(Note: You’ll have to forgive the flightiness of today’s post – I seem to have brought a cold back with me from Indiana.)
The theme for the past two weeks has been detours. Partly due to some geographic change (I went home for a visit) and partly due to life throwing a curve ball at my thought processes. As I have three trips planned for October, I predict that trend will continue.
I started in on the state regulations survey. Thus far, what has mainly stood out is that there are no archives (except maybe for some state versions of the Federal Register) and PDFs everywhere. So, it’s not great, but it matches all other free law provided by governments. The lack of archives is concerning. I mean, I hope they’re somewhere, if not online?
Now that my primary law survey is close to wrapping up (I hope to be done with the surveys by the time I leave on Trip #2 on the 16th),I’m starting to ease into phase two of my fellowship – data analysis and research.
I decided to look to libraries and their collections to see if they are filling in the gaps that government doesn’t provide So I sent out a survey via the law-lib and some AALL listservs and have gotten over 200 responses! So that’s exciting. November is going to be all about the data analysis. This is all going to the “information poverty” and ” access to justice” research pile.
I have finally gotten around to activating my legal database research services subscriptions (thank you, Harvard Law Library!), and I begun doing some secondary research. First things first, it looks like no one has written about legal information poverty or how it relates to access to justice, so that’s good. I guess. I mean, it would suck to try and have to figure out something else to write about but on the other hand WHY DON’T PEOPLE CARE ABOUT THIS? This is an important issue! Isn’t it?
Now a weird curveball… It turns out some of my tweets became the basis of a Above the Law column. Which is sort of funny timing because I had been thinking lately that one thing I’m getting from my Berkman Center experience is that being surrounded by so many people that are “famous” makes me appreciate my anonymity and how I have been liking not arguing with people or having to defend myself against a bunch of strangers on the Internet. I’m a small fish in a big pond and I like it. It’s been a peaceful few weeks, basically. But the column did make me think about the legal practice world and technologists and the interactions between the two. So I actually cracked open my other blog and wrote some there.
It also made me think about the ethical implications of new technology and whether they are an impediment or enticement to innovation. (Spoiler alert: I think it’s the latter.) So I think I’ll be throwing that on the research pile. I guess I was going to eventually come to that, since so much of what I’m studying does eventually make its way back to the legal practice world – tools and services for the public to use in lieu of attorneys, and therefore I need to be concerned about things that the legal practice world may do to stop it. But there’s something about the conversations had in the legal practice world about the future of legal practice that I find so unsatisfying.
I visited with my therapist when I was home and one thing we talked about was “what counts as a success” for my time here. That’s something I’ve been struggling with. When you have a job or are in an educational program, there are duties and benchmarks that you need to hit. Here’s there’s no requirements or benchmarks – just what I want to do . What happens if I don’t formally publish anything? Is just learning and researching enough? How soon do I need to start getting manuscripts to publishers? What happens if I keep getting hit by detours. It’s oddly stressful, in a way, all this freedom.