New Lists of U.S. State Legal Resources Available on Web

Two new resources provide metadata describing U.S. state legal resources available on the Web:

• 2011-2012 Preliminary Analysis of AALL’s State Legal Inventories

[The American Association of Law Libraries' (AALL’s)] Digital Access to Legal Information Committee and Government Relations Office analyzed 6 primary online legal resources [Administrative Code, Administrative Register, Statutes, Session Laws, High Court Opinions and Appellate Court opinions] included in AALL’s state legal inventories to answer the following questions about each title:

• Is it official?
• Is it authenticated?
• It is preserved?
• Is permanent public access mandated by statute?
• Is there a copyright assertion or other use restriction?
• [...] whether the state is employing universal citation
• [whether the state has] introduced or enacted the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA)

• The Analysis and the data linked from it are not subject to copyright, according to Sarah Glassmeyer.

• State Regulations Online
• This table has been created by the Sunlight Foundation (click here for a description of the table). For each state, the table lists whether the regulations are readable in a Web browser; whether the regulations can be downloaded in bulk; and information about the laws governing online availability of regulations.

HT @sglassmeyer and Matt Rumsey

Uniform Electronic Material Act Approved by ULC

The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act — formerly called The Authentication and Preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials Act — has been approved by the Uniform Law Commission (ULC; formerly called the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, NCCUSL) at their annual meeting in Vail, Colorado, according to a ULC Twitter post.

[Update 12 July 2011, 6:22 p.m. Pacific: Click here for the ULC's press release.]

According to ULC, the vote was “45 [states] in favor, 1 abstention and 7 states not voting.”

The Act establishes uniform legal standards for the authentication and preservation of U.S. state legal information in digital formats.

The chair of the drafting committee for the Act is Michele L. Timmons, the Revisor of Statutes for the State of Minnesota, and the committee’s reporter is Professor Barbara A. Bintliff of the University of Texas School of Law.

Click here for the meeting agenda.

Click here for the current draft of the Act and the memo describing it.

Click here for earlier drafts of the Act and related documents.

July 7: NCCUSL to Consider Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act — formerly called The Authentication and Preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials Act — will be considered by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) at their upcoming annual meeting, on 7 July 2011, in Vail, Colorado. The Act would establish uniform legal standards for the authentication and preservation of U.S. state legal information in digital formats.

The chair of the drafting committee for the Act is Michele L. Timmons, the Revisor of Statutes for the State of Minnesota, and the committee’s reporter is Professor Barbara A. Bintliff of the University of Texas School of Law.

Click here for the meeting agenda.

Click here for the current draft of the Act and the memo describing it.

Click here for earlier drafts of the Act and related documents.

Le Métayer et al. on Liability Issues in Software Engineering: Case Study of eSignatures

Daniel Le Métayer of INRIA Grenoble – Rhône-Alpes, and colleagues, have published Liability Issues in Software Engineering: The Use of Formal Methods to Reduce Legal Uncertainties, Communications of the ACM, 54(4), 99-106 (April 2010). Here is the abstract:

This paper reports on the results of a multidisciplinary project involving lawyers and computer scientists with the aim to put forward a set of methods and tools to (1) define software liability in a precise and unambiguous way and (2) establish such liability in case of incident. The overall approach taken in the project is presented through an electronic signature case study. The case study illustrates a situation where, in order to reduce legal uncertainties, the parties wish to include in the contract specific clauses to define as precisely as possible the share of liabilities between them for the main types of failures of the system.

Martin on Abandoning Law Reports for Official Digital Case Law

Dean Peter W. Martin of Cornell University Law School has posted Abandoning Law Reports for Official Digital Case Law (2011), on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

In 2009, Arkansas ended publication of the Arkansas Reports. Since 1837 this series of volumes, joined in the late twentieth century by the Arkansas Appellate Reports covering the state’s intermediate court of appeals, had served as the official record of Arkansas’s case law. For all decisions handed down after February 12, 2009, not books but a database of electronic documents “created, authenticated, secured, and maintained by the Reporter of Decisions” constitute the “official report” of all Arkansas appellate decisions.

