The Summer of Codes: Many new U.S. state and municipal legislative codes posted free on Web by Public.Resource.Org

Public.Resource.Org has posted legislative codes for several U.S. states and localities, free on the Web, making summer 2013 the Summer of Codes.

The data are available in various formats, including XML, PDF, HTML, and RTF.

Legislative codes have been posted for the following U.S. states and the District of Columbia:

• Arkansas
• Colorado
• District of Columbia
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Maryland
• Mississippi

Municipal or county codes have been posted for the following U.S. localities:

• Baltimore County
• Boston
• Chicago
• Cleveland
• Los Angeles
• Philadelphia
• San Diego
• San Francisco
• San Jose
• Sonoma County

Examples of how developers can use open legislative codes like these include:

• Tom MacWright‘s Unlocking the DC Code;
• Robb Shecter‘s projects for Oregon, California, Texas, and New York;
• Waldo Jaquith‘s The State Decoded projects for Virginia, Florida, and Maryland;
• Michael Bommarito‘s Michigan Compiled Laws in XML;
• John Joergensen‘s New Jersey Statutes.

HT @waldojaquith

Harvey: Free Public Access to Law and Primary Legal Information as an Aspect of Internet Freedom

Judge David Harvey has posted Free Public Access to Law and Primary Legal Information as an Aspect of Internet Freedom, at his blog, The IT Countrey Justice.

Here are excerpts from the introduction:

The Rule of Law and its protection of human rights is essential to a functioning democracy. The discussion that follows addresses a critical aspect of the Rule of Law and that is the issue of the right of access to legal information. This right is a subset of the right to receive and impart information, but what is of significant importance is the nature of the information that is being imparted and received. It is information about the law – the rules that set the metes and bounds of behaviour in a society and that delineate and define the relationships between citizens and between citizens and the State. [...]

The study firstly examines the rationale for access to legal information, using a “law-based” approach. I then proceed to consider the opportunities provided by the Internet in the onset of the digital paradigm, and then consider the concept of access to law on-line and the development of the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) and the principles that have developed over the years. Based on these principles a distillation of the responsibilities of the State and of redistributors are articulated, and using these principles a matrix is developed by which the performance of State and redistributor obligations may be measured and assessed as a part of a wider measure of the state of Internet freedom in a society. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @djhdcj

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.

Open DC Code Hackathon: Tweets and Resources

This post links to selected resources from the Open DC Code Hackathon, held 14 April 2013 in Washington, DC, USA.

Click here for the hackathon’s Website.

The Twitter hashtag for the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 was #openlawdc

• Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the Open DC Hackathon 2013, in .cvs format.

IRC discussion during the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 occurred on Freenode under #openlawdc

Online discussions of issues addressed at the hackathon are available at https://github.com/openlawdc/dc-decoded/issues and https://github.com/openlawdc/code-browser/issues

Tom MacWright has posted an FAQ about the DC Code and the hackathon.

Eric Mill has posted a detailed description of the hackathon: What Happens When You Open the DC Code.

The results of the hackathon are now available at the openlawdc repository on GitHub: https://github.com/openlawdc

Among the resources worked on at the hackathon was The Open DC Code browser.

• Code for the Open DC Code Browser is available at https://github.com/openlawdc/code-browser
• Tom MacWright points to DC Code section 5-101.03 as an example of improvements made to the Open DC Code browser at the hackathon.

Another product of the hackathon is a new online version of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, developed by Joshua Tauberer and Harlan Yu.

For background on the effort to make the DC Code freely available on the Web, please see Freeing the DC Code: An Update.

HT @konklone @sglassmeyer @tmcw @waldojaquith

Freeing the DC Code: An Update

There have been several developments in recent weeks in the effort to make the District of Columbia statutory code freely available.

The project began in February 2013 when Tom MacWright posted You Cannot Have the DC Code, complaining that no free and open version of the DC Code was available for developers or the public to use.

Discussion then occurred regarding how to make the DC Code publicly available online in a version that was free of copyright.

In March 2013, Public.Resource.Org posted a digital version of the DC Code.

Last week, the DC Council said that they would not sue Public.Resource.Org for copyright infringement for posting a digital version of the code.

This week, the DC Council posted an unofficial digital version of the DC Code, licensed with the Creative Commons CC0 license.

This week it was announced that a hackathon to hack the DC Code will be held on 14 April 2013: Open DC Code Hackathon, in Washington, DC.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the Open DC Hackathon 2013, in .cvs format.

The Twitter hashtag for the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 was #openlawdc

IRC discussion during the Open DC Code Hackathon 2013 occurred on Freenode under #openlawdc

Among the notable aspects of this project are that it demonstrates how members of the legal informatics and open-government-data communities can use the Internet to coordinate their efforts to make legal data publicly available, address challenging policy issues, and realize several of the principles of the open government data movement.

Here are selected articles and posts about the effort to make the DC Code publicly available on the Web and free of copyright restrictions:

• Tom MacWright: DC’s laws aren’t yours
• Cory Doctorow: Municipal codes of DC, free for all — liberated without permission
• Waldo Jaquith: Washington D.C. and the Work Ahead
• Steve Schultze: The District of Columbia Claims Copyright on the Law
• Martin Austermuhle: Breaking the Law to Publish the Law: Open Government Advocate Digitizes Entirety of D.C. Code
• Tom MacWright: The Open Code
• Tom Lee: The D.C. Code is Open–Come Hack on It!
• Dr. Joshua Tauberer: DC opens its “code”, embracing principles of open laws

For additional news about development of the Open DC Code, please see the comments to this post.

