Accessing the Content of Foreign Law: Activity of the Hague Conference

In the past several years, the Hague Conference on Private International Law has engaged in significant activity respecting public access to digital legal information, through its project on “Access to Foreign Law.”

This inquiry appears to have begun at least as early as April 2006, when, according to the project’s 2007 feasibility study, “the Special Commission on General Affairs and Policy of the Hague Conference on Private International Law … invited the Permanent Bureau to prepare a feasibility study on the development of a new instrument for cross-border co-operation concerning the treatment of foreign law.”

One of the key documents resulting from that activity is entitled Accessing the Content of Foreign Law and the Need for the Development of a Global Instrument in This Area: A Possible Way Ahead: Preliminary Document No 11 A of March 2009 for the attention of the Council of March / April 2009 on General Affairs and Policy of the Conference.

The heart of the document is a set of Guiding Principles to be Considered in Developing a Future Instrument [scroll down to page 8] drafted by a group of “experts which met on 19-21 October 2008 at the invitation of the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference on Private International Law as part of its feasibility study on the ‘access to foreign law’ project [about which see documents below].”

These principles, which address many key legal informatics issues respecting digital legal information — including access, standards, metadata, interoperability, authentication, and preservation — read as follows:

“Guiding Principles to be Considered in Developing a Future Instrument

• “Free access
• “1. State Parties shall ensure that their legal materials, in particular legislation, court and administrative tribunal decisions and international agreements, are available for free access in an electronic form by any persons, including those in foreign jurisdictions.
• “2. State Parties are also encouraged to make available for free access relevant historical materials, including preparatory work and legislation that has been amended or repealed, as well as relevant explanatory materials.
• “Reproducing and re-use
• “3. State Parties are encouraged to permit and facilitate the reproduction and re-use of legal materials, as referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2, by other bodies, in particular for the purpose of securing free public access to the materials, and to remove any impediments to such reproduction and re-use.
• “Integrity and authoritativeness
• “4. State Parties are encouraged to make available authoritative versions of their legal materials provided in electronic form.
• “5. State Parties are encouraged to take all reasonable measures available to them to ensure that authoritative legal materials can be reproduced or re-used by other bodies with clear indications of their origins and integrity (authoritativeness).
• “6. State Parties are encouraged to remove obstacles to the admissibility of these materials in their courts.
• “Preservation
• “7. State Parties are encouraged to ensure long-term preservation and accessibility of their legal materials referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2 above.
• “Open formats, metadata and knowledge-based systems
• “8. State Parties are encouraged to make their legal materials available in open and re-usable formats and with such metadata as available.
• “9. States Parties are encouraged to cooperate in the development of common standards for metadata applicable to legal materials, particularly those intended to enable and encourage interchange.
• “10. Where State Parties provide knowledge-based systems assisting in the application or interpretation of their legal materials, they are encouraged to make such systems available for free public access, reproducing and re-use.
• “Protection of personal data
  • “11. Online publication of court and administrative tribunal decisions and related material should be in accordance with protection of personal data laws of the State of origin. Where names of parties to decisions need to be protected, the texts of such decisions and related material can be anonymized in order to make them available for free access.
• “Citations
  • “12. State Parties are encouraged to adopt neutral methods of citation of their legal materials, including methods that are medium-neutral, provider-neutral and internationally consistent.
• “Translations
  • “13. State Parties are encouraged, where possible, to provide translations of their legislation and other materials, in other languages.
  • “14. Where State Parties do provide such translations, they are encouraged to allow them to be reproduced or re-used by other parties, particularly for free public access.
  • “15. State Parties are encouraged to develop multi-lingual access capacities and to co-operate in the development of such capacities.
• “Support and co-operation
• “16. State Parties and re-publishers of their legal materials are encouraged to make those legal materials more accessible through various means of interoperability and networking.
• “17. State Parties are encouraged to assist in sustaining those organisations that fulfil the above objectives and to assist other State Parties in fulfilling their obligations.
• “18. State Parties are encouraged to co-operate in fulfilling these obligations.”

