, than
to learn how much legal research costs in the United States and how access
to the law is essentially closed off to the public.  Mr. Malmund used a
phase something akin to "you have access to the law as long as you have a
credit card."  The legal research cartel (i.e Lexis/Nexus and Westlaw)
exercises an extreme dominance over the availability to legal research tools
and the legal research education programs of US law schools have
institutionalized this dominance.  The goal of law.gov is to open up access
and create an ecosystem of innovation and competition in legal research.

Some of the topics or issues discussed in Boulder were:

* The assertion of copy right over state law by some states.  Colorado is
one of these states.
* Authentication of electronic legal resources.
* Access to legacy or historic materials.  There are thousands of volumes of
legal information that is not in an electronic format.
* The digital divide and electronic access.
* Better citation practices by courts.  Currently, the dominate form of
legal citation in the United States is to a court reporter published by
West.

I found that day interesting and productive.  I will say that the one way
the law.gov movement could get more traction is to help legal practitioners
understand how releasing of primarily law data will help improve the
practice of law.  The putting it all together portion of the Boulder
presentation was practical to legal academic researchers.  The
law.govmovement will be hampered by the 10x effect until someone can
find or
present a product that is vastly superior to the cartel's.  At the moment,
the cartel's product will allow a practitioner to get his or her job done.
Of course, driving down costs would be the most compelling argument to most
practitioners.  (Every law student and legal professional is aware of the
$14000 legal research error horror stories told in law school.  An error
mostly likely caused simply by going outside your subscription's database or
forgetting to log out.)

In any case, I hope someone on this list will attend the Harvard
workshop and share their thoughts with the group.

Thanks,
Brian

2010/6/14 Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>

> Very interesting! Would love to hear from anyone who attends.
>
> Jonathan
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Next Thursday (6/17) and Friday (6/18) the Harvard Law School Library
> and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society will host two workshops
> focused on the Law.gov initiative, a proposed registry and repository
> of all primary legal materials of the United States. The workshops,
> organized by Carl Malamud, President of Public.Resource.Org<http://public.resource.org/>,
> aim to
> convene advocates for the public domain, lawyers, policy makers,
> librarians, archivists, students, and all those interested to discuss
> issues around access to primary materials in Massachusetts, and also
> to reflect on the national series of workshops held in the past year
> in order to identify core principles and policy mechanisms for public
> information.
>
> The workshops will feature Carl Malamud, Berkman Faculty Co-Director
> John Palfrey, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, the Honorable
> Dina E. Fein, Boston College Librarian Joan Shear, Harvard Law
> Cyberlaw Clinic Director Phil Malone, and many more.
>
> We hope you will join us for one or both of these events. To learn
> more or register, please visit:
> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgovMA or
> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgov.
>
> More about the workshops:
>
> Law.gov: Massachusetts (6/17)
>
> Do we have access to all primary legal materials in Massachusetts?
> What are the best practices for making information accessible?  What
> obstacles face institutions trying to make it available?  Our hope is
> to create a document outlining the most salient issues in
> accessibility to Massachusetts legal information with suggestions of
> things that could be done to effect the most accessible system
> possible in Massachusetts.
>
> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgovMA
>
> Law.gov: Putting it All Together (6/18)
>
> The Harvard Law School Law.Gov workshop on June 18 is the last in a
> 6-month series of such workshops that have taken place throughout the
> country.  In this final workshop, participants will discuss the
> implications of some core principles about access to primary legal
> materials. Are these principles workable? What will it take to make
> them real? What are the implications of these principles? Our hope is
> that upon completion of this workshop, a crisp set of basic principles
> can be presented and discussed, perhaps leading to the enactment of
> some of these principles into policy through mechanisms such as
> judicial rules, executive orders, or legislation.
>
> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgov
>
> Registration and full agendas for both workshops can be found at
> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgovMA and
> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgov.
>
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