Tag Archives: Carl Malamud

Law.gov video presentation now online!

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In a January 2, 2010 op-ed in the New York Times entitled “A Nation of Do-It-Yourself Lawyers,” California Chief Justice Ronald George and New Hampshire Chief Justice John T. Broderick Jr. asked “how can we help those who are left to represent themselves in court?”

One thing we can do is make the law of the nation freely available.  Today much of the law remains behind a pay wall, often a very expensive pay wall.

There have been efforts to liberate the law — five guys at Cornell (Cornell’s Legal Information Institute), three guys at Google (Google Scholar legal opinions), and others.  The federal government has made strides too, eCFR remains a model of free, updated legal content, but as the first paragraph explains on the eCFR website disclaims, “It is not an official legal edition of the CFR.”  State government efforts are as varied as the 50 states and District of Columbia.

So what to do?

Law.gov is a campaign to identify what a national law registry should include, and to make recommendations to the policy makers on how to structure a repository of all primary legal materials (and maybe more) at all levels of government.

The Stanford Law Library hosted a Law.gov kickoff event on January 12, 2010 and the day’s events included a terrific panel discussion with Carl Malamud, Anurag Acharya (Google Scholar lead engineer) and law professor Jonathan Zittrain, moderated by Stanford Law School lecturer Roberta Morris.  We now have a streaming video link from this discussion and it’s definitely worth viewing:

http://www.law.stanford.edu/calendar/details/3717/#related_media

Law.gov: A Revolution in Legal Affairs

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On Tuesday, January 12th, Stanford Law Library is co-hosting the first Law.gov workshop with Carl Malamud.

The keynote of the workshop is the 1pm talk entitled, “Law.gov: A Revolution in Legal Affairs.”  The speakers at this panel include: Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law), Anurag Acharya (Google), Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org) and Roberta Morris (Lecturer, Stanford Law) will serve as moderator.

The day’s agenda is full and the workshop sessions will include a discussion of the Law.gov movement, technical considerations, and other issues.

 One of the main goals of the workshop(s) is to define a National Inventory of Legal Materials and think about how we go about building it. 

Some of the questions that we plan to raise with our workshop attendees on Tuesday include:

-What items should be included in this inventory?  Think primary legal materials, plus…

-What information would we want to collect for items in the inventory?  For example: what  formats are available, costs, scope, etc.

-Should the inventory take the form of a wiki while in development?  Or?

-How should we note potential copyright issues in the inventory?   For example, some states assert copyright over statutory codes.   Also, what about the IP issues regarding briefs and filings. 

-How do we organize the effort to create the inventory?  Should this be done by individuals across the US? Should this be developed in partnership with organizations (for example, NOCALL)? 

-What about legislative efforts: will we need to work on legislation to make this a reality at the state and federal level? 

-What about legal publishers and vendors?  Can/will/how should they help?

-What about authentication concerns and standards? 

I am anxious to hear what our attendees have to contribute on these topics and more.  If you have additional questions or issues that you think should be raised at our workshop, please let me know.  Also, we welcome your comments and answers to the above questions.  Feel free to comment on this posting or send me a note.

Vive la revolution!

Celebrating Legal “Rebels” — Carl Malamud

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Carl Malamud, our friend and technologist, author, and public domain advocate — currently perhaps best known for his foundation Public.Resource.org — is featured in the December 2009 ABA Journal piece Legal Rebels: Paper Tiger.

A big day for Free Law

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See Google post below.  And stay tuned for another announcement tomorrow, which will be yet another big day for Free Law.   And we here at Stanford have something cooking too.  Stay tuned.

Take a look at this posting and its comments too, from the Supreme Court of Texas Blog.

 

 

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-govern-us.html

 

Finding the laws that govern us
 
11/17/2009 09:05:00 AM

As many of us recall from our civics lessons in school, the United States is a common law country. That means when judges issue opinions in legal cases, they often establish precedents that will guide the rulings of other judges in similar cases and jurisdictions. Over time, these legal opinions build, refine and clarify the laws that govern our land. For average citizens, however, it can be difficult to find or even read these landmark opinions. We think that’s a problem: Laws that you don’t know about, you can’t follow � or make effective arguments to change.

Starting today, we’re enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of “separate but equal” facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals. Browse these by clicking on the “How Cited” link next to the case title. See, for example, the frequent citations for Roe v. Wade, for Miranda v. Arizona (the source of the famous Miranda warning) or for Terry v. Ohio (a case which helped to establish acceptable grounds for an investigative stop by a police officer).

