Category: digital legal information
By - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - 10:30pm
Here’s a couple things I believe:
- There are several providers of free legal information out there that are reliable enough to recommend to my patrons to use.
- Librarians need to collaborate and communicate more with information vendors – all information vendors…Wexis, ILS providers, independents and non-profits.
- Most legal research educational materials suck. They’re dry and the publisher bias contained within some is almost laughable.
- Legal information vendors use tactics to get law students hooked on their products that would make a drug dealer blush.
So, when Tom Bruce emailed me a few weeks ago and asked if I’d be interested in creating a Free Law Research Guide aimed at law students, I jumped at the chance. Without further ado, I present to you The Law Student Guide to Free Legal Research.
Although sponsored by Justia and the LII, I had total editorial control over what resources got selected. (I also didn’t get paid anything, so I have no real conflicts of interest to declare. Tom has promised to buy me the beverage of my choice upon our next meeting, though.) My only real direction was that I should only recommend sources that I – as a librarian – would use but that I should make it fun and interesting for the average law student. As for that…well, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a librarian. I just want to warn you that you may feel the need to do some pearl clutching at what you read in the guide. I make statements like “Legal research is boring and tedious and nothing can change that.”
Listen…legal research is boring and tedious.
You know, for normal people.
Librarians love it, but that’s why we became librarians. If it makes me a bad librarian to admit that publicly and I’m gonna go to Librarian Hell for doing so, well….I’ll be sure to pack marshmallows.
ANYWAY, the project evolved over the course of the past few weeks from the initially planned 3 page PDF that they could post on their social media outreach sites to the website linked above. (A great big thank you to CALI for hosting it on their Classcaster site!) There is still a PDF available that contains the basics of the site, but there’s much more available. For instance, there is a blog that will allow us to highlight developments in the #lawgov movement, new resources that are available or just general thoughts on legal research. I really love Austin Groothuis’ inaugural post. Guest bloggers are invited and welcome!
Although the site is primarily aimed at law students, there is also a section for law librarians and legal writing instructors. Just as one goal of the site was mirror the student-aimed Wexis offerings, we wanted to offer a similar assortment of teaching aids in the hope that it would encourage the introduction of free legal resources in the classroom. If you have a handout or powerpoint show that you’d like to share, please contact me and I’ll happily load it and give you full credit. Check back often for more updates.
Speaking of teaching free legal resources, there’s currently a short (~30 seconds) poll on the law librarian resources page. Aside from my anecdotal evidence, it occurred to all of us during our planning that we had no idea how, when or if free legal resources were being taught in law schools and firms. We would really appreciate it if you could share your experiences. Thanks!
One benefit of the website is that I can constantly add or make changes. The next section that seems obvious to add is a foreign and international law one. But I’m always open to suggestions. Similarly, if you find something that you think should be changed, drop me an email or tweet and I’ll look into it. I’m generally pretty low ego when it comes to things like this and am open to constructive criticism. So, look around and let me know what you think!
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By - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - 6:21pm
A funny thing happened on my way to the Chicago Law.gov meeting…
A little over a week ago, I got asked to look at local states’ online legal materials offerings so that I could give a brief spiel on them at the Chicago law.gov workshop. (I’ll tell you more about what I found in a minute.) Since I’m still relatively new to the jurisdiction, I asked around and sought some advice and one thing led to another and now I am heading up the Indiana Working Group for the AALL Inventory of State Legal Materials.
The link above has more information about the National Inventory. You can also read this Call to Action by Erika Wayne and Paul Lomio of Stanford Law School. Essentially, it boils down to this: the current hodge-podge system that states are using to put their legal materials up on the free Internet, frankly, sucks. There are big problems, such as lack of official status, no authentication, no preservation, etc. And smaller ones, such as basic usability and UX design problems.