The Report of the Council on General Affairs and Policy of the Conference of 31 March to 2 April 2009 (Preliminary Document No 1 of December 2009 for the attention of the Council of April 2010 on General Affairs and Policy of the Conference) states that the Council adopted the following conclusions and recommendations respecting “Accessing the content of foreign law and the need for the development of a global instrument in this area”:

“The Council took note of the extensive exploratory work done by the Permanent Bureau. The Permanent Bureau may convene a Working Party consisting of experts from Members to explore further the feasibility of mechanisms as described in Preliminary Document No 2 of February 2009 with the understanding at this stage that this will not lead to the development of a binding instrument” (emphasis added).

Even though the Hague Conference’s “Access to Foreign Law” project may not yield a treaty, the research and documents produced by the project may influence standards and practices for digital legal information. Ginevra Peruginelli and Enrico Francesconi report, in their summary of the 2008 Law via the Internet Conference at the VoxPopuLII blog, that the “Access to Foreign Law” project has already begun to influence participants in the Free Access to Law movement.

Indeed, the documents so far issued by the “Access to Foreign Law” project contain some very interesting information about access to and use of foreign legal materials among the conference’s member states. Here are links to documents related to the project, that I’ve been able to identify:

• Prel. Doc. No 21 A of March 2007 – Feasibility study on the treatment of foreign law – Report on the meeting of 23-24 February 2007
• Prel. Doc. No 21 B of March 2007 – Feasibility study on the treatment of foreign law, summary tables on the status of and access to foreign law in a sample of jurisdictions
• Prel. Doc. No 21 C of March 2007 – Feasibility study on the treatment of foreign law, legal norms in relation to the treatment of foreign law
• Recommendations and Conclusions adopted by the Council[, Council on General Affairs and Policy of the Conference (2-4 April 2007)]
• Prel. Doc. No 24 of July 2007 – Report of the Council on General Affairs and Policy of the Conference of 2-4 april 2007
• Prel. Doc. No 25 of October 2007 – Feasibility study on the treatment of foreign law – Questionnaire
• Prel. Doc. No 1 of July 2007 – Report of the Council on general affairs and policy of the conference of 2-4 April 2007
• Prel. Doc. No 2 of February 2008 – Strategic Plan Update
• Individual responses to the Questionnaire on the Treatment of Foreign Law (presenting “responses received [through] 20 February 2008″)
• Prel. Doc. No 9A of March 2008 – Feasibility study on the treatment of foreign law – Summary of the responses to the Questionnaire
• Prel. Doc. No 9B of March 2008 – Feasibility study on the treatment of foreign law – Summary tables and charts of certain responses to the Questionnaire
• Conclusions and Recommendations adopted by the Council (1-3 April 2008)
• Prel. Doc. No 1 of May 2008 – Report of the Council on General Affairs and Policy of the Conference of 1-3 April 2008
• Prel. Doc. No 2 of February 2009 – Work programme of the Permanent Bureau for the next Financial Year (1 July 2009 – 30 June 2010)
• Prel. Doc. No 5 of March 2009 – Strategic plan update
• Prel. Doc. No 11A of March 2009 – Accessing the content of foreign law and the need for the development of a global instrument in this area – a possible way ahead
• Prel. Doc. No 11B of March 2009 – Accessing the content of foreign law. Report of the meeting of experts on global co-operation on the provision of online legal information on national laws
• Prel. Doc. No 11 C of March 2009 – Accessing the content of foreign law. Compilation of responses to the Questionnaire of October 2008 for the meeting of experts on global co-operation on the provision of online legal information on national laws
• Prel. Doc. No 12 of March 2009 – Draft Annual Report 2008
• List of preliminary documents [March 2009]
• Conclusions and Recommendations adopted by the Council (31 March – 2 April 2009)
• Prel. Doc. No 1 of December 2009 – Report of the Council on general affairs and policy of the Conference of 31 March to 2 April 2009

HT Ginevra Peruginelli and Enrico Francesconi.

CFR in XML Available for Bulk Download from GPO

[NOTE: Updated on 27 December 2009 to add the final four paragraphs.]

The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) for 2007-2009 is now available for bulk download in XML from U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) FDsys. Click here for the user guide.

Why is this of potential interest to the legal community? First, attorneys, legal IT personnel, and law librarians can download the CFR in XML and process it so that they, their colleagues, and the communities they serve can use it free of charge, without incurring the costs of using a for-fee online service. The XML markup enables the code to be output in a wide range of formats or integrated with a number of other information resources.

