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

Tue Jun 15 18:06:52 UTC 2010

Thanks for this Brian!

If anyone goes we'd be delighted to have a guest post on the OKF blog!

All the best,

Jonathan

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Brian Gryth <briangryth at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.gov
> movement 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, 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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>> Jonathan Gray
>>
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Jonathan Gray

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http://twitter.com/jwyg
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