The article examines what distinguishes this Arkansas reform from the widespread cessation of public law report publication that occurred during the twentieth century and this new official database from the opinion archives now hosted at the judicial websites of most U.S. appellate courts. It proceeds to explore the distinctive alignment of factors that both led and enabled the Arkansas judiciary to take a step that courts in other jurisdictions, state and federal, have so far resisted. Speculation about which other states have the capability and incentive to follow Arkansas’s lead follows. That, in turn, requires a comparison of the full set of measures the Arkansas Supreme Court and its reporter of decisions have implemented with similar, less comprehensive, initiatives that have taken place elsewhere. Finally, the article considers important issues that have confronted those responsible for building Arkansas’s new system of case law dissemination and the degree to which principal components of this one state’s reform can provide a useful template for other jurisdictions.

Wash on Authentication as a User-Centric Activity

Mike Wash, Chief Information Officer of the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), has posted Authentication Is a User-Centric Activity, on his blog, The WashBoard.

Mr. Wash’s post identifies key issues respecting the authentication of digital government information — including U.S. federal legal information — and discusses GPO’s approach to authentication.

For other recent discussion of authentication of digital legal information, please see Sean McGrath’s post, Pssst…there is no such thing as an authentic/original/official/master electronic legal text, and Jason Eiseman’s VoxPopuLII post, Time to Turn the Page on Print Legal Information.

HT @propylonsean.

McGrath on Authentication of Digital Legal Information

Sean McGrath of Proplyon, has written an interesting new post on authentication of electronic legal information, entitled Pssst…there is no such thing as an authentic/original/official/master electronic legal text.

Digitizing the World’s Laws: Authentication and Preservation

A paper entitled Digitizing the World’s Laws: Authentication and Preservation, was given by Claire M. Germain at the 76th IFLA General Conference and Assembly, held 10-15 August 2010 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Here is the abstract:

Many countries now provide online access to statutes, codes, regulations, court decisions, and international agreements. Digital law issues that have emerged include authentication of official legal information and preservation for long term access, particularly for born digital legal information which has no paper equivalent. This article is part of a chapter forthcoming in “International Legal Information Management Handbook” (Ashgate 2010).

HT @GovDocsGuy.

NCCUSL Accepts Draft Uniform Statute on Authentication and Preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials

The latest draft of The Authentication and Preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials Act, and its accompanying report, were accepted by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) on 15 July 2010, according to a report by Professor Barbara Bintliff of the University of Colorado School of Law, the reporter to NCCUSL Drafting Committee on Authentication and Preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials, which is drafting the statute.

According to Professor Bintliff’s report, the NCCUSL Committee of the Whole’s principal comments on the draft were as follows:

a request for clarification of the relationship between the state’s official publishers and commercial publishers; a desire by Commissioners to include “free access” to preserved, historical materials as an option; and a need to explain better the Drafting Committee’s intentions regarding the effective date of the act.

According to Professor Bintliff’s report, the drafting committee will meet again on 19-21 November 2010 in Washington, DC, USA, to address those comments and to consider further revisions to the draft statute. Professor Bintliff’s report states that a second reading of the draft statute by NCCUSL is expected in summer 2011.

Most of the previous drafts and other documents produced by the drafting committee are available at the drafting committee’s documents Website.

Document Authentication Workshop at GPO

The transcript and the slides are available for the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO)‘s Document Authentication Workshop, held 18 June 2010, at GPO in Washington, DC, USA.

The workshop addressed many aspects of the authentication of digital legal information. GPO is the official publisher of many important sources of U.S. federal law, including statutes (United States Code, United States Statutes at Large, and Public and Private Laws), reports of the U.S. Supreme Court (United States Reports), and administrative regulations (Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations).

Click here for more information on GPO’s authentication technology.

HT Daniel Bennett.