Second, many organizations that publish legal information for free on the Internet or at low cost — such as the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University and Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and its FedThread federal regulations publishing project — can download the CFR, process it, and make it available to the legal community and the public. This should result in greater competition in the market for legal information and ultimately lower costs for users of legal information.

This is the second major legal information access initiative at GPO this year. Earlier in 2009, GPO began making available the Federal Register for bulk download in XML.

These data access initiatives are consistent with such law-related Open Government Data activities as the U.S. Government’s Open Government Directive and the Law.gov project, which will be the subject of a number of public meetings throughout the U.S. in the first half of 2010.

Legal Information & the Ithaka Report on the Federal Depository Library Program

[NOTE: Updated on 27 December 2009 to refer to the Law.gov project.]

A report recommending changes to the U.S. Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) was issued this month by ITHAKA S+R: Roger C. Schonfeld & Ross Housewright, Documents for a Digital Democracy: A Model for the Federal Depository Library Program in the 21st Century (Dec. 17, 2009). The report was funded by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA), many of whose members are Federal Depository Libraries or administrators of such libraries. This post will discuss the report’s treatment of U.S. federal legal information.

The ITHAKA report recommends that the FDLP be reformed to meet five objectives:

1. “Newly issued [U.S. federal] government information must be made freely available in digital form and must be preserved for the long term.”
2. “To provide [] permanent public access for the historical collection [of U.S. federal government documents], a significant program of retrospective digitization is required.”
3. “…[S]ome original print copies [of U.S. federal government documents] must continue to be preserved even though fewer depository library collections overall will be required”
4. “The print format will continue to have advantages for certain subsets of material types and user communities, so the [FDLP] must provide appropriate access to certain historical and new [U.S. federal government documents] in print form, where appropriate via print on demand.”
5. “Depository libraries must reemphasize their commitment to serving user needs for outreach, discovery, and access.”

Five issues respecting U.S. federal legal information seem especially relevant for the legal informatics/communication community: public access, metadata, long-term preservation, authentication, and usability. Happily, the ITHAKA report addresses all of these issues to some extent, and identifies potential roles for legal informatics developers and researchers in providing services related to U.S. federal legal information.

Respecting newly issued U.S. federal legal information, commonly called “born digital,” the report addresses public access, preservation, authentication, and discovery. While Congressional and some U.S. executive branch materials are discoverable, freely available to the public, and preserved via the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO)‘s FDsys content management system, or via GPO’s partnerships with federal agencies, many executive and judicial branch law-related materials are either not freely accessible to the public or not treated for long-term preservation. Further, only a portion of the law-related information in FDsys is authenticated by GPO, while none of the law-related federal information distributed outside of FDsys appears to be authenticated. Respecting federal law-related information not in FDsys or under a GPO-agency partnership, the report urges GPO to implement technology “to harvest content directly from agency websites for incorporation into the FDLP.”

Yet whether GPO will implement such a harvesting system is unclear. Further, problems and delays with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Electronic Records Archive (ERA) mean that NARA is now unable, and will likely be unable in the foreseeable future, to reliably preserve or authenticate law-related digital federal government information.

These recommendations and circumstances indicate several roles for civil society organizations, including free-access-to-law organizations such as the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School, law libraries, other not-for-profit entities, and for-profit enterprises.

• First, these entities could continue to publish and preserve current law-related federal digital information.
• Second, these entities could continue to develop services to enable discovery of federal law-related information.

To foster these first two activities, the ITHAKA report urges GPO’s FDsys to offer “bulk download methods” (such as those already available for the Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations, and consistent with the goals of the Law.gov project) and publicly available APIs (application programming interfaces) to enable civil-society participants to access and distribute full text and metadata of law-related U.S. government information.

• Third, members of civil society might advocate for more extensive authentication of federal legal information by the appropriate federal bodies, and oversight of federal authentication and preservation efforts by third parties, such as by an entity using the Center for Research Libraries’ Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC) process. The ITHAKA report recommends that “greater assurance about [GPO’s work in th[e] area [of digital preservation and authentication] should be provided via outside auditing and certification.”

