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

Bruce on the LII Legislative Metadata Model

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute has posted Our Legislative Metadata Model, at Making Metasausage.

Excerpt:

Some months ago, I and some of my colleagues at the LII began to release a series of white papers that were written as part of the construction of a (mostly) comprehensive metadata model for Federal legislation. They are appearing as a series of blog posts in this blog. One which seemed more appropriate for VoxPopuLII – it had to do with metadata quality concerns that are not limited to legislation — was posted there yesterday. We’ll continue to adapt the white papers as blog posts and release them as Metasausage posts, but we thought that it was high time that we released full documentation of the model. Many of you have known of its existence for a while; we’ve been slow to release it because, well, we’re just overwhelmed with work.

The model is Linked-Data-friendly and designed to be highly extensible. We think it could serve as a reference model (by which I think I really mean “extensible scaffolding”) for a much more comprehensive metadata model for Federal legislation. As you’ll see when you read the documentation, we made no attempt to model things where we lacked domain expertise (appropriations and reconciliation being two), nor did we try to deal with the finer points of House and Senate rules when modeling process.

We’ll be interested in your reactions to it, and very, very interested in taking it further. Over the next month or so, we’ll actually build out what we’ve already put in the Open Metadata Registry into a full Linked Data representation online. [...]

The model was primarily done by myself, Diane Hillmann, John Joergensen, and Jon Phipps. [...]

Disclosure: I made small contributions to the model.

Click here for the LII Legislative Metadata Model documentation (in many formats).

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @trbruce

Strause et al.: How Federal Statutes Are Named, and the Yale Database of Federal Statute Names

Renata E.B. Strause of Yale Law School, and colleagues, have published How Federal Statutes Are Named, Law Library Journal, 105, 7-30 (2013).

Here is a summary of the article:

The naming of [U.S.] federal statutes for individuals has received surprisingly little systematic attention. The purposes of this article are to trace the history of federal statutory naming conventions and to identify as authoritatively and as completely as possible the persons and political issues Congress has decided to honor or highlight in this fashion, as well as the proliferation of abbreviations as a further shortening of the short title.

In their research the authors used the Yale Law School Library’s Database of Federal Statute Names.

Jason Eiseman of the Yale Law School Library told us that, according to Strause et al. (2013), page 12, a key source of data for the Database of Federal Statute Names was the U.S. House of Representatives’ Office of the Law Revision Counsel’s Table of Popular Names (HT also Thom Neale of the Sunlight Foundation).

Other sources of popular name data for U.S. federal statutes include:

• The Legal Information Institute’s Table of Popular Names, developed by LII Director Tom Bruce
• the united states GitHub repository’s Bill Nicknames database, created by Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation
• THOMAS’s List of Bill Popular and Short Titles (HT Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation)
• Professor Richard Leiter of the University of Nebraska and Adrian White‘s Concordance of Federal Legislation (HT Richard Leiter)

Stephane Cottin of Secrétariat général du Gouvernement and ADIJ tells us that Legifrance publishes a similar list of popular names for French statutes, the Lois Dites….

The Yale Database of Federal Statute Names includes the following fields:

• Popular Name Statutized?:
• Type:
• Date Enacted:
• Short Title:
• Public Law citation:
• Statute At Large citation:
• Named For?:
• Link/Source:
• Notes:

According to Jason, the library does not currently provide an API or bulk access to the database, but is considering providing them in the future.

HT @maricheney and @jeiseman here and here, and the members of the Legal Informatics Research Network

Bruce on Practical Principles of Free Access to Law

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute has posted Practical Principles, the text of his presentation at AfricanLII’s Conference on Access to African Supranational and Regional Law, held earlier this week in Johannesburg.

The post gives an overview of several different sets of broad principles underlying the free access to law movement, and then presents Tom’s version of such principles, which covers the topics:

• Open Access
• Replication
• Open Standards
• International Cooperation

For more details please see the complete post.

HT @trbruce

Archived Tweets and Materials from AfricanLII Conference on Access to African Supranational and Regional Law

Archived Twitter tweets are now available, in .csv format, for the Conference on Access to African Supranational and Regional Law, held 5-6 November 2012, at Crowne Plaza, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Click here for slides and papers from the conference.

Click here for the Outcome Statement of the conference.

The conference was sponsored by the African Legal Information Institude, AfricanLII.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference was #freelawafrica

5-6 November: Conference on Access to African Supranational and Regional Law

A Conference on Access to African Supranational and Regional Law is being held 5-6 November 2012, at Crowne Plaza, Johannesburg, South Africa.

The conference is sponsored by the African Legal Information Institude, AfricanLII.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #freelawafrica

Slides and other materials related to conference presentations will shortly be posted to the AfricanLII Website.

HT @AfricanLII and @trbruce.

Bruce Reports on LVI 2012 Workshop on Open Scientific Publishing and Communication on Law and ICT

A Workshop on Open Scientific Publishing and Communication on Law and ICT was held 10 October 2012 in Ithaca, New York, immediately following LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute (LII), Cornell Law School, Ithaca, New York, USA. The workshop had the informal title of “Steve the Librarian.” Tom Bruce of the LII sends the following report on the workshop. Thanks to Tom for allowing me to repost his report:

Since I ended up acting as the informal “chair” of the meeting, I suppose I should be the one to fill everyone in. It was, in fact, a meeting of 8 or 10 people around a breakfast table at the Holiday Inn, and not a workshop in any ordinary sense. But it was the latest event in a chain of discussions around this subject that began at LVI in Florence, and continued through the LVI meetings in Durban and Hong Kong, sometimes in conference sessions, sometimes in the FALM business meetings, and sometimes in airport lounges. It is fair to say that this is a recurring topic and an important one.