As we worked to build this feature, we were struck by how readable and accessible these opinions are. Court opinions don’t just describe a decision but also present the reasons that support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations. And they often do it in language that is surprisingly straightforward, even for those of us outside the legal profession. In many cases, judges have gone quite a bit out of their way to make complex legal issues easy to follow. For example, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court justices present a fascinating and easy-to-follow debate on the legality of internment of natural born citizens based on their ancestry. And in United States v. Ramirez-Lopez, Justice Kozinski, in his dissent, illustrates the key issue of the case using an imagined good-news/bad-news dialogue between the defendant and his attorney.

We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org), Daniel Poulin (LexUM), Tim Stanley (Justia), Joe Ury (BAILII), Tim Wu (AltLaw) and many others. It is an honor to follow in their footsteps. We would also like to acknowledge the judges who have built this cathedral of justice brick by brick and have tried to make it accessible to the rest of us. We hope Google Scholar will help all of us stand on the shoulders of these giants.

Posted by Anurag Acharya, Distinguished Engineer

Law.Gov: America’s Operating System, Open Source

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Carl Malamud (public.resource.org) just posted on Radar O’Reilly about Law.Gov: America’s Operating System.  Carl writes:

Public.Resource.Org is very pleased to announce that we’re going to be working with a distinguished group of colleagues from across the country to create a solid business plan, technical specs, and enabling legislation for the federal government to create Law.Gov. We envision Law.Gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States. More details on the effort are available on our Law.Gov page.

To kickstart this amazing effort, Carl and his co-conveners will be hosting a series of workshops.  After these workshops, he plans to submit a report to the law makers in DC, and Carl also welcomes others to contribute reports, findings, etc.  Collaboration between the legal and open source world should shed new light and hopefully help answer how to best serve and provide this content.

The Law.gov site features supportive responses from both Andrew McLaughlin (Deputy CTO) and Senator Lieberman.   Also available on the Law.gov site is Carl’s call to action at the Gov 2.0 Summit (September 2009) hosted by Tim O’Reilly.

The co-conveners include legal and technology all-stars (such as Pamela Samuelson, Jonathan Zittrain, Larry Lessig, Tim Wu, Ed Felten, Tim O’Reilly and John Podesta, to name just a few).    This should be an interesting and exciting year.

GPO VIP Visit at SLS today

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Our special guest today in the law library was the Honorable Robert (Bob) Tapella, Public Printer of the U.S and CEO of the GPO.  

We chatted about all things GPO, from cheering the recent launch of an XML Federal Register to learning about the eventual phasing out of GPO Access  (it’s being succeeded by the very impressive FDSys) to why Bob likes to pronouce it F-D Sys and not Fed Sys to discussing the Federal Depository Library Program and, of course, PACER.    

We learned that the GPO does not want to be in the web portal business; instead, they want to make government documents widely available to the public and keep them archived in perpetuity.   The Federal Register XML project is a fine example of this mission and their new initiatives.

Joining us for lunch were a number of Stanford Law  folks and Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org. 

After lunch, Bob Tapella stopped by our Advanced Legal Research class.  On Monday, one of our students had an excellent question regarding overlapping government websites.  And, lucky for our student, Bob Tapella was able to join us for an expert answer.   I’m not sure we can bring in the head of every agency that our students raise questions about, but we can try!

GPO Visit to Stanford

Left to right:  CEO of GPO Bob Tapella; Stanford Law Library Director Paul Lomio; Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.org; Roland Vogl, Executive Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology; Library Deputy Director Erika Wayne; E-Resources and Serials Librarian Brian Provenzale

Ms. Wayne Goes to Washington

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The library’s Erika Wayne is in Washington right now.

Erika is attending the Gov 2.0 Summit, “The Platform for Change,” where our friend and hero Carl Malamud will be presenting his paper “By the People…”

Erika is also hand-delivering our Improve PACER petition to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts!

Erika Wayne is being  joined by Terry Martin from Texas/Harvard and Kumar Jayasuriya from Georgetown in making the presentation to Michel Ishakian at the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. 

In addition, Erika has meetings with Ric Davis and Mike Wash from the GPO and with staff members from the Judiciary Committee, Appropriations Committee, and from Senator Lieberman’s office to discuss the petition.

And Erika starts her day on Friday with a visit to the West Wing and breakfast at the White House mess as a special guest of one of the president’s special assistants!

Next week Erika will have an op-ed in the National Law Journal about PACER, “What Public Access?.”

The most effective way to teach law students how to conduct legal research is to provide hands-on training, but one of the most important tools, PACER, is off limits.

Vive la Revolution & America’s Operating System

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Earlier today, (imho) there was a trending-topic-in-the-making on Twitter — all of these tweets had two things in common: the phrase “Open Source the Law” and thanks to Public.Resource.Org and BoingBoing.  

Why?

Well, BoingBoing recently posted about the latest effort by Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.org to liberate “America’s operating system.” 

As Cory Doctorow summarizes, these “actions taken together are trying to establish a basic principle: the laws of our society need to be readily available for all to read, not locked behind a cash register.” 

What did Carl Malamud do? 

Malamud mailed off three letters (on Bastille Day) to the government asking for change.  The first letter was a request to the Executive Office of the President to make the Federal Register and Patent databases available for free in bulk;  the second letter was a FOIA request to the National Archives asking them to make the many pricey ANSI and UL standards that are ‘incorporated by reference’ (in the CFR) available for free; and the third letter (perhaps my favorite) is a request for a refund for the $17K spent on a defective bulk feed of the CFR. [To see the list of all these letters, plus earlier letters, visit public.resource.org's GPO page.]

[P.S.  If these letters have got your heart beating a bit faster, perhaps you might be interested in signing the petition to improve PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records).]

Open Letter to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, part 1

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Dear Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts,

Recently, a few of my librarian colleagues and I deployed a brief petition aimed at improving PACER.

Instead, I’d like to share with you some of the amazing comments that we have already gotten in our petition’s first week.  We have heard from librarians and lawyers and legal academics, and here is a sampling of the feedback:

Professor Howard Friedman (from University of Toledo College of Law) comments:
I would like to suggest that PACER also make it possible to create hyperlinks to opinions and major pleadings so blogs and websites can link to them.

[ME TOO!]

Carl Malamud (of Public.resource.org) writes:
Access to primary legal materials is a foundational issue for the judiciary. We cannot be a nation of laws if the proceedings of our courts are distributed at high cost and with no certificate of authenticity.

Dawn Urquhart (of Canada) shares:
I value the content and only wish we had a similar resource in Canada. However, it is a very confusing database to use. I often have difficulty trying to identify the documents I need. The interface needs to be more user-friendly.

Ed Walters (of FASTCASE) suggests:
A few things would be really helpful: 1) Offer a bulk access, flat-rate license fee. Many would pay for bulk access and update. 2) Please do a better job identifying judicial opinions. Often not tagged or mis-tagged. 3) It would be great to unify PACER in a single web application instead of different apps for each court. Justia has a nice UI for this. 4) I would also support a re-rationalization of access fees so that they are proportionate to costs. I have no problem with fees to cover the costs of maintenance, or even fees to cover costs of modernization. . . .

Ellen Simmons (of Texas) writes:
As a Depository librarian, I strongly believe in free public access. Allowing Depository libraries to have free access to PACER would be another step to shore up our democracy. To echo Carl Malamud, in a nation of laws, the people should have access to the proceedings of our courts. That access should be authenticated, straightforward,and preferably free so as to be accessible to all.

Ryan Calo (of Stanford Law School, Center for Internet & Society) states:
Usability and transparency go hand in hand.

Margaret Leary (Director of the Law Library, University of  Michigan) comments:
The information in PACER was accumulated through the use of taxpayer dollars and should be freely available to the public, perhaps via the Federal Depository Library program. . . .

More comments to follow as we continue to add signatories to the petition.

Techne Interviews Public Printer Candidate Carl Malamud

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Techne Interviews Public Printer Candidate Carl Malamud

“Long a proponent of open access to what he calls the ‘operating system’ of the US government — the laws, codes and court cases that regulate our lives in society — Carl Malamud has spent more than a decade working to make government documentation freely available online through his organization public.resource.org. He has recently turned his attention to the GPO and is “running” for the appointment of Public Printer, the head of the GPO and thus of the federal agency that produces a great deal of the same documentation he has previously fought for public access to. Malamud was kind enough to recently take the time to discuss with Techne his proposals for the GPO–such as an RSS feed of the Official Journals of Government–and how the internet and technology are changing, or could change, the relations between a citizenry, its government and the information that passes between the two.”
http://www.technemag.com/?p=400

Source: The Intersect Alert is a newsletter of the Government Relations Committee, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Special Libraries Association

http://units.sla.org/chapter/csfo/csfo.html