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

Colorado Enacts Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

Colorado has enacted the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA), according to a 27 April 2012 announcement by the Uniform Law Commission.

According to the announcement, Colorado is the first state to enact UELMA, which has also been introduced in California, Connecticut, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.

UELMA is a new, proposed, uniform, U.S. state statute requiring states that enact it to authenticate, preserve, and provide permanent public access to legal information that those states publish in electronic formats.

Professor Barbara A. Bintliff of the University of Texas School of Law is the reporter for UELMA.

For more information on UELMA, please see Professor Bintliff’s VoxPopuLII post, entitled The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act Is Ready for Legislative Action, and Alan S. Kowlowitz’s recent report, Opening Government’s Official Legal Materials: Authenticity and Integrity in the Digital World.

Preservation of Legal Information Highlighted in Lee: Review of State Projects Funded by NDIIPP

The preservation of judicial and legislative information is highlighted in a new report by Christopher A. Lee of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, entitled States of Sustainability: A Review of State Projects funded by the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).

NDIIPP is led by the Library of Congress.

The preservation of legislative and court information is targeted by two projects described in the report:

• The Model Technological and Social Architecture for the Preservation of State Government Digital Information (MTSA) Project, led by the Minnesota Historical Society; and
• Kansas Enterprise Electronic Preservation (KEEP), which is to be integrated with Kansas Legislative Information Systems and Services (KLISS).

Among the notable aspects of these projects is the development and use of XML technologies for legislative documents. The report also addresses the role of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) in offering a policy framework for state-level efforts to preserve digital legal information.

For more information, please see the complete report.

CTG Albany on Authenticity and Integrity in Official Legal Information

New from @CTG_UAlbany : Opening Government’s Official Legal Materials: Authenticity and Integrity in the Digital World (2012).  

Here is the abstract:

Increasingly, state governments are moving toward making primary legal materials available online via state government websites. The goal in these efforts, and also the challenge, is to provide users with more efficient access while ensuring that the electronic versions of primary legal materials are as “official” as their paper originals. The desire of state governments to make this a priority is strong. However, they currently lack the necessary policies and management practices necessary for success. State legislators and their staffs, legislative reference librarians, state archivists, and chief information officers all have important roles to play in laying the foundation for these efforts through the creation of new policy, management, and technology capabilities. This brief provides background to the recently approved Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA), explores the concepts behind authenticated electronic materials, defines what it will take to create, maintain, and make available official electronic legal material, and provides recommendations for states.

HT @tpardo

Ching and Feltren on the National Inventory of Legal Materials

Tina S. Ching of the Seattle University School of Law, and Emily Feltren of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) have posted Protecting Access One Entry at a Time: An Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, the authors describe the National Inventory of Legal Materials, an effort by U.S. law librarians to create a listing of all legal information resources in the United States, in order to facilitate efforts to authenticate, preserve, and make those resources more accessible to the public. The inventory is related to several projects, including the Law.gov legal open government data movement and AALL’s efforts to authenticate and preserve digital legal information, including the effort to persuade states to enact the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA).

The authors report that at least 7,000 resources had been added to the inventory as of last summer. Among the findings arising from analysis of those resources are that:

• U.S. state governments are not authenticating newly created digital legal resources;
• “Twenty-five states assert copyright on at least one legal resource, including Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island”;
• “Eighteen states require preservation and permanent public access of at least one legal resource, including Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington”; and
• “Ten states charge fees to access the official version [of their legal resources], including Kansas, Vermont, and Wyoming.”

The authors report that the first stage of the development of the inventory, focusing on state legal resources, has been completed. The current stage of the development of the inventory, focusing on U.S. federal legal resources, is currently underway. “Emily Carr, Senior Legal Research Specialist at the Law Library of Congress, and Judy Gaskell, retired Librarian of the Supreme Court, are coordinating this project.”

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT @stephdavidson.

Bintliff on the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

Professor Barbara A. Bintliff of the University of Texas School of Law has posted The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act Is Ready for Legislative Action, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Professor Bintliff — who is the Reporter for the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) — explains the provisions of UELMA — a new, proposed, uniform, U.S. state statute requiring states that enact it to authenticate, preserve, and provide permanent public access to legal information that those states publish in electronic formats. The statute is intended to “ensur[e] the trustworthiness of online legal resources and preserv[e] … electronic [legal] publications to provide for continuing accessibility.”

The post also examines the policy principles that inform the Act — especially the Act’s “outcomes-based” approach, intended to accommodate technological change and to afford states substantial flexibility in complying with the Act — as well as the origins of the Act in the American Association of Law Libraries’ 2007 National Summit on Authentication of Digital Legal Information.

Professor Bintliff explains that UELMA is scheduled to be introduced into a number of U.S. state legislatures in January 2012.

This post will be of interest to policy makers responsible for digital legal information resources, the government and legal technology communities, the legal community, legal information professionals, and advocates of improved public access to legal information.

New on VoxPopuLII: Walters on The End of Private Copyright in Public Statutes

Ed Walters, Esq., of FastCase, has posted Tear Down This (Pay)Wall: The End of Private Copyright in Public Statutes, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Walters describes the extent to which U.S. state governments and for-profit legal publishers assert copyright in U.S. state statutes, and the problems this poses for due process of law, as well as for competition and innovation in the legal publishing industry. Mr. Walters explains the U.S. legal authorities prohibiting copyright in state statutes. Mr. Walters then proposes an innovative strategy
with which state governments can preclude assertions of copyright in state laws.

In the course of his argument, Mr. Walters notes the recent approval of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act, which has the potential to make important contributions toward freeing state statutes from copyright restrictions.

This post will be of interest to advocates of open government data, as well as to government technologists, legal publishers, developers of legal information systems, and all who seek greater competition and innovation in the U.S. legal publishing market.

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.

Rhodes on The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability

Sarah Rhodes of Georgetown University Law Library and the Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive, has published Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability, Law Library Journal, v. 102, no. 4 (2010) [article 33]. Here is the abstract:

[This paper] explores URL stability, measured by the prevalence of link rot over a three-year period, among the original URLs for law- and policy-related materials published to the web and archived though the Chesapeake Project, a collaborative digital preservation initiative under way in the law library community. The results demonstrate a significant increase in link rot over time in materials originally published to seemingly stable organization, government, and state web sites.