The ITHAKA report also calls for “a significant program of retrospective digitization” of U.S. federal documents, in which historical documents would “be digitized comprehensively and at a sufficiently high level of quality.” The report recommends that civil society organizations play a key role in retrospective digitization. Since the U.S. federal government is unlikely to fund high-quality digitization of the entire historical federal documents collection, the report asserts that such digitization must involve “library digitization projects [and] mass digitization initiatives (involving a number of libraries sometimes in cooperation with Google, the Internet Archive, or other non-library partners).” The report urges GPO to coordinate these efforts.

As the ITHAKA report notes that most retrospective digitization efforts in the coming years are likely to use low-quality mass digitization methods — that tend to produce files exhibiting problems with legibility and usability by humans or machines, and that are usually unsuitable for long-term preservation — there appear to be rich opportunities for civil society organizations to undertake the digitization of historical law-related federal information, by means of high-quality digitization methods consistent with current long-term digital preservation standards. This suggests the continued value of efforts such as those of the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Congressional Documents and Federal District Court Decisions collections.

To ensure permanent public access to these digitized materials, the report recommends that “[d]igitized materials [] be deposited whenever possible into FDsys, documenting chain of custody and digitization standards.” “When [deposit into FDsys] is not possible, GPO should provide coordination including standard bibliographic control via formal partnership agreements with other government agencies and outside institutions.” Thus the report envisions civil society organizations’ playing a role not only in digitization but also in long-term preservation of digitized historical federal legal information. This recommendation suggests a prominent role for legal information archives coordinated by the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA), such as the Chesapeake Project.

The ITHAKA report’s recommendation that “some original print copies [of U.S. federal government documents] must continue to be preserved” suggests the value of LIPA’s efforts to coordinate preservation of U.S. federal legal resources in print format among U.S. law libraries.

Finally, the ITHAKA report’s recommendation that “[d]epository libraries [] reemphasize their commitment to serving user needs for outreach, discovery, and access” underlines the importance of making federal legal information usable. This suggests the value of adding good-quality secondary resources to open collections of primary legal resources — as Cornell’s Legal Information Institute has done with its Wex legal encyclopedia, and as Google has begun to do within Google Scholar.

That said, the ITHAKA report exhibits certain shortcomings respecting its treatment of U.S. federal legal information. First, because the report is not based on a formal user needs assessment, the report’s findings and recommendations respecting the identity and needs of users of federal legal information lack empirical support. For example, respecting uses of federal legal information by persons not connected with the legal system, the report appears to mention only those uses related to “legal disputes.” The report thus seems to neglect the wide range of non-dispute-related purposes for which nonlawyers use federal legal information, such as for engaging in personal or business transactions, personal financial planning, estate planning, starting a business, or expanding one’s existing business.

Second, the report neglects to mention several important categories of frequently used federal legal information, including:

• Legislative history materials;
• Federal court documents other than court decisions — such as pleadings, motions, briefs, and docket information;
• Federal court publications, such as Federal Judicial Center reports, treatises, and handbooks; periodic reports, policy documents, and statistical reports published by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts or the federal judicial conferences; and reports of committees and commissions appointed by the federal courts;
• Administrative decisions;
• Regulatory history materials;
• Policy documents issued by executive or legislative agencies;
• Reports of executive or legislative commissions; and
• General Accountability Office reports.

Nonetheless, the ITHAKA report offers a vision for the FDLP in which U.S. federal legal information is more likely to be found, authenticated, used, made more useful, and preserved for future generations.

Interlaken Conference on the Future of the European Court of Human Rights

[NOTE added on 28 February 2010:

• Click here for the full text of the Interlaken Declaration agreed at the conference.
• Click here for Antoine Buyse's commentary on the declaration.
• Click here for Antoine Buyse's links to the conference page and the special conference site of the Swiss Presidency.
• Click here for links to press coverage of the conference, HT Antoine Buyse.

]

A Conference on the Future of the European Court of Human Rights, among States that are subject to the jurisdiction of that court, will be held February 18-19, 2010, in Interlaken, Switzerland. The purpose of the conference is to enable the Member States to engage in strategic planning for the Court respecting the next decade. According to the official preparatory memorandum, the conference will address two key issues:

• The Court’s large and growing caseload; and
• Problems with enforcement and effect of the Court’s rulings at the Member State level.