We outlined three major needs in the field.

One (which I’ve pushed to the point of being a broken record on the subject) is the need for low-threshold, internal communication among the various subdisciplines that touch open access to law. We’ve taken on some of that in VoxPopulii, first under your capable leadership and now with Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger at the helm. It’s vitally necessary that legal informatics researchers learn about the needs of publishers, publishers about librarians, librarians about informatics, and social scientists about all of them (not a complete census but you see what I mean) and that the resulting literature be accessible to non-specialists in the field that is talking about itself. There is room for much more than VoxPopuLii here.

A second is for a publishing venue for people who are working on open access to legal information as researchers in various fields, particularly younger scholars. If you can agree for a moment that we might describe their fields as, for the most part, “law and…” fields, then the journals they now have available to them are all in the fields that are on the other side of the three dots. This has a distorting effect. The availability of very good open-journal software for electronic publication makes good alternatives possible. There is general agreement that because there are so many fields bordering what we all do there is a potentially difficult problem of defining boundaries for such a journal. Initial forays will thus focus pretty tightly on open access to law. Even that is potentially tricky, given that government information of many kinds might be eligible and useful, so firm editorial leadership is called for.

A third is for a comprehensive archive and index to existing work in the field, to be maintained as new stuff is added. One might describe its boundaries as being “all the stuff Rob Richards posts about” , with substantial work on mapping it having been done by you both in formal bibliographies and in blog posts and Twitter. We think there is the possibility of working either with an existing apparatus such as the physics arXiv, or with a purpose-built DSpace installation or some other repository.

Participants in the discussion included Pompeu Casanovas, Graham Greenleaf, Enrico Francesconi, Ginevra Peruginelli, James Lambert, John Heywood, Cicely Wilson, John Joergensen, Amy Taylor, and others whose names I apologize for not retrieving from my faulty memory.

Various individuals have been tasked with pursuing initial steps toward these objectives with the aim of having all or part in place by the time of the next LVI conference (tentatively believed to be in September 2013). We’ll post news as things become concrete.

Congress.gov: New Official Source of U.S. Federal Legislative Information

The U.S. Congress has launched a new official legislative information system for the U.S. federal government: Congress.gov.

According to Alex Howard of O’Reilly:

[...] the new Congress.gov features responsive design, adapting to desktop, tablet or smartphone screens. It’s also search-centric, with Boolean search and, in an acknowledgement that most of its visitors show up looking for information, puts a search field front and center in the interface. The site includes member profiles for U.S. Senators and Representatives, with associated legislative work. In a nod to a mainstay of social media and media websites, the new Congress.gov also has a “most viewed bills” list that lets visitors see at a glance what laws or proposals are gathering interest online. (You can download a fact sheet on all the changes as a PDF).

Click here for Alex’s complete post about Congress.gov.

Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation observes that Congress.gov does not provide “for public comment on the design process [or] computer-friendly bulk access to the underlying data.”

Daniel, Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute, and others have recently written recommendations to Congress about providing public bulk access to congressional data.

Tom and his team have been consulting with the Library of Congress on their legislative metadata, and Congress.gov appears to reflect their work. Tom describes this new approach to legislative metadata approach in a series of posts here.

Kim Nayyer of the University of Victoria Law Library has also written about Congress.gov at Slaw.ca.

Nick Judd and Miranda Neubauer have written a post about Congress.gov at TechPresident: What Congress.gov Means for a Congressional API.

Bruce, Mill, Schuman, Tauberer & Wonderlich: Recommendations on Public Access to Legislative Data

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute; Daniel Schuman, Eric Mill, and John Wonderlich, all of the Sunlight Foundation; and Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack and POPVOX, have posted a new report entitled On Public Access to Legislative Information: Recommendations to the Bulk Data Task Force (2012).

The report “provides a roadmap” that the U.S. Congress’s Bulk Data Task Force can use “to implement[]” free public “bulk access to” the THOMAS database of U.S. federal legislative information.

The report is a product of the effort — known as #freeTHOMAS — to provide free online public access in bulk to THOMAS.

For more information, please see Daniel’s post entitled How to #FreeTHOMAS: A report on implementing bulk access.

HT @danielschuman

Julie on SeyLII: The freeway to Seychelles Legal Information

Thelma Julie of the Judiciary of the Seychelles has posted SeyLII: The freeway to Seychelles Legal Information, at the AfricanLII Blog.

In this post, Ms. Julie describes the development of SeyLII: The Seychelles Legal Information Institute, a free-access-to-law service for The Seychelles, which launched in March 2012.

The post describes the need of Seychelles’ citizens and legal community for online access to Seychelles legal materials, the role of Kerry Anderson of AfricanLII and Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute in the planning of SeyLII, and some of the technology and principles underlying SeyLII, including the use of medium-neutral legal citations.

For more information, please see the complete post.