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.

 

Category: plans, Week in Review | 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

Activity Summary – Week Two

Made it to Friday of my first full week of work!  Yay me!   So what have I done this week?

I made it through the first pass of reviewing all 50 states (and DC) online codes. My goal was to have all of the state code data collection project done this week, so I’m pretty much on schedule. Yay me.*  About halfway through I decided I needed to have separate entries for the actual name of the code and the name of the official/certified version of the code.  (Because they’re not the same thing. Of course they’re not.)  I hope to fill that in, as well as a few unknowns in my datasheet by the end of business today.  That means I get to spend today in the Harvard Law Library Reading Room using the AALL State Bibliographies, which will hopefully help solve some mysteries for me.

After I get everything sorted I’ll make it all public.  I really want to jump into the data collection on case law, so any in depth analysis of the code information will probably wait.   I can say now that one way my thinking has changed is that – for some reason –  I used to think that only state websites could/should be the publisher of official digital copies of law.  However, something about seeing the number of privately published print official/certified codes has caused me to change my mind.  Why can’t a State Decoded website be certified too?

(I have vague ideas about how blockchain technology could be implemented ensure absolute accuracy and chain of custody with regards to code data without relying upon PDFs. But that’s another post for another day.  And I’m sure they’re are other ways of doing this. Hey hey, who’s got a research project and a couple of months to spare doing research?  This gal right here.  But I digress.)

Speaking of AALL, I was reminded this week of the Digital Access to Legal Information Committee.  They are the ones in charge of the 50 state surveys, which I am modelling my data collection on.  Yay for more people being interested in this type of information and future possible collaborators.

*It’s interesting being in charge of my own schedule and deadlines.  I like it.  Surprisingly, no guilt thus far about not working hard enough or fear about setting the bar too low.  I think maybe because it wasn’t that long ago that getting out of bed and getting dressed consisted of a victory for me that I’m in no rush to set myself up for failure.

Speaking of success, the Berkman stuff will finally start to ramp up next week.  There was an email chain of all the new/returning fellows/affiliates/associates etc introducing themselves.  Holy Impressive Lineup, Batman.  I was hit with a mixture of impostor syndrome and “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”  My parents like to kid me about being a librarian rockstar, but there are like, actual rockstars on this list.   And, oh, by the way, US Supreme Court justice coming to talk to us.   It’s intimidating and exciting and I can’t wait to learn more from the community.  I’m still not entirely sure how I am lucky enough to be doing this.

On the skills enhancement side of things, I started to work my way through the Code Academy web stuff.  All refresher thus far and pretty easy.    I was told by several people, quite understandably, that instead of asking what programming language I should learn, I should have a project in mind and build it and that will teach me what language to learn.  But that doesn’t quite answer the question about which language will do what I want – I don’t want to start building something in, say, Ruby, only to find that actually Python would have been better.  Does taht make sense?    At any rate, I think I’m going to start with the python modules on code academy.

I also want to highlight this blog post I read this week:  Libraries’ Tech Pipeline Problem.  Definitely reinforced my thinking that I have a great opportunity here to teach myself some new technical skills.

On a personal note, settling into Cambridge nicely.  My apartment – a small fully furnished one – is finally starting to feel a little like home/my space, even though I’m surrounded by other people’s stuff.  I’m also starting to get some routines in place, which are always comforting.   I’m definitely learning to embrace simplicity, just due to the size of my apartment and the fact that I couldn’t bring much stuff with me.  It’s nice.  I guess I could insert a reference to local boy Thoreau here, but I’ll pass on the temptation.    My plan for the weekend is to get the heck out of Boston one day – probably Salem because I know I definitely want to see that and soon it’ll be too close to Halloween to deal with – and maybe one day go down town and ride a double decker bus tour just to get the lay of the land.  I’ve been to Boston quite a few times in the past few years, but it seems like all I saw was either the convention center or Harvard Law School.

Category: codes, Week in Review | 1 Comment on Activity Summary – Week Two