Recent activity in the legal informatics world has been characterized by numerous efforts to make legal documents and technologies more openly available, and to make legal information more interoperable. Here are some examples:

• Núria Casellas, Joan-Josep Vallbé, and Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute discussed their recent work applying Linked Data technology to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), in their new paper entitled "From Legal Information to Open Legal Data: A Case Study in U.S. Federal Legal Information", presented at the Open Government Knowledge 2011 conference. The paper described their experiments with marking up the text of the CFR as RDF Linked Data, marking up the CFR Thesaurus of Indexing Terms in SKOS Linked Data, and annotating the CFR text with the Linked Data CFR Thesaurus terms. This application of Linked Data technology is aimed at rendering the CFR Thesaurus, and much of the content of the CFR, interoperable with a wide range of systems and data on the open Web.
• Professor Barbara Bintliff, reporter for the recently approved Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA), explains — in her recent post at VoxPopuLII — how the Act would increase public access to digital legal information published by U.S. state governments, and encourage citizens to make more use of such information. UELMA furthers these goals by creating uniform standards for the authentication, preservation, and provision of permanent public access to electronic legal information that states publish.
• Legal informatics scholar Christine Kirchberger, in her recent article entitled "The 'I' in Legal Information Retrieval", argues that governments should increase access to and interoperability of the legal information they publish, by making the metadata associated with that information compliant with open standards.
• Legislative information systems developer Grant Vergottini has recently published his XML model for legislation — called SLIM: Simplified Legislative Information Model (click here for the schema in .xsd format) — openly under a Creative Commons license. In addition, he has developed a new legislative identifier model, based on the open URN:LEX standard. He has begun writing about open XML- and Semantic Web-based legal technologies, and open legal data, at his new Legix.info blog.
• The NIEM EDemocracy Initiative, led by legislative information systems developer Sean McGrath, has begun work on an open model for legislative bill status information, consistent with the open National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). The Initiative's goals include increasing the public availability of such information, and using XML-based metadata to render that information interoperable with other data and systems.
• Adam Wyner and Wim Peters have posted their new paper, entitled "On Rule Extraction from Regulations," which describes a new method for automatically extracting legal rules from digital legal texts, by applying the open source GATE natural language text processing software. Legal rules extracted using the authors' method can then be made interoperable by marking the rules up in Legal RuleML or another open rule markup language, and then outputting the marked up rules in open XML.
• Legal RuleML is the topic of a new article — entitled "LegalRuleML: XML-Based Rules and Norms" — by Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani, Dr. Guido Governatori, and colleagues. The article explains how marking up legal rules in the open Legal RuleML markup language renders such rules interoperable with a wide range of data and systems, including e-Government systems accessible by the public, internal public administration systems, and private sector business-rule-based systems, such as compliance systems.
• My new article, entitled "The Use of Non-MARC Metadata in AALL Libraries: A Baseline Study", describes the efforts of many North American law libraries to create interoperable, non-MARC metadata with the Dublin Core schema. The article also explains that many of these law libraries make their metadata open and interoperable by employing content- or metadata-management systems that comply with the OAI-PMH standard.
• Rinke Hoekstra describes in a recent post his new legal information project, the MetaLex Document Server. This system automatically marks up Dutch legislation and regulations in the open CEN MetaLex XML format; adds identifiers based on the Legislation.gov.uk URI model; creates RDF Linked Data for the legal content as well as for legislative and regulatory events associated with each document; and then publishes all of this enhanced, interoperable data and metadata free of charge on the open Web. The resulting data can be re-used by citizens, the private sector, civil society organizations, and government agencies.
• Professor Frank Bennett has added support for legal citations in Bluebook and OSCOLA formats to the open source Citation Style Language, which powers Zotero and other open citation management systems. He has also created a new "Zotero for Law" discussion forum on his CitationStylist site.
• The Colorado Supreme Court took another step towards adopting an open legal citation standard for Colorado court decisions, by issuing a request for public comment on its "Proposal to Adopt a Public Domain Citation Format" (HT @AlliGerkman). These steps by the court are part of a broader movement urging widespread use of open legal citation standards, as reflected in Justia's open legislative citation initiative, and the new UniversalCitation.Org project.

Considered together, these efforts reflect tremendous energy among developers, policy makers, information professionals, and scholars, focused on opening up legal information and making that information interoperable with other data and systems. Remarkably, individuals and institutions from all of these sectors are pursuing their goals by crossing traditional boundaries, partnering with colleagues in other sectors, and sharing research results, expertise, and ideas. The coming months promise even more of this high-intensity information sharing and innovation. Hold onto your hats!

