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

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

Bill Summaries at GovTrack

Dr. Joshua Tauberer‘s GovTrack free access to law and e-participation service now includes summaries of selected legislation, according to Dr. Aviad Eilam‘s post entitled Update: Adding Bill Summaries, at GovTrack Blog.

Here is an excerpt of the post:

Here at GovTrack we’ve gotten a fair amount of complaints about wordy, incomprehensible legislative language. So we’ve started doing our own research on certain bills, in an effort to provide simple and straightforward explanations of their content and purpose. These are bills that have gotten a lot of coverage in the press and social media, have many of our users tracking them, or have piqued our interest. Oftentimes, they have all three features.

Here’s a list of the bills we’ve summarized so far, ordered by the number of users tracking them:

H.J.Res. 15: A bill to repeal presidential term limits
S. 150, H.R. 437: Assault Weapons Ban of 2013
H.R. 138, S. 33: Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act
H.R. 142, S. 35: Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act of 2013
H.R. 21: NRA Members’ Gun Safety Act of 2013
H.R. 141: Gun Show Loophole Closing Act of 2013
H.R. 193: Seed Availability and Competition Act of 2013
S. 22: Gun Show Background Check Act of 2013 [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @freegovinfo

Up-Goer Five and legal plain language

We’re starting to see people use the Up-Goer Five plain language editor to render legal language in plain language.

Here’s a new Up-Goer Five version of the U.S. copyright law doctrine of first sale, by Nancy Sims, JD, MLS, of the University of Minnesota.

Click here for background on the Up-Goer Five editor.

HT @CopyrightLibn

Good Law

Today in a conversation with John Sheridan of The National Archives and Richard Heaton of the UK Cabinet Office, I learned about the concept of Good Law (designated by the hashtag #goodlaw) which I’d seen John referring to recently.

They explained that Good Law is a new idea they are currently developing. Good Law has (at least) three aspects:

• Quality of substantive legislation, in terms of appropriateness, effectiveness, etc.;
• Complexity of legislation: When is complexity in legislation a bad thing? What are the causes of complexity?
• Intellectual accessibility or Readability of legislation, for example in terms of principles of plain language, etc., and
• Technological accessibility of legislation: in terms of retrievability, usability, etc.

(And I hope John will correct me if I’ve gotten any of this wrong.)

This is, I think, a very intriguing idea, particularly for the legal informatics community, because members of that community include those who work on improving technological accessibility and usability of electronic legal information, and those who work on making the law more comprehensible to the public, through means such as public legal education and the promotion of plain language principles.

So Good Law has the potential to engage many subgroups within and near our field, including legal informatics scholars, developers of legal information systems, the free access to law community, the plain legal language community, law librarians, advocates of democracy and of public participation in government, and advocates of law reform.

The inclusion of both intellectual and technological accessibility within a single concept that is related to policy action is extremely exciting. I look forward to learning more.

John’s and Richard’s comments about #goodlaw today are at the following links:

• https://twitter.com/johnlsheridan/status/278635094363746304
• https://twitter.com/johnlsheridan/status/278636000115310592
• https://twitter.com/RHCabinetOffice/status/278639630180560898
• http://twitter.com/RHCabinetOffice/status/279300201322258432

To see additional comments about this post, please see the version of the post on Google +.

[NOTE: Updated 13 December 2012 to add Richard's point about complexity of legislation.]

Widener on Making Law Journal Content More Accessible to the Public

Michael N. Widener, JD, MS, has published Driving Pedestrian Traffic to Law Journals, Law Library Journal, 14(4), 569-575 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

Recent technological advances enable the legal academy and law student editors to embed aids to understanding the law journal’s content in the articles and student notes published there. As there are compelling social purposes for making the content of law journals more accessible to lay inquirers, the author advocates incorporating into law journals devices such as QR codes and content summaries written for the layperson.

Abstracts and Archived Tweets for CLARITY 2012: Conference on Plain Language and Law

Abstracts, archived tweets (in .csv format), and the program are available, for CLARITY 2012: Conference on Plain Language and Law, which was held 21-23 May 2012, in Washington, DC.

The conference hashtag was #clarity2012.

The conference was co-hosted by Clarity, the international plain-legal language association; Scribes —- The American Society of Legal Writers; and the Center for Plain Language.

Sinha on Ad Hoc [Legal] Learning in an Online World

Dr. Sushant Sinha of Indian Kanoon has posted slides of his new presentation entitled Ad Hoc Learning in an Online World, given at Teaching Media Policy and Law – A Faculty Workshop, held 24-25 April 2012 at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.