The Court identifies the following primary causes for these problems:

• “[M]any applicants are not familiar with either the substantive limits of the Convention or the procedural conditions for admissibility.”
• “The high number of repetitive applications before the Court is an indication that the subsidiarity principle does not operate adequately” (e.g., many Member States allegedly:
• are not providing adequate remedies for human rights violations,
• are permitting individuals to apply to the Court without having exhausted national remedies,
• are failing to enforce the Court’s judgments, or
• are declining to conform their law and practices to Court rulings applicable to other Member States).

To address these problems, the Court proposes several reforms. Of those reform proposals the following involve legal information or communication issues:

• “[S]et up special sections, an applications division …, or another filtering body, … the Court proper ruling only on those cases found admissible”;
• Create a “Human Rights Tribunal [similar to the Court of First Instance of the ECJ] subordinate to the Court” which Tribunal “would deal with admissibility [while] the Court would rule on the merits”;
• Create “a preliminary reference mechanism or possibly an extension of the Court’s advisory competence”;
• Require each State to implement the following corrective measures “at the national level”:
• providing human rights training to its citizens;
• translating the Court’s judgments into the languages of its citizens;
• “execution of national judgments”;
• “solutions for the excessive length of proceedings”; and
• “reopening of proceedings following Strasbourg judgments.”
• Require States to “execute the Court’s judgments promptly”;
• Furnish “human rights training” to the States (see, e.g., the Court’s Warsaw Pilot Project, in which the Court educates potential applicants about the Court’s procedures and substantive human rights law);
• “[E]nsur[e] better dissemination of the Court’s case-law”;
• Authorize “’[c]lass actions’ or collective applications”; and
• Refer “purely repetitive cases to the Committee of Ministers and/or to the States concerned.”

Also of interest to legal informatics researchers is the Court’s description of information- or communication-related steps it has already taken to reduce its caseload or expedite case processing:

• Adding a fifth section (or panel) of judges to the court;
• Deciding on admissibility and the merits at the same time;
• Encouraging settlement;
• Accepting “unilateral declarations of violations”;
• Implementing a “pilot judgment” procedure;
• Simplifying the drafting of judgments;
• Creating “a new order for processing applications based on well-defined criteria”;
• Implementing better data processing tools, and
• “Develop[ing] its Research [and Library] Division.”

For more information on the Interlaken conference and stakeholders’ preparations for it, please see Antoine Buyse’s very informative posts on the ECHR Blog.

CLE and Social Networks

Because legal continuing professional education — usually referred to in the U.S. as “continuing legal education (CLE)” or “mandatory continuing legal education (MCLE)” (see, e.g., this map of state bar requirements from West LegalEdcenter), and in the U.K. as “continuing professional development (CPD)” (see, e.g., the Bar Standards Board regulations and the Solicitors Regulation Authority requirements) — involves many legal informatics issues and contexts — including legal publishing, legal education, legal professional development, legal ethics, legal information behavior, legal communication, legal technology, and legal social networks — this blog will occasionally comment on developments concerning CLE.

Of particular note in recent months is the use of social networks by CLE providers. Many CLE services and content creators are using social media to market their programs and connect with lawyers and other customers.

One way to gain a sense of how CLE providers and content creators are using social media is to peruse the lists — created by Tim Baran of uMCLE.com — of CLE community members who use Facebook or Twitter. Tim plans to add a LinkedIn list shortly.

Also of value would be a list of CLE providers who offer CLE programs on “closed” legal social networks — i.e., networks participation in which is restricted to particular groups of lawyers or other legal professionals — such as Legal OnRamp, Corporate Legal Exchange, and Martindale-Hubbell Connected.

Since CLE providers are both educational institutions and publishers, monitoring the CLE community’s use of social media is a useful way to gauge the role of social networks in legal education and legal publishing.

Drupal for Courts

A group of legal informatics researchers, of which I’m one, is currently trying to identify courts that use the Drupal open-source content management system for their Websites or other information systems.

So far, we have identified just one court Website that uses Drupal: the emergency preparedness site of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

If you know of other uses of Drupal by courts, in the U.S. or in any other jurisdiction, we would be most grateful if you would please identify them in the comments.

