November 5

Copyright of State Documents and General Update

One of the many annoying factors in analyzing the data I have on state published law is the copyright issue.  Some states flat out say that they are claiming copyright on their published law, some just have a “copyright state of X” notice on the bottom of their webpages (which leaves it ambiguous as to whether they mean the law itself or just their groovy circa 1998 web page design), and some have no copyright notice but have a terms of use that prevents one from actually using the published law such that they might as well slap a copyright on it.   Happily, the folks at Harvard and Berkman have created this handy guide that breaks down (or at least provides some guidance) on the status of copyright on state documents.  I shall be incorporating it into my data analysis.

In other news, I’m putting Project X on the backburner for the time being and re-diving into my data collection analysis on state published law.  (I needed the break from the data and also Project X is now at a good point to break from it – I’ll really be heading into it full time in 2016.  I just was doing some preliminary work to reassure myself that there’s enough out there for Project X to work.  Possibly.  Anyway…)   I want to re-go over my regulations data – sharp eyed folks will notice I unpublished the link to it.   I found a mistake and I’m worried that my distraction in finishing it the day before leaving on a year-long planned vacation didn’t make me as cautious as I should have been.   Then I’m going to generally clean up the data so all the fun graphs and charts work right and try to figure out what it all means.  Besides the initial reaction of “omg this is so much worse than I thought.”

While I was gone at a conference in Canada, it was finally announced that the lab which I’m affiliated with – the Harvard Library Innovation Lab – is working with Ravel to digitize all of U.S. Case law.  I really admire my colleagues at LIL and all the hard work they have done to make this happen.  It’s a good thing.

Finally, the conference I went to in Canada was on law libraries and access to justice, especially in rural communities.  It was an interesting mix of legal aid attorneys, public librarians and law librarians.  It was good to see that there is interest in all sides to collaborate and make legal information and knowledge more available to communities.

Category: Berkman, case law | LEAVE A COMMENT
September 21

State Case Law Data

I made it through the survey of case law published by courts/government on the web.  You can check out the public version here. As of this writing, South Carolina is missing because their website is down.  I’ll add that into this public worksheet as well as my private official copy later.

I really started to question the validity or usefulness of collecting this data about a third of the way through this.  So this was emotionally hard to get through.  Can I admit that?  Although now that I’m done I guess I’m happy I did it because it becomes obvious how uniformly bad case law publication is. So yay?

As with the codes, more in depth analysis is to come later after I tear through all of this, but you can play with the explore button on the bottom right hand side of the spreadsheet to get some graphs.  They require some data clean up to be more accurate, but you can see that PDFs and West publishing pretty much rule the day when it comes to case law.  I don’t know why I was surprised so many states use the regional reporters as their official publication, but here we are.

Now onto regulations!

Category: case law, data share | LEAVE A COMMENT
September 18

Activity Summary – Week Four

Week Four.  A month.  A month!  How have I been here a month already????

This week I have hit the state case law survey hard.  And it hit me back.  The situation is pretty grim there. It was pointed out to me this week that I seem to take this research personally, and I do, perhaps to a fault.  I’m only to the O’s on the case law survey and I can tell now that any hopes I had for it to be possible to even do a modicum of free research on government websites are gone. Long long gone.  It’s depressing.

I realized that any publication of case law done on state websites has to be for press inquiries and other related reasons.  Legal research and self help is just not on the radar of reporters of decisions.  It can’t be.   But as long as I remember that the publication isn’t done for legal research purposes, I feel better?

Some other issues I’ve seen/thoughts I’ve had:

– The few states that are making their online publication the “official” and authentic version….well, they aren’t putting the rest up.  So a person is gong to have to go to several spots to get the “real deal” law.  As I said on twitter, we won the authentication debate at the price of a useable legal information ecosystem.

– I wonder if a state would ever retroactively go back and adopt an online ecosystem, assuming that you could prove provenance of the data.

– Lots of usability issues.  PDFs galore, no or limited searching (NO SEARCHING!), limited scope, unofficial copies (although I swear I could care less about “official” or “authentic” status right now.  Does that make me a bad librarian?)   Mainly courts are putting up slip opinions, which may or may not be correct.  I’d like the correct law over the official version.   It could be argued that how do you know it’s correct without it being official?  I dunno.  How do I know the sun is going to come up tomorrow?