The past two months have seen a flurry of innovative activity in the corner of the legal technology world that concerns free access to law and open legal information. Here are some developments that seem noteworthy:

Open Legal Educational Resources

New, free, and open versions — in ePUB and .mobi formats — of U.S. federal court rules have been published, jointly by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School and CALI, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction. This is the latest addition to the ePUB-based open legal publishing endeavor that John Mayer describes in this recent post.

PRESTO

Many developers dealing with open legislative data or systems — such as Waldo Jaquith and his State Decoded system, and Dr. Rinke Hoekstra and the Leibniz Center for Law's MetaLex Document Server — are implementing Rick Jelliffe's PRESTO model for legislative information systems, featuring of RESTful APIs and human-readable URIs.

Legal Bulk Data

New collections of legislation and related information have been published as machine-readable bulk data:

• Michael Bommarito has published Michigan Compiled Laws in XML;
• New Mexico, Idaho, and Illinois have been added to Sunlight Labs' Open States Project.

Standards

Innovators are embracing standards — technical, stylistic, and administrative — for open legal data:

• Sean McGrath has initiated The NIEM EDemocracy Initiative, an effort to develop “technological standards based on the” U.S. National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), as applied to law-related e-government functions;
• Professor Peter Martin and John Joergensen, through their organization UniversalCitation.org, are renewing the effort to persuade U.S. legal authorities to adopt a universal legal citation standard;
• Courtney Minick recently wrote a post about Justia's implementation of universal legal citation. That post led Waldo Jaquith to decide to build universal citation into The State Decoded;
• Professor Frank Bennett has opened Citation Stylist, a new Website that provides information and tools related to the legal citation “features of the citeproc-js citation formatter” used by Zotero and Mendeley;
• The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act, for which Professor Barbara Bintliff was the reporter, and which creates a uniform legal standard for the authentication and preservation of digital legal resources — has been approved by the Uniform Law Commission.

eParticipation

Several new developments have arisen in the eParticipation world:

• OpenCongress has launched two new eParticipation resources: Contact Congress, a tool for emailing members of Congress; and MyOCGroups, "an open source social network" that lets citizens share ideas and organize to take action about legislation;
• The UK's e-petitions system has begun operations;
• President Obama's Administration has launched We the People, an ePetition system for the U.S. federal executive;
• POPVOX's eparticipation widgets have begun to be used by a number of U.S.-based civil society organizations and political campaigns, such as The Abolish Child Trafficking Campaign.

Scholars and Developers Are Sharing Expertise

Knowledge developed by legal informatics scholars is being made available in forms that legal information systems developers can use and apply:

• Dr. Núria Casellas has published Legal Ontology Engineering: Methodologies, Modelling Trends, and the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge, a study of legal ontology development that offers valuable guidance for practitioners;
• Another important recent example is Legislative XML for the Semantic Web: Principles, Models, Standards for Document Management, co-edited by Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor, Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani, and Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi. This book is based on materials presented during the past several years at The LEX Summer School, at which legal informatics scholars train e-government administrators and civic entrepreneurs in XML and Semantic Web technologies for legislative information systems.

Those are the notable free law developments of the past two months, as I've seen them. What developments in the free law space do you think we should be watching?

OpenGovernment.org is a new, free site providing online access to information about proposed legislation in U.S. states. Funded by the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF) and now covering six U.S. states, OpenGovernment.org — which launched in January 2011 — enables citizens and organizations to learn about and track pending state legislation, the activities and votes of state legislators, issues that are the subject of proposed legislation, and campaign contributions to state legislators.

In July I spoke with David Moore and Carl Tashian — respectively PPF's Executive Director and Director of Technology, and the developers of OpenGovernment.org — about the principles and technology that inform OpenGovernment.org, and what is known about the users and usage of the service. The following is an account of our discussion.

Overview and Key Functions

OpenGovernment.org is a free site that provides up-to-date information on legislation pending in U.S. state legislatures. This information includes not only the texts of proposed bills, but also contextual information, such as the key issues discussed in each bill, votes on the bills, the legislators related to each bill and their voting records, and campaign finance information for each legislator. Using OpenGovernment.org, citizens can identify pending bills on topics or keywords of interest to them; read the texts of the bills; get bill status information, including update notifications by email or RSS; locate news stories and blog posts about the bills; find biographical, voting, and campaign finance information about legislators who sponsored or voted on those bills; and learn which special interest organizations active on those issues contributed to legislators' campaigns, and which legislators received the most money from those organizations. Users can also participate in the legislative process through OpenGovernment.org by commenting on the text of bills or contacting legislators about bills. (Additional ways in which users can interact with data on the service are described here.)