Interest in Drupal in connection with law-related Websites has grown in recent months in the wake of the U.S. Government’s decision to use Drupal for a number of Executive Branch Websites, including the White House, and a number of sites hosted by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Legal information systems administrators on the TEKNOIDS listserv recently identified the following potential benefits of using Drupal for court information systems:

• Because Drupal is open source and free of charge, use of Drupal:
• entails lower cost;
• gives one access to a depth of community support, via a large and growing community of developers;
• gives one the option to make use of professional support, but at a lower cost than support for proprietary systems;
• offers access to the code; and
• offers the ability to freely make modifications.
• As a content management system, Drupal facilitates a higher quality of Web publishing with greater functionality than does a collection of inert HTML pages.
• Drupal is more secure than most other Website platforms.
• Drupal sites can be of any size, and can be designed for scale.
• Drupal sites can be hosted in the cloud. They do not require that a court or court system maintain its own servers.
• Drupal accords with courts’ character as communities:
• Drupal provides tools for exchanging information easily and quickly between personnel of the same court or court system.
• Drupal creates a culture in which personnel from different courts or court systems can share expertise.
• Drupal enables the creation of a uniform look and feel for all court Websites within a given system, while also allowing individual courts to have custom applications and remain part of their larger community:
• Drupal allows all of the courts within a given system to share information, while enabling each individual court to maintain a unique web presence.
• Drupal provides excellent tools for managing users and their access
  to data on the system:
• Drupal allows access to sections of a court’s Website to be restricted to members of particular groups, such as attorneys who practice before that court, or pro se litigants.
• Drupal enables single sign on.
• Drupal has tools that can manage the flow of information to
  interested parties:
• Drupal enables court personnel to easily publish current information via Websites and blogs.
• Information published through Drupal can then be distributed — widely or in targeted fashion — via a multitude of RSS feeds, email notification, etc.
• Drupal enables the interoperability of government information:
• With more and more government agencies using Drupal, Drupal use in the judicial branch would increase the interoperability of information between branches of government.
• As Drupal is being adopted by federal, state, and local government agencies, Drupal fosters interoperability of information between different levels of government.
• Data published through Drupal is often stored in a MySQL database, making the data portable and increasing the likelihood of standardization.
• Drupal enables courts, if they wish, to allow the public to provide input via court Websites.
• Bulk data can be made available to the public via Drupal.

Many thanks to Elmer Masters, John Mayer, Dan Nagy, and Stuart Sierra for their comments.

Update on Legal Information Preservation: 2009 LIPA Minutes Available

Minutes are now available of the July 26, 2009 meeting of LIPA, the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, held in Washington, DC, at the 2009 AALL Annual Meeting. LIPA coordinates legal information preservation efforts in the United States. Here are some highlights of the July 2009 meeting:

• The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) has appointed a Drafting Committee on Authentication and Preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials, to write a uniform state law setting standards for the preservation and authentication of U.S. state legal resources in digital format. The Committee Reporter is Professor Barbara A. Bintliff of the University of Colorado School of Law.
• The Chespeake Project Legal Information Archive completed its pilot project, during which it captured and preserved 4306 digital law-related information resources, in a system that runs on the CONTENTdm platform. LIPA Executive Director Margaret Maes reported that the Chesapeake Project “is now part of LIPA under the umbrella of the Legal Information Archive,” and LIPA members were to be invited to participate in the Legal Information Archive in the fall of this year;
• Professor Kent McKeever of Columbia University Law School reported on LIPA’s Print Retention Program, which monitors and coordinates the retention of print legal resources among U.S. law libraries. Here is the most recent report on this program. This project currently involves Columbia University’s Diamond Law Library and the Harvard Law School Library. There are plans to expand the project to enable other libraries to commit to preserving particular print legal resources. “There is a parallel project being done by the old RLG group whereby preservation status will be in 583 field of the bibliographic record. This model will allow smaller libraries to be able to participate in the print retention project.”
• LIPA has named a Digital Preservation Priorities and Inventory Committee, which is “developing priorities for selecting materials for a repository of digital and born-digital information and maintaining that information on the LIPA Website”;
• LIPA has a new strategic plan, whose goals include:
• promoting preservation of born-digital and print legal information resources;
• creating a database of LIPA’s preservation inventory; and
• developing best practices for legal information preservation.

For more information, please see the minutes, or visit the LIPA Website.

New Blog on Developing Digital Law Collections: Hacked Librarian

John Joergensen, Esq., the award-winning digital law library developer, and creator of the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Digital Collections, has launched a new blog, called Hacked Librarian, focused on the details of creating digital legal collections.

The first post, Supreme Court Documents, lays out the procedures John uses to process U.S. Supreme Court decisions to make them available in the Rutgers Camden Federal Courts Database.

I understand that John plans to use this blog to publish a range of procedures used in processing documents for the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Digital Collections. This blog complements the Cornell Legal Information Institute’s LexCraft Wiki, where developers of digital law collections share technical information and advice. Both Hacked Librarian and LexCraft are excellent resources for those developing or maintaining digital legal collections.

Thoughts on Google & Legal Research

The addition of case law and patent search functions to Google Scholar, and subsequent comments from Richard Nash, prompted the following thoughts, which are mine alone:

In my view, the U.S. market for high-end computer-assisted legal research (CALR) currently requires at least the following systems features:

• complete and current collections of primary law;
• large collections of quality secondary legal resources;
• retrieval systems that can search across multiple primary and secondary legal resource databases; and
• specialized and current descriptive metadata applied to document segments, especially citator systems and knowledge representation for points of law.

This high-end market appears to be shrinking, for several reasons:

• clients are forcing cost reductions;
• the low-end legal research market (which typically offers only “plain-vanilla” retrieval of primary legal documents containing little if any descriptive metadata) is offering better metadata (currently citators and, probably before long, subject access to whole documents, if not segments); and
• many lawyers and paralegals appear to be learning to live with the features offered by low-end systems, according to recent survey evidence, such as that from the latest ABA Legal Technology Survey Report.

Google’s U.S. CALR strategy so far seems to have been to engage with this sector from the bottom up. Google first developed its presence in the low-end market by indexing the free case law available on the Web. This week, it has advanced “up market” by integrating that primary legal resource retrieval system with the secondary legal resource retrieval systems of Google Scholar and Google Book Search.

I think that, if Google really wants to compete for the high-end market, its next steps would be:

• to fill the holes in the primary legal resource collections that it indexes (perhaps by offering incentives to organizations that publish primary legal resources free of charge on the Web);
• to build an effective, automated legal citator, as Andrew Plumb-Larrick discusses in his fine post today; and
• to develop a good quality, automated knowledge representation system to provide subject access to individual primary legal documents (i.e., individual statutes, cases, and regulations).

An interesting white paper published earlier this year by Tim O’Reilly & John Battelle may shed light on Google’s next steps. That paper notes Google’s aptitude for developing sophisticated automatic metadata creation systems, such as the one underlying Google Mobile App, that incorporate improvements drawn from the study of large numbers of user searches. This aptitude suggests that Google probably won’t need very long to build a good quality automatic legal citator and subject indexing system, if it has a mind to. If Google takes those further steps, then I think it could take a big share of the high-end CALR market. At the very least, its efforts, coupled with Bloomberg’s, should result in increased competition, lower prices, and more innovation yielding better retrieval tools for users in the U.S. CALR sector. (On the obstacles to innovation in the U.S. CALR sector, see Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s recent post on VoxPopuLII.)

Google’s ongoing development of its legal research system could also yield additional benefits for the legal community. The O’Reilly-Battelle white paper notes Google’s skill at identifying implicit structures in large data sets. These implicit structures can complement express, formal descriptive metadata, such as, in the legal realm, West’s Key Number System, Lexis’s Headnotes, or Bloomberg’s Points of Law. One great potential benefit for the legal community in Google’s development of its legal research system, is the (automated) discovery of previously unknown, implicit structures in primary and secondary legal information. Some legal scholars are already exploring this area by using techniques developed in connection with the study of complex adaptive systems. I think Google may also have important contributions to make to this area of research, particularly if it chooses to publish its research findings.

Google Scholar Now Indexes Judicial Decisions & Patents

[NOTE: Updated on 17 November 2009 to link to Andrew Plumb-Larrick's post, Carole Levitt's post, and to Greg Lambert's post and list of links.]

Google Scholar now indexes selected judicial decisions and patents, metadata for which are available on the Internet. Note the “How Cited” feature.

Andrew Plumb-Larrick has written a fine post describing the new system.

Carole Levitt gathers much valuable commentary about the new system here. HT @montserratlj.

Greg Lambert published a useful list of links about the system, and a fine post commenting on it.

HT @justia