Sorry, I’m being snarky.

Here’s the nice thing about digital information – traditionally, there’s been the official copy of the law.  Usually print.  And if there’s a discrepancy, the “official” version wins.  BUT.  With digital information it is possible to have LOTS OF COPIES that can be certified as being the same and they can be more easily (and cheaply) distributed and they are more usable.

In other news, I got my office computer set up and signed up for the big three legal research databases.    This has been excellent for two reasons.  (1) I can leave my laptop at my apartment, which means I can work from home more easily. (As I am now.  In my jammies.  FTW.)  (2) I started doing the preemption checking on the paper(s) that I see coming out of this research that I am doing.   So far, no one seems to have written the article(s) that I see writing.  So that’s good.

I know some people scoff at academic writing and the value of it vs. just blogging and/or “making something”, but I think in order to convince some of the people that I’ll need to convince to make the legal information ecosystem better, I’ll need to have an article or two as “proof.”

See, I’m not just a crazy woman ranting on the Internet.  I’m a crazy woman ranting in print with the blessing of half a dozen law students that selected my article for publication!

It’s a weird game, I know.

I do plan, as the year progresses, to design out a publication system for maybe libraries or other interested parties to use to start publishing law.   I think that’s where I’m heading.   I want to make solutions, not just point out the problems.   Speaking of which, I really need to get back on the stick of codeacademy.

I’m feeling a little burnout, so I think the plan for today is to read law journal articles, wander over to the Berkman Center and maybe stay away from spreadsheets until Monday.   This year is a marathon, not a sprint!

Category: case law, Week in Review | LEAVE A COMMENT
September 14

Activity Summary – Week Three

Last week was both very very busy, and yet I don’t feel like I got a lot done.

Started in on the case law review.  Holy cats, it’s so much worse than I thought it would be! I was expecting the unofficial, unauthenticated PDFs, but I was not expecting the really limited scope of the posted cases, the INABILITY TO EVEN SEARCH, or the fact that some states decided that once it was published by a print commercial journal, there was no need to make it available online anymore.

Last week was also when the Berkman Center kicked off activities and I got to meet all the other people connected to it.  Words can’t quite express how neat it all was.  Everyone is very smart, and dedicated and sincere.  I have a feeling I’m going to learn a lot from all of them.

Finally, on Friday I went down to DC for Transparency Camp. It was very interesting and I’m glad I made the somewhat spontaneous decision to go.  There’s not a lot of overlap between the “open law” and “open government” people, at least it doesn’t feel like it to me.  But, if law is data, and I believe it is, I think there’s a lot to be learned from each other.    Probably the biggest thing for me to come out of this unconference was the idea that I should take a look at state’s open data laws and portals.  Maybe they are the future of distribution of legal information since the creating bodies are seemingly having such a terrible time of it.

It also has occurred to me that in looking at law as data, there may be some more sticks (instead of just carrots) that can be used to encourage/force government bodies to open up their legal information.  Because that’s a big hurdle – convincing people in the government to do it and trying to get other people to join the open law movement. Unfortunately saying “it’s the right thing to do” or “access to justice” isn’t enough, sadly.  I’d like to be able to say “oh, actually you’re supposed to because of x,y,z requirements.”

I’ve sort of rededicated myself to/decided that looking into the law and policy behind open legal information is going to be an important piece of this year’s work.   I came up with a rough outline last night, but of course I have forgotten it right now as I write this.

Category: Berkman, case law, conferences, Week in Review | LEAVE A COMMENT
September 4

Case law data collection

Next up on data collection list…case law.  This is going to be ugly.  Here are the data points I think I’m going to be collecting for the state supreme and appellate level cases.

  • Court Name
  • Official print publication for cases
  • URL of online cases
  • Official or Unofficial
  • Statement of Officialness
  • Format cases published in
  • Vendor neutral citation?
  • Current Year or Archival Versions Available?
  • URL of Archive
  • If Archival versions available, how far back?
  • Bulk Download available?
  • Copyright Claims
  • Use Restrictions

Am I missing anything?

Category: case law, methodology | LEAVE A COMMENT