The presentation covers the following topics:

• My ad hoc legal learning on the Internet
• How does ad hoc learning compare to formal education?
• Why does legal education need to go beyond lawyers?

For more information, please see the slides.

HT @sushantsinha.

Legal Technology and Information Systems at NLADA 2011

Slides and materials have been posted for several presentations on legal technology or legal information systems, given at NLADA 2011: The National Legal Aid and Defender Association Annual Conference, held 7-10 December 2011 in Washington, DC, USA.

The conference theme was “Innovations in Civil Legal Services.”

Here are the legal technologies or information systems I’ve identified in the slides or materials:

• Illinois Legal Aid app, which provides “[p]lain language legal information includ[ing] FAQs, step-by-step instructions and referrals to helpful organizations,” by Illinois Legal Aid;
• Illinois Pro Bono app, which offers “primers on Illinois law, volunteer opportunity search, and calendar of upcoming legal events, including MCLE trainings,” for lawyers who want to provide pro bono legal services, by Illinois Legal Aid;
• “[A]n interactive online decision tree, using the A2J [Author] software… to help litigants, practitioners and judges parse” the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act, by the DC Family Court Self Help Center;
• Electronic document management system and mobile access to documents and data, by Memphis Area Legal Services, Inc.;
• Data analysis to “identify unmet” client needs, … “gauge the effectiveness of specific legal strategies,” and “measure our progress toward achieving our existing strategic goals,” by Legal Aid Society of Cleveland;
• Client intake decision guides, by Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago;
• Online county-based legal self-help centers [such as the center for Will County], by Illinois Legal Aid Online;
• LiveHelp (e.g., go to http://www.illinoislegalaid.org/, and click on “LiveHelp”), “an instant messaging service that provides remote navigation assistance to website users seeking legal information,” by Illinois Legal Aid Online.
• AyudaLegalIL.org, an online Spanish-language legal aid service, which “integrate[s] an automatic translation component into the website’s content management system with Google Translate API,” with translations reviewed and correction by a human “native Spanish-speaker”, by Illinois Legal Aid Online.

Many of these technologies or systems were developed in part with funds from the Legal Services Corporation‘s Technology Initiative Grants (TIG) program.

Federal Register 2.0 Now Available

Federal Register 2.0 (FR 2.0) — a new online version of the Federal Register, featuring Web 2.0 functions enabling users to comment, plain language summaries of regulations, and access by subject — is now available.

Click here to access the FR 2.0 source code on Github. HT @bethnoveck and @govpulse.

Click here for a video describing the history of the Federal Register and the features of FR 2.0.

Click here for background information on FR 2.0.

Of particular interest to those interested in open government data efforts is that FR 2.0 appears to include features and functions that were originally developed as part of innovative nongovernmental erulemaking efforts, such as the University at Albany’s DeER (Deliberative E-Rulemaking) Project, the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy‘s FedThread, the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative‘s Regulation Room, and WestEd‘s GovPulse. Some of GovPulse’s innovative Federal Register-related technology was developed as part of The Sunlight Foundation’s 2009 Apps for America Challenge. Click here for a video describing the Federal Register-related innovations developed through the Apps for America Challenge.

These projects arose because in 2009 the Office of the Federal Register and the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) began making the Federal Register available online in XML for free of charge bulk access on GPO’s FDsys. This free bulk access to legal information enabled nongovernmental developers to create innovative systems and tools for use in connection with that information. With FR 2.0, the U.S. federal government is reincorporating some of these innovative systems and tools, to enhance public access to the law and public participation in agency rulemaking and other aspects of federal public policy.

This kind of socially beneficial collaboration between government as data provider and civil society organizations as technology innovators is consistent with the model proposed by David Robinson et al. in their paper, Government Data and the Invisible Hand, 11 Yale Journal of Law and Technology 160-175 (2009) (Issue No. 2).

One statement in the video describing new features of FR 2.0 seems questionable. The video seems to suggest that the “Summary” field in each proposed or final rule is a feature new to FR 2.0. However, the “Summary” field appears for many years to have been a required field for proposed or final rules published in the Federal Register. See, e.g., Federal Register Document Drafting Handbook 1-6, 1-8 (1998), and this proposed rule from 1998. I’ve sent an email to the Office of the Federal Register asking for clarification of this point; I’ll post any response I receive.