According to Mr. Moore, OpenGovernment.org is intended to provide data and functionality at the state level comparable to those of OpenCongress, another transparency and eParticipation service sponsored jointly by PPF and Sunlight.

"The Chain of Engagement" and "Transparency with Teeth"

Like OpenCongress, OpenGovernment.org has two primary purposes: to increase the transparency of information about proposed legislation, and to foster citizens' participation in the legislative process. Mr. Moore explains that the design of OpenGovernment.org is informed by the view that transparency and eParticipation are interrelated concepts.

Mr. Moore use two metaphors to describe this relationship. The first is that of a "chain of engagement." With OpenGovernment.org, he explains, "we can walk users up the chain of engagement,” beginning with "information provision" and "eventually leading to engagement" in the legislative process, through functions such as posting comments on proposed bills and sending email to legislators. “With a user-focused interface design,” Mr. Moore says, "we can foster multiple functions related to legislative information," to create “an open source version of Facebook for government.” "Both transparency and participation tools are necessary for true engagement,” he argues.

The second metaphor Mr. Moore employs is that of "transparency with teeth." By providing sufficient primary and contextual information about legislation, in a user interface that makes reception of, understanding of, and taking action on that information “as easy as possible," OpenGovernment.org can enable "meaningful public input" and "real accountability in government" — “transparency with teeth" — in which citizens "hold members [of the legislature] accountable for their decisions, and for their budget choices.” "Everyone should want that," he asserts.

Mr. Moore emphasizes that OpenGovernment.org belongs to a wider eParticipation movement. According to Mr. Moore, "our ultimate vision is of an ecosystem of open standards for civic engagement," of which Open 311 — the emergent "open standard for reporting non-emergency issues" to government — provides a model. Mr. Moore continues: "[W]e can envision … interoperable standards [similar to Open 311, enabling] … a citizen to track a bill's status, see version control of its full text, watchdog lobbying disclosures and public hearings around it, vote on a section of bill text, perform[] local [Congressional Budget Office]-type estimates, and practice deliberative democracy in considering [a bill's] final passage." As additional evidence of this "ecosystem," Mr. Moore points to legislative standards and other standards being developed on Code for America's and OpenPlans' Civic Commons platform.

Principles: Open Government Data and the FCC Report on "The Information Needs of Communities"

A distinctive feature of OpenGovernment.org is that the policy principles informing the site are expressly and extensively set out on the site's "About" page. Mr. Moore explained that the core ideas of the Open Government Data movement, as formalized in the "Eight Principles of Open Government Data" agreed during meetings in Sebastapol in 2007 in which Mr. Moore participated, underlie the approach and design of OpenGovernment.org. "True open government data is the foundation for online participation," Mr. Moore said, "and we are trying to demonstrate how it can work." Mr. Moore identified Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute, Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org and the Law.gov legal open government data movement, and Professor Beth Simone Noveck of New York Law School, as sources of inspiration for the creative use of government data in OpenGovernment.org. These leaders in open government data have demonstrated, according to Mr. Moore, how “from this level playing field of open data," using "open platforms," "we can develop tools for microfunctions," such as engagement concerning particular pieces of legislation, as well as tools for "macrofunctions,” such as public action on broad policy issues.

I asked Mr. Moore how OpenGovernment.org fit within the account of the U.S. news media landscape set out in the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) recent report, The Information Needs of Communities. (A summary of legal information issues discussed in the report is available here.) In that report, the FCC describes a recent, dramatic diminution in U.S. news reporting about state and local government, and urges nonprofit media and new media organizations to step in to fill this gap in public affairs reporting. Mr. Moore agreed with the FCC's assessment: “We’re seeing the erosion of institutions for civic engagement," he said. Mr. Moore also agreed with the FCC's proposed solution. "New media can fill that gap," Mr. Moore asserted, "and even — in a rosy view of the situation — can improve on traditional media” in the quality of state-level public affairs information provision and the opportunity for civic engagement in response to that information.

