Mendelson: Private Control Over Access to Public Law: Federal Regulatory Use of Private Standards

Professor Nina A. Mendelson of University of Michigan Law School has posted Private Control Over Access to Public Law: The Puzzling Federal Regulatory Use of Private Standards, forthcoming in Michigan Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

To save resources and build on private expertise, federal agencies have incorporated private standards into thousands of federal regulations – but only by “reference.” An individual who wishes to read this binding federal regulatory law cannot access it for free online or in a government depository library, as she can the U.S. Code or Code of Federal Regulations. Instead, the individual is referred to the private organization that prepared the standard, which typically asserts a copyright and charges a significant access fee. Or else she must travel to Washington, D.C. Thus, this category of law has come under largely private control.

In assessing the arguments why law needs to be public, previous analyses have focused almost wholly on whether regulated entities have notice of their obligations. This article evaluates several other considerations, including notice to those who expect to benefit from the way government regulates others, such as consumers of dangerous products, neighbors of natural gas pipelines, and Medicare beneficiaries. Ready public access also is critical to ensure that federal agencies are accountable to the courts, Congress, and the electorate for the regulatory power they exercise. As shown by an assessment of the institutional dynamics surrounding public and private interaction to define the scope of federal regulation, the need for ready public access is at least as strong in this collaborative governance setting as when agencies act alone. Finally, expressive harm is likely to flow from government adopting regulatory law that is, in contrast to American law in general, more costly to access and harder to find. Full consideration of the importance of public access both strengthens the case for reform and limits the range of acceptable reform measures.

Kraft and Jaquith: Launch of Maryland Decoded

Seamus Kraft and Waldo Jaquith tell us about the launch of Maryland Decoded, a new free-access-to-law site for the U.S. state of Maryland, built by Seamus and colleagues at the OpenGov Foundation, on Waldo’s State Decoded platform.

Here is a description, from the Maryland Decoded “About” page:

Maryland Decoded is a non-profit, non-governmental, non-partisan implementation of The State Decoded brought to you by the folks at the OpenGov Foundation. The State Decoded is a free, open source project that provides a platform to display state-level legal information in a friendly, accessible, modern fashion. Maryland is the third state to deploy the software, with more coming soon.[...]

For more details, please see Waldo’s post, OpenGov Foundation’s post, or the Maryland Decoded site.

HT @waldojaquith

Mill on Scout, Free Access to Law, and Open Legal Data

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation has posted the text of his presentation on tracking government information and open legal data, given 26 April 2013 at the AzALL Congressional Information Symposium, in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

Here is the introduction to the presentation:

I recently got a chance to go speak to a group of Arizona law librarians about legal informatics [...]

They found me because of Scout, and asked me to talk about tracking government information. I decided to start with Scout as an example, to zoom out to similar projects [GovTrack and CourtListener] , and then to describe the conditions necessary to make projects like ours possible. Because the audience was law librarians, a sympathetic crowd inside an unsympathetic area of government, I emphasized the necessity of absolutely free access to data as a fundamental requirement and right. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @konklone

Jaquith launches Open Virginia data portal, providing access to legal data

Waldo Jaquith today launched Open Virginia, an open data platform for the U.S. state of Virginia.

Open Virginia is built with the CKAN open source data portal software.

Here is a description of Open Virginia:

Open Virginia is an effort to document the open government data published about the Commonwealth of Virginia—APIs, bulk downloads, and links to third-party data sources that provide much-needed information about how our government works.

Open Virginia currently offers access to legal data, including:

• the state’s legislative code
• code sections affected by bills 2006-
• a list of Virginia Court of Appeals decisions that cite a given law
• data on members of the state legislature

HT @shevski

Legal Informatics Proposals for TransparencyCamp 2013

Some legal informatics proposals have been submitted for TransparencyCamp 2013, to be held 4-5 May 2013, in Washington, DC, USA:

• Ben Balter: Open Sourcing Government
• Hudson Hollister: Creating a Legislative Agenda for Open Data
• Tom MacWright: The Story of the DC Code
• James McKinney: Open Government Data Standards
• David Moore: OpenGovernment.org : For state and city government engagement
• Stephen Schultze: PACER, RECAP, OpenPACER.org

The Twitter hashtag for TransparencyCamp 2013 appears to be #tcamp13

Parliaments on the Net XI Conference: 2-3 May 2013: Tweets and resources

The Parliaments on the Net XI Conference is being held 2-3 May 2013 in London, England, UK.

Click here for archived videos of the Day 1 and Day 2 sessions.

The conference is being live-blogged at http://potn2013.tumblr.com/

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #potn2013

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from both days of the conference.

Click here for the conference program.

April 26: CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference: Tweets and Resources

The CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference is being held 26 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

The conference focuses ‘on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly. The conference will bring together leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, investors and technologists that are experimenting and actively working to re-architect the future of the law. If you’re of a similar mind, we’d love to have you there.’

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #futurelaw

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the conference, in .csv format.

The conference Chair was Tim Hwang.

The legal informatics-oriented panels at the conference include:

• Legal Disruption: Why Now? Why Here? What Next?
• Computational Law and Contracts
• Designing Legal Data
• Open Source Legal Practice

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University and the ReInventLaw Lab will give the closing keynote address.

The conference is sponsored by CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

Please see the comments to this post for additional resources related to the conference.

Colorado and Baltimore statutory codes posted free on the Web

The Colorado statutory code and the Baltimore, Maryland statutory code have been posted free on the Web by Public.Resource.Org.

Public.Resource.Org appears to be communicating with entities that assert copyright in those codes, about whether those entities will take legal action to prevent posting of those codes on the free Web and the use of those codes by developers to create new information resources.

HT @carlmalamud here and here

Good Law Initiative Launch Event, 16 April 2013: Tweets and Resources

This post links to tweets and selected resources from the 16 April 2013 launch event for the Good Law Initiative, a project of the UK Office of the Parliamentary Counsel.

The main page for the initiative appears to be called Good law – Detailed guidance – GOV.UK.

Click here for video of the event.

The Office’s announcement of the Good Law initiative is called Join the good law conversation.

Twitter tweets from the launch event are now archived in .csv format.

The Twitter hashtag for the event, and for other Good Law activities, is #goodlaw

On 16 April 2013 the Office published a new report entitled When laws become too complex: Review by Office of the Parliamentary Counsel into the causes of complex legislation, which is also called the OPC Good Law Report or the Good Law Report.

For more information about the Good Law Initiative, please see Good law – Detailed guidance, or Good Law Initiative: UK Government Effort to Make Legislation More Effective and Accessible.

HT @johnlsheridan

Today 16 April, 2 pm Eastern: Google+ Hangout on Government Role in Free Access to Legal Information

A Google+ hangout on the topic of The Government Role in Free Access to Legal Information, will take place today, 16 April 2013, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern ( -4:00 p.m. UTC), and will be hosted by Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute and Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack.

Click here for video of the hangout.

The Twitter hashtag for the hangout appears to have been #freelaw

Click here for archived tweets from the hangout, in .csv format.

The URL for the hangout will be announced shortly on the LII Twitter feed, @LIICornell, and on the LII Google+ feed.

HT @LIICornell