If we want this to change, we need to organize. The law.gov workshops and information roadshow are one way of getting info to stake holders and people who make the decisions. We also need to have similar information sharing events locally – get this issue in front of state librarians and library groups, local bar associations and CIOs. And there also needs to be data collected so that organizations like AALL who have Government Relations Offices can really put the pressure on and advocate effectively.
Creating a state inventory of legal materials is not hard. It is, however, tedious and time consuming. And often horrifying if you at all care about the integrity of legal information. For Indiana, I got a google docs spreadsheet template from Mary Alice and Emily at the AALL Goverment Relations office. You can see the work in progress here. State level materials are on the far left, then moving to the right are county level and then municipalities. Oh, yeah, when I say inventory, I mean down to the every last municipal code from every one horse town I can find in this state.
Because, you know, the law isn’t just Big Motions for Justice argued in front of Supreme Courts. A lot of it is just regular Joes and Janes who want to know if their town’s zoning regulations will let them build that fence in their yard. And in 2010 they should be able to figure that out easily without having to consult an attorney or wade through disclaimers and copyright assertions that make them wonder about a dozen things besides their current legal issue, assuming that they can even find where on web their local government decided to put this information. But I digress…
Where was I? Right. State inventories. Not hard, but tedious. To keep confusion down with many contributors editing the document, Google Spreadsheets makes it pretty easy to create a web form that will populate the spreadsheet. Here is the one for the Indiana Inventory. If you are in Indiana and would like to volunteer, please let me know! (My contact information appears under the contact tab.) If you are in another state and would like to participate, contact your state working group coordinator. A complete list can be found here. Some states only have one or two people volunteered thus far and your help would be very appreciated, I’m sure.
For my minor contribution to law.gov Chicago, I looked at the major state level offerings of Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois. By “major”, I mean session laws, statutory compilations, administrative codes, administrative registers, supreme court cases and appellate court cases. From just that brief toe-dip, I was able to see the following trends and problems:
Non-jurisdiction Specific General Problems:
- No one stop shop for state laws – case law is held on court websites, statutory law on the legislatures’, admin law varies. My first year law students aren’t always aware of the separation of power and types of law each branch creates, so it may not be obvious to the general public that they will have to visit several different sites. Also, just as a random check, I googled “[state name] law” and none of the court websites appeared on the first page of results.
- Usability is a nightmare within these sites. Finding and navigating the information sources was difficult for me and I’m smarter than the average bear when it comes to navigating electronic legal information.
- It’s very hard to determine the official and/or authentic status of the laws posted on the web. That was the most time consuming part of the exercise, really.
- Predominant formats used were PDFs, Word/Wordperfect and HTML.
- In several instances, “official” versions were only obtainable from commerical publishers at significant costs.
Indiana Notes:
- Nothing available online prior to 2000, with the exception of some non-code acts.
- The Indiana Administrative Code and Register is no longer being published in a print format. They do have “certificates of authenticity” but nothing electronically guaranteeing that.
- Copyright is a bit of an issue. There is a notice on the statutory and admin codes that the headnotes contained in them are copyrighted by Thomson West. The official case reporters are the Northeastern Reporter and the Indiana Cases offshoot of this reporter, both of which have “Copyright (C) [year] Thomson Reuters” in the front. Prior to the Thomson products being the official version, there were a state produced publications called “Indiana Reports” and “Indiana Court of Appeals Reports,” both of which have a “Copyright [year] State of Indiana” notice in them.
Kentucky:
- Okay, this is hilarious. And by that I mean deeply disturbing. As many of you know, I am recently departed from the great Commonwealth of Kentucky. I spent three years teaching law students that there were two official versions of the state code, both published by commercial publishers. Well, that is wrong. As it turns out, the official Kentucky Revised Statutes is only created electronically and is stored in a database that only the Legislative Research Commission is able to really look at (although you can purchase a copy for personal use.) The print Lexis and West versions are only certified. The web version is clearly marked as unofficial and that no warranty is made to correctness or completeness.
- The Kentucky courts opinion search used search methods that I have never heard of before in my life. Stemming? Fuzzy searching?
- More copyright issues. Again, we have case law being printed in Thomson Reuters reporters with copyright notices in the front. Also, the front of the Revised Statutes have “Placing these files on the Internet does not alter or relinquish any copyright or proprietary interest or entitlement of the Commonwealth of Kentucky relating to this information.” …so does that mean that the Commonwealth is claiming copyright on them? I do not know.
Illinois
- Illinois really surprised me. And by “surprised” I mean disappointed. For one of the larger states in the union, its online offerings were terrible.
- The online code was current only. As in current current. Changes were constantly being added, and no previous editions at all to be found. It was also stated that it was primarily for the legislature’s use.
- Also, there is no official print version of the code.
So, that’s just a brief overview. The unofficial spreadsheet that I used to cobble the Kentucky and Illinois information together can be found here. It’s mainly just my messy notes, but you are more than welcome to look at them.
By - Monday, April 26, 2010 - 6:26pm
I’m currently investigating the whys/hows/best practices of digitizing law journals and creating an institutional repository. (Have I mentioned lately how much I like my new job? Because I really like my new job.) IRs and Open Access are topics that I really like in theory, but have very little actual practice with. So, it’s very exciting to me in a very geeky sort of way that I’m getting to spend time looking into these subjects.
This is something I’ve been needing to do anyway, because here in LawLibraryLand, we have an extra reason to get familiar with the topics. Early last year, a group of law library directors got together and created The Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship. The call to action in the statement is as follows (with my emphasis added for the highlights):
We therefore urge every U.S. law school to commit to ending print publication of its journals and to making definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school immediately available upon publication in stable, open, digital formats, rather than in print.
We also urge every law school to commit to keeping a repository of the scholarship published at the school in a stable, open, digital format. Some law schools may choose to use a shared regional online repository or to offer their own repositories as places for other law schools to archive the scholarship published at their school.
Repositories should rely upon open standards for the archiving of works, as well as on redundant formats, such as PDF copies. We also urge law schools and law libraries to agree to and use a standard set of metadata to catalog each article to ensure easy online public indexing of legal scholarship.
As a measure of redundancy, we also urge faculty members to reserve their copyrights to ensure that they too can make their own scholarship available in stable, open, digital formats. All law journals should rely upon the AALS model publishing agreement as a default and should respect author requests to retain copyrights in their scholarship.
I’m not a signatory to statement. I’m not really against it, but I guess when it came out I got stuck on the idea that a “stable digital format” was an impossibility and then just discounted the rest of the statement. Then I didn’t really think too much more about it.
This, I admit, was maybe not the best reaction to it.
So, anyway, that happened.
Well, now it’s my job to figure out how to get compliant with the Durham Statement (or at least as close as humanly possible since I’m pretty sure that whole “stable digital format” thing still hasn’t been figured out yet.) I decided to see how other schools and institutions were putting up their journals. The Durham Statement FAQs directed me to Directory of Open Access Law Journals and the Science Commons Open Access Law Project.
However, I knew that there were more law journals online than that, and I wanted to get as many examples as possible to see what other people were doing. At this point, my inner scientist kicked in and I went into data collection mode. I should note that data collection mode is easily confused with “Oh my God, Glassmeyer, are you totally insane?” mode. Don’t feel bad if you get them mixed up.
I found a list of online law reviews from this “Free Full-text Online Law Review/Law Journal Search Engine” created by the ABA. (Remember the name of that page. It will soon become important.) I transferred that list to a spreadsheet and edited out the ones that were not affiliated with a law school, which amounted to a little over 350 journals. I then decided that I was going to collect just some very basic information about each online journal: Date coverage, Searchability, if it was Indexed, if they provided PDFs and, if possible, determine what software (e.g. BePress, DSpace, etc.) they were using.
I made it through 50 journals and decided to pause because (a) I was going insane staring at that spreadsheet and (b) at just 1/6 of the way in I’ve already noticed some disturbing trends that I wanted to blog about. (Hello new “works in progress” post tag!) As I said, when Durham came out , I was primarily concerned with the “stable digital format” part. However, I see now that public indexing and metadata parts are way more requiring of emphasis and encouragement.
I guess, because I’m a librarian, I just assumed that when a school mounted its law journal up on the web, it would at the very least have a basic search functionality built into their law journal online archives. If they wanted to get really wild and crazy, they’d have an index. This is not the case at all. Again, I’m just 1/6 of the way through my survey, but if trends hold, only about 15-20% of the journals are searchable. And indexed? HA! Maybe 5%?
Just for an example of what I’m talking about, here is the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal which appears on the Science Commons Open Access site linked above. Unless I want to browse through all of the issues, I’m going to have to use a vendor-based index (which will cost money) or google scholar (which doesn’t always allow for the most sophisticated of searches) to get at the content this journal contains.
So, I guess my point is, I am concerned that these online journals are becoming PDF dumping grounds with little to no metadata or access points contained within them to assist with the “access” part of “open access.” I hope that law schools, in their attempts to becoming compliant with the Durham Statement, don’t forget to include the access points to their journals.
By - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - 12:57pm
(Hey, remember when I said that I was taking a break from blogging? Well, I lied. I’m a liar. And, more to the point, a procrastinator. So I am blogging instead of packing for my imminent move to Indiana. La!)
As I alluded to in my last post, we are at a magical time in libraries because technology and librarian interest are finally at the point where we can make some viable LibPunk alternatives to corporate products and services. And most of this is because of the “opens”…Open Access, Open Source, Open Standards, etc.
There’s a lot of confusion about what these topics mean. I’ve seen Open Access and Open Source topics put in the same conference presentation when really the only thing that they have in common is the word “open.” Happily, yesterday Dorthea Salo broke down all the “Opens” into a handy guide. I highly recommend checking that post out.
As you may know, Gentle Reader, one of my major topics of interest/bones to pick with the rest of the world is the Free Law movement. I wonder if maybe we should start calling it the Open Law movement…would that would put it in a better light with people unfamiliar with the issues? As someone once said to me in a bar, “People don’t respect free stuff because they don’t think it’s worth anything.” (Yes, I think the Free Law stuff is an appropriate conversational topic in when hanging out in bars. I am Just. That. Cool.) So, anyway, that statement blew my mind. Granted, I was a little tipsy, but THINK ABOUT IT.
Just for the heck of it, here’s my interpretation of Open Law, using the framework that Dorothea Salo used in her “Battle of the Opens” blog post.
OPEN LAW
What is being made open? The primary legal materials from a multitude of jurisdictions – federal though the 50 states and 1000s of municipalities. These include, but are not limited to: court cases, legislation, administrative regulations and codes.
What legal regimes are implicated? That’s the kicker…NONE. Primary legal materials are created by government bodies and therefore should be free to use by anyone. Of course, that didn’t stop the state of Oregon from asserting copyright on its code. As I noted earlier, there is the slight the problem that the finding aids to wade through this massive amount of law are proprietary systems owned by a small number of large corporations. And the secondary materials that are really necessary for fully understanding and researching law are under copyright protection.
How does openness happen? Organizations like AALL and Public.Resource lobby and harass the government until they start doing things like releasing the Federal Register in XML. Then organizations like the Cornell Legal Information Institute, Open Congress or Justia take the information and make it more user friendly. A lot of this is computer stuff that I don’t fully understand so I just generally give it the blanket term “MAGIC.”
Again, with the law, openess only goes so far. As Rich Leiter recently wrote, librarians need to work on creating meaningful access to the law as well. We should also be trying to get more Open Access to secondary materials.
Free law is dead…long live Open Law? Whaddya think?
By - Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 7:41pm
In Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 philosophies, there is a concept called “Radical Trust.” The idea behind Radical Trust is pretty simple: trust your patrons. Trust them to leave comments on your blogs. Trust them to edit wikis. Trust them to add tags to your Flickr photos or OPACs. Yes, there will always be jerks and 12 year old hackers with nothing better to do than vandalize the materials that you have so lovingly placed out in the Internet for people to interact with. But guess what? You also have to trust that the community will step up and re-edit out the wiki mis-edits and/or trust that are users are savvy enough to ignore a trollish comment on a blog.
Radical trust really isn’t that radical..it’s just trust. It only feels radical to us because librarians and other gatekeepers of information have spent centuries trying our damndest to preserve, protect and defend information resources from theft, loss and corruptions. As I’ve said before, this is a noble and just raison d’etre. However, the digital age has changed the game in many ways. We don’t need to keep materials chained up and out of patrons hands because they may destroy them…now we can digitize and allow many more users access to them. And if they do somehow corrupt the digital versions? Well, it’s easy enough to have master copies locked away that can replace the corrupted versions.
In Law LibraryLand, there is currently a major issue of conflict between librarians and information providers in the area of authentication of digital legal materials. I don’t claim to be an expert on the issue and I haven’t entirely decided what is the best solution to the conflict between the two camps. However, John Joergenson, the digital services librarian at Rutgers University School of Law – Camden, wrote an excellent blog post last year which breaks down much of the conflict.
The American Association of Law Libraries has recently issued a report on Authentication of State Documents which outlines the concerns of the librarian community. If I’m reading it correctly, here’s the problem. (1) Digital materials are vulnerable to lapses in management and control, corruption and tampering. (2) To make up for these vulnerabilities, the digital materials need to equivalent to the official print versions. (3) To become equivalent, they must become “authentic.” (4) To be “authentic”, they must be capable of being “authenticated.” (Um…yeah.) There is no standard or endorsed method of authentication, but it can involve things like digital water marks, chain of custody, certification, etc.
Currently no state-provided (i.e. FREE) digital legal materials are “authentic” and as such, “citizens and law researchers may reasonably doubt their authority and should approach such resources critically.” I guess these researchers are supposed to try and get a hold of a print resource (assuming a library is close by, the state still issues a print verison and/or the library hasn’t canceled its order) OR utilize Wexis (which also isn’t “authentic” and is quite costly)?
This makes no sense to me.
Can someone please explain to me what steps that free information providers like Justia, the Legal Information Institute and Public Resource – or even Google Scholar – need to be taking so that they are given the same respect as Lexis and Westlaw?
I propose it’s time we extend the concept of radical trust upwards…not only should we trust our users to take the information we safeguard and remix and run with it, but also maybe we should start trusting people who want to provide the information to our patrons.I could also put in a plea for open source ILSes, but that’s another blog post for another day.
If an entity like the Legal Information Institute wants to take raw data from the government and put it up on the web in a more easily navigable way than what the government provides on the GPO website, maybe we should trust that they are not altering the text of the materials or even being sloppy in the updating of them? If enough providers get in the game, there will be plenty of copies to compare against to make sure they are accurate. Why is accuracy not enough?
Perhaps if librarians can learn to radically trust information brokers, we will be able to work together and start to see new ways to use and manipulate legal information. Input from the librarian community will allow the information providers to make more useful tools and provide stability, which in turn, will lead to better donor funding for long term preservation and maintenance of the information. And finally, patrons will be able to access accurate legal information much more easily, which ultimately, is what everyone wants.
Like I said, I have no answers. Personally, in my ideal world, the various state and federal governments would step up and provide stable and easily navigable law for free. However, as my mother always says, “…and people in Hell want ice water.” Clearly, we as librarians are going to have to choose between forever being at the mercy of Wexis or working with the free legal information providers. I’m hoping that by writing this, a dialog can be opened between the library camp and the legal information world and some solutions can be negotiated.