Users and Usage

What types of citizens and organizations been using OpenGovernment.org so far, and what kinds of information have they been accessing on the service? Mr. Moore says that the "hardest core users" of OpenGovernment.org to date fall into three categories: (1) "political bloggers," who "use RSS feeds" to track the status of bills and who also "need bill text"; (2) "legal researchers, access-to-information advocates, and free-culture advocates" who seek to use the service to perform legal research, to demonstrate the value of open government data, or to integrate OpenGovernment.org data with other data and systems; and (3) "issue-based activist groups," such as "community organizers, nonprofit allies [of the service], and organizations whose presence is already known in state capitals, such as families of incarcerated persons"; organizations in this latter category make use of the "informational resources" provided by OpenGovernment.org, "as well as free organizing tools [provided by the service] for their community."

Mr. Moore added that "online political journalism operations" — such as California Watch, MinnPost.com, The Texas Tribune, and WisconsinWatch — "are a key target audience for our free OpenGovernment tools and open data offerings." MinnPost.com and WisconsinWatch have begun linking to OpenGovernment.org, he said. In addition, Mr. Moore asserted, within the next few weeks, all four of these organizations will be drawing data via the OpenGovernment.org API, and offering their readers access to those data with free OpenGovernment.org HTML widgets. (The API and widgets are described further below.)

In terms of content, Mr. Moore said that “bills [are] the most popular type of content” available on OpenGovernment.org. Mr. Moore explained that all of the service's data are indexed by Google, and that bill titles tend to be easily accessible and heavily searched on Google. As a result, so-called “viral bills" are the most frequently accessed resources on OpenGovernment.org. "When bills go viral," Mr. Moore explained, "people hear about a bill in their community, and then go searching for information about it” online. He cited the example of the recent "Wisconsin budget bill," which, after having become a popular topic on social media, received very heavy usage on OpenGovernment.org. Similarly, "in the last three months," Mr. Moore said, several "hot bills in Texas" — HB 274, SB 81, SB 321, and SB 785 — after having gained notoriety among the people, "have become the most popular bills on the site." Mr. Moore observed that of the "top 25" most popular bills on OpenGovernment.org, "almost all are viral bills." He noted that "people are self-organizing around bills" on OpenGovernment.org, with the effect that bills have become “sites of real engagement, day to day" for users of the system.

Mr. Moore further identified "major budget bills in each state," and "key bills" — such as California SB 48, a recent education bill — "as indicated by Project VoteSmart" — a data source for OpenGovernment.org — as additional, frequently accessed resources on the service.

Mr. Moore noted that users of the service can easily learn which bills are most popular on OpenGovernment.org, because the bills receiving the most page views appear on each state's home page, under "Popular Bills." (The California page demonstrates this.) Mr. Moore said that a "Hot Bills" function — like the one at OpenCongress, which allows users to vote on bills and then ranks bills by the total number of votes cast by users — is not yet available on OpenGovernment.org, but would be rolled out in the coming months. Mr. Moore also noted that OpenGovernment.org lets users sort bills by several criteria.

Technology and Data

Mr. Moore and Mr. Tashian described the technology that powers OpenGovernment.org. All of the software in the OpenGovernment.org architecture is free and open source. According to Mr. Tashian, the architecture includes a PostgreSQL database, which PPF "runs on their own server"; GeoServer open source geospatial data server for "serving up maps"; the Thinking Sphinx Ruby library, that provides "full text indexing" on the site; the MongoDB open source database software, for analytics (see the explanation here); and the "DocumentCloud JavaScript viewer" for "convert[ing] PDF to PNG and text files."

Much of OpenGovernment.org's data are accessible through an open API. Currently, data available via the API include information about legislatures and legislative sessions; legislators, their biographies, votes, page views, and "news coverage"; legislative committees and their members; an index of the most popular bills; and data on individual bills, including page views and "news coverage." Data available via the API are governed by a "Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 US" license. For more details on the data available through the API, see the description here. More details about OpenGovernment.org's technology appear on the OpenGovernment.org blog.

Mr. Moore and Mr. Tashian emphasized that they are "always looking for volunteers" to help with development of the service's technology. Developers are invited to visit the service's Developer Hub, and to join the service's IRC channel: chat.freenode.net channel #opengovernment.

Respecting data sources, OpenGovernment.org currently makes use of legislative data from Sunlight's Open States Project, and contextual data from Project VoteSmart, the National Institute on Money in State Politics' Follow the Money service, Wikipedia, Google News, and blogs indexed by Google. All of these data are acquired via APIs and aggregated by the GovKit Ruby gem, from which OpenGovernment.org pulls new data once a day. According to Mr. Tashian, primary legal documents from the Open States Project are received daily in JSON format. (See a diagram of the data flows here.)

Funding and Sustainability

According to Mr. Moