January 19

New Project

In case you missed the news, Gentle Reader, I finalized my report on my Census of State Legal Information and released it last week.  That was a big relief and I think the things I was able to discern from the data was useful information.  I hope anyway. My great hope for it is that the people that have the ability to make decisions about how to publish legal information can use it to make better decisions.

Now on to a new project!

As you may know, I was going to write a book about Access to Law.  After thinking about it and starting to do the research for it, I realized that I don’t quite have it in me to do.  Plus, even if I did have the mental acuity to do the research and sit down and write, I don’t think I could do it (or at least a decent attempt at it) in the remaining time allotted.  Kind of sucks, but dem’s the breaks.

Fortunately I have no dearth of things to do.  Even in the middle of the state legal info census, I was bothered by the niggling question of “who cares?”  That little voice became louder the more I finished up the report.  So I have decided to try and answer that question through my second research project, which is a citation analysis of state supreme court decisions.

Here’s the plan:  I’ve created a list of the 10 most recent state supreme court decisions from every state.  Slightly harder than one might think, since there are a lot of “decisions” out there that are not written opinions.  Of these 500 cases, I’m going through the Table of Authorities for each and seeing how many of the cases cited are available via either Free or State websites.

I hope to get an idea of the following three things:

  1. Whether the “lifespan of a case is about 20 years” found for US Supreme Court opinions holds true on the state level.
  2. If someone (i.e. a citizen) reading a state supreme court opinion would have access to the cases cited to read in order to better understand the law that governs them.
  3. To see if the resources needed to be a participant in the state court system are available for free or must pay law be used.

So that’s generally my spring semester, although I do plan on still messing around with some random acts of free law, investigations of legal tech and other things that catch my attention.  I feel a lot less stressed this semester about ‘trying to prove my value’ and getting the most out of the year.  It’s definitely a marathon, not a sprint.

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October 1

Activity Summary – Weeks Five and Six

(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.

 

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August 31

I Need Programming Skills

Generally speaking, when I hear someone declare that [librarians, lawyers, law students, library students, fill in the blank] need to become programmers, I make a face that kind of looks like this:

>:(

However, I’ve realized that I actually DO need to learn some programming skills (and brush up on the technical skills that I already have.)   I still don’t think that everyone needs to become a programmer, but the open law world in which I exist is small, requires a certain specialized knowledge on top of tech skills and is not profit driven.   Basically, if I don’t get the skills that will allow me to create tools, I don’t think I’ll be able to get someone to make it for me.

I have a couple of goals for my time here at Harvard.  The main one is to do “something useful.”  Nebulous phrase, I know.  Basically, I want to in some way add to the knowledge base or otherwise advance the cause of free and open law.  But a secondary goal of this year is self improvement.  I’m not going to end up with any more letters after my name, but I want to come out of this experience…improved.  New skills, new knowledge, new ideas of what to do…that sort of thing.  I’ve been out of school for ten years and am doing a hard reboot.

IT

Yeah, like that.

Besides, I can’t spend 8 hours a day doing data entry.  I just can’t, y’all.  And I do want to emphasize that I’m not just working on my tech skills.  I just signed up for an EdX course on The History of the Book in the 17th and 18th century.    Not to go into a huge digression, but books are technology and I think the future of technology (especially legal technology) can be found by knowing a bit about the history of publishing.  But that’s a blog post for another day.

So the million dollar question is…what languages should I learn? What skills should I have?   In library school (ten long years ago) I learned basic HTML, Unix and database design (using MS Access.)   I’ve picked up some CSS and PHP along the way, but by that I mean I can edit those if someone has already made it.  So basically I don’t feel like I know anything.   I’m going to start my way through Codeacademy’s website modules to get started but then…?  Ruby? Python?  PHP? JavaScript?    I definitely want to do their MySQL module, and then I have no idea.

Ideas, Gentle Reader?

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August 27

Opening Thoughts and Plans

What would you do if you were given a year to work on/research whatever you wanted to work on? I think like many people would, I had an immediate answer.  If there’s one topic that really lights my fire, it’s open law and other types of open information.  So of course, I said “I’m going to work on open law and information” when I was granted this opportunity.    But what does that mean?   It seems like my answer to that question changes every time I ask it of myself.

Imagine, if you will, a Venn diagram made of four circles.  One is labeled “legal information”, one is labeled “access to justice”, one is labeled “legal technology” and one is labeled “libraries.”  So something like this:

venn

My ultimate goal is to work in areas that are smack dab in the center of that Venn diagram, or at least three of the four circles. Of course, related to all of the above are intersections with legal education and legal practice.  While those won’t be my primary foci (at least not at current plan), there will be times when I touch on those topics.  But, like, I don’t care about the business of law and I’m currently pretty burnt out on the idea of “improving” legal education when the actors in that process – not commentators like me – are the ones with the power to actually make changes, so keep that in mind with anything I do in those areas.

PROJECTS AND PLANS

Here’s a rough idea of things I’d like to work on this year.  Some of the plans are more concrete than others.

1)  My first goal is to get my arms around the current state of legal information on the web, as published (or outsourced by) the creating government bodies.   So this means a rather dreary period of data collection, similar to the survey that AALL performed almost five years ago.    Right now I’m still in the process of trying to decide exactly what data to collect and it what container I should collect it in, especially as ultimately I’d like to create a tool where a person could enter some geographic data (e.g. address, zip code, county, etc.) and receive in return links or information to let them know what jurisdictions they are in and what source(s) of law they should consult.

2) Related to above data collection project, I have a hypothesis that similar to the concept of “food deserts”, there are “justice deserts” (a term I’m trying to find an alternative to, as it sounds too much like “just desserts”) or “legal access deserts” where a person, either through geography or availability of content or copyright is unable to adequately assist themselves in legal issues.  (Important since studies have shown that 80% of the people that need legal assistance are unable or unwilling to consult an attorney.)  So that’s also informing my decisions on what data to collect.

3) I am also curious about what types of resources are available to the public via law libraries.  There has been a recent survey published by the AALL Special Committee on Access to Justice (survey) (report) that covered the general idea, but I’d like to create a survey that goes a little deeper into the content of the services offered.  I’m curious because it’s been my experience that some online services offered specifically for pro-se patrons only cover the local jurisdiction primary law and very little in the way of secondary sources.

4) Related to the legal access desert idea, I’ve already found that it’s almost impossible to find case law (unless you’re talking about US Supreme Court cases) before 1950.   Is that a big problem or not?  So, one project idea I have is to do a citation analysis and see what cases are being cited.  The big question is “what corpus do I check”?   So that project will take some planning and thought.

5)  I’m a strong believer that libraries need to take more of a leadership role when it comes to publishing and preserving legal information.  (And publishing other types of information…).  Is it possible for there to be some sort of “legal information archiving tool” that can be easily deployed and used by libraries?

6) A technical project (as opposed to research) that I’ve been thinking about it topic modeling.  Specifically, creating an open index of US case law.  I think one is needed because full text searching of case law – as available to most people using open law sites – is insufficient for legal research.  There needs to be a back bone there in order to assist with searching.   I don’t know how hard this will be.  This project is still waaaaay early in the planning stages.   I saw a brief demonstration performed by the people at the Legal Information Institute, so I need to get with them and work on this, me thinks.

7) I’m also hyped up on block chain technology and it’s possibilities for authenticating legal information.  So throw that into the “thinking about” pile.

There’s some other things, but that’s a good start for now.  I have some even vaguer ideas, so vague as to not be worth writing down.  While I am terrified of getting to June and having nothing to show for my year off, I also don’t want to lock myself into plans so that I cannot pivot and try new things that catch my attention.

BEING SELFISH

I really feel a big obligation to do something useful during the time of my fellowship, since I am so lucky to be given this opportunity.  But I’m also here at Harvard to learn and improve myself and my skillset.  It’s been ten years since I finished grad school and the world, technology speaking, has undergone a huge revolution.  In addition to the Berkman community activities, I also want to take the time to learn some new tech skills and gain other types of skills and knowledge.   Part of it is going to be very necessary, as I want to build some tools that come out of my research and I don’t want to rely on outside developers.  So, EdX, CodeAcademy, etc here I come.   I also hope to attend some relevant conferences through the year, including LVI in Sydney, in order to expand my horizons and professionally related social circle.

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