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The Legal Information Institute: Enhancing Access to Legal Knowledge

Uncover insights into Legal Information Institute (LII), the significance of legal information, its impact on public awareness, and the challenges in publishing and accessing legal data in the digital age.

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The Legal Information Institute: Enhancing Access to Legal Knowledge

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Presentation Transcript

  1. The Legal Information Institute What is it, and what questions does it raise?

  2. Prelude: Gilmore v. Ashcroft • “Secret law”: sorry, but you can’t see the rules • Very dramatic, but no different from the situation of most people, including many lawyers: • Appearing in Kenya’s High Court • Hit by a snowplow on the NYS Thruway

  3. What’s an LII? • History, facts, and figures • An electronic publisher • A content creator • An applied-research activity • A value-adding filter and integrator/aggregator

  4. What is legal information? • For today’s purposes, note-government. • Judicial opinions • Statutes and codes • Regulations • These separate classes are related: • Judicial opinions interpret and validate statutes and regulations • Codes organize statutes • Statutes enable regulations • All have unique problems of cost, maintenance, accuracy.

  5. Who cares? Why? • “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” / public right to know • Stare decisis – precedents rule • Law publishing levels the playing field • Law publishing is an economic engine • As business-generator • As risk-management tool • As indicator of business climate

  6. The LII as filter • Existing public-access requirements say little about format or value. • Integration via hyperlinking • Within a corpus • Across multiple collections • Across multiple collection types [illustrations- / +] • Adding value via • Presentation [illustrations - / +] • Structural & informational disambiguation

  7. How is legal information different? • Defined by a very sophisticated print tradition • Strong connection between format and function • Problems of accuracy and authority are treated very seriously • Experts and nonexperts do research very differently

  8. How is it the same? • Nonexperts confronting expert information • Impoverished models of information-seeking [illustrations+ / -] • Barriers are raised by a lack of interoperability

  9. Issues raised by law-on-the-web • Who should publish? • (issuer vs. third-party public vs. private) • A little knowledge: how dangerous is it? • Balance of power between • government and governed • lawyer and client • Privacy

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