Thanks to Eric Mill and the members of the Legal Informatics Research Network for helping to gather the sources cited in this post.

Registration open: CodeX FutureLaw 2013: Conference on Technology & Legal Profession, 26 April

Tim Hwang tells us that registration is now open for CodeX FutureLaw 2013, “a conference focusing on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly,” to be held 26 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

Tim is Chair of the conference.

The legal informatics topics to be addressed during the conference sessions include:

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

Speakers include:

• Itai Gurari of Judicata
• Tony Lai of LawGives
• Daniel Lewis of Ravel Law
• Tim Stanley of Justia
• Ed Walters of Fastcase

For more details, please see the conference Website.

HT Tim Hwang

MacWright on Copyright Barriers to Creating a Free and Open DC Code

Tom MacWright of MapBox has posted You Cannot Have the DC Code, at macwright.org.

Here are excerpts:

You cannot have a digital copy of the DC Code. You cannot have a public domain version of the code, despite it being legally public domain. [...]

You cannot. There is no-one to ask who can give you one and who wants to. The government only has copyright-infected copies, and the contractor has no reason to endanger their information monopoly.

To preclude misunderstandings: this is not a failure of the [DC] Council itself. [...]

The Council composes and publishes its bills and makes every effort at transparency: this is a failure of the last step, in which the bill is compiled and de-facto owned by a private contractor.

This is not a question of hacking or technology. Writing a scraper for the portal is an afternoon project, but is illegal, and can be construed as a felony by the federal government.

This is a failure of the public/private contracting system and the government’s ability to write strong and precise contracts that are geared for the internet era.

This is a failure of Westlaw and LexisNexis. It’s possibly a reiteration of a well-known court case focused on their previous attempt to do the same thing: monetize what should be a basic unit of democracy.

Next up: how this is possible, what it means, and how we can fix it.

Click here for a storify of some responses to the post.

For more details, please see the complete post.

Ed Walters of Fastcase has written powerfully about this problem in his post, Tear Down This Paywall: The End of Private Copyright in Public Statutes, at VoxPopuLII.

Waldo Jaquith has developed a free and open platform for statutory codes, called The State Decoded.

HT Dan Nagy

Call for Papers: LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference

The call for papers and presentation proposals has been issued for LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 26-27 September 2013 on the Channel Island of Jersey.

The conference Website does not seem to state the deadline for submitting papers or proposals. If you know the submission deadline, please feel free to tell us in the comments to this post.

[UPDATE 11 February 2013: The conference organizers now say the submission deadline is 31 March 2013.]

Papers are invited on the topics covered by any of the seven tracks in which the conference program is divided:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access
• Privacy v open government in legal publishing
• Emerging patterns of information access and usage
• Technological development and free access to law

The conference Twitter account is @JerseyLVI2013 and the conference hashtag is #lvi2013

For details about the tracks, please see the track Websites.

For more details about the conference, please see the conference Website.

Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants to further development of RECAP open law repository

On 3 February 2013 an additional $10,000 for the Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants — which fund the development of the RECAP project aimed at increasing public access to U.S. federal judicial information — were announced by Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Here is an excerpt from the announcement:

The generous folks over at Google’s Open Source Programs team have pledged to support two more RECAP-related project awards — at $5,000 each. These are open to anyone who wishes to submit a proposal for a significant improvement to the RECAP system. We will work with the proposers to scope the project and define what qualifies for the award.

There are several potential ideas. For instance, someone might propose add support to RECAP for displaying the user’s current balance and prompting the user to liberate up to their free quarterly $15 allocation as the end of the quarter approaches (inspired by Operation Asymptote). Someone might propose to improve the archive.recapthelaw.org interface, and to improve detection and removal of private information. Someone might propose some other idea that we haven’t thought of. You may wish to watch the discussion of a few of these initial ideas from our developer kickoff session.

Email info@recapthelaw.org if you are interested. Thanks again to the Think Computer Foundation and Google.

These grants are in addition to the original $5,000 in grants sponsored by Think Computer Foundation and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, where RECAP was developed.

Click here for Stephen Schultze’s VoxPopuLII post explaining RECAP.

HT @harlanyu and @sjschultze

Glassmeyer: Free Law Users Group

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI has launched Free Law Users Group, on the pbworks platform.

Here is the description:

This group is for sharing news and developments in the Free Law world. Primarily it will serve as a conduit for connecting librarians to the law tech and developer communities, in the hope that librarians will be able to increase involvement and share their skills and knowledge. It is also hoped that individuals in the Free Law, Open Law and Open Gov developer worlds will join in and see that librarians aren’t so scary and can be a valuable resource in their projects.

This website is a wiki. Please feel free to add anything of relevance. It will really only succeed if the community takes charge of it. This also means it is a constant work in progress so check back often!

HT @sglassmeyer

On a related note:

Tim Stanley of Justia has started a new Free Law discussion group on Google+.