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.

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

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.

Good Law Initiative: UK Government Effort to Make Legislation More Effective and Accessible

The UK Office of the Parliamentary Counsel is launching “the ‘Good Law’ initiative, with the aim of improving the user’s experience of legislation,” at an event to be held 16 April 2013, at the Institute for Government, London, England.

The Twitter hashtag for the initiative is #goodlaw

Here are excerpts of the announcement:

Legislation is difficult. The volume of statute law and regulations, together with their piecemeal structure, level of detail, and frequent amendments, mean that citizens find law complex, hard to understand, and difficult to comply with. That can generate barriers to economic activity, as well as burdens for individuals, businesses, and communities. It obstructs good government, and it undermines the rule of law.

Efforts have been made to address aspects of the problem. Parliamentary Counsel has adopted a simple, plain English style. The National Archives have improved access to up-to-date legislation through legislation.gov.uk. The Law Commission has a programme of special Bills for law reform, consolidation and repeals. But the problem remains.

At this event, the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel launches the ‘good law’ initiative with the aim of improving the user’s experience of legislation. Join us to discuss what ‘good law’ means in practice. What do users expect from legislation? How can we make it more accessible? When is complexity in legislation desirable? And when is unavoidable?

I believe that at the launch event, John Sheridan of The National Archives will give a presentation about the role of legislation.gov.uk in the Good Law initiative.

For more information about the launch event or to register for the event, please see the event announcement.

Click here for more information about the principles underlying the Good Law project.

HT @johnlsheridan

CanLII launches API

Colin Lachance of the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) tells us that CanLII, which provides free access to Canadian law, has opened an application programming interface (API).

A description appears below.

Colin has a new post at Slaw.ca that provides context for the API launch: Unbundling legal information.

Description of CanLII API:

This document describes the specifications of the CanLII API. The API provides over a million court judgments, tens of thousands of statutes and regulations and covers all the major courts and legislatures, as well as over 150 specialized courts and tribunals.

How it works

Let’s dig into the more technical information:

- The technical guidelines provide details about encoding, formats, error management and content negotiation.
- The technical guideline will give you detailed information on how to develop your client and interact with the API.

Supported Resources:

Currently, the API supports following services:

Legislation browse: Regulations and statutes from all Canadian federal, provincial and territorial jurisdictions,
Case browse: Judgments from all courts and tribunals accessible on CanLII.

On top of the complete documentation, you can also access directly to the content of the API thanks to the I/O Docs module. [...]

For the API key and for other details, please see the description.

HT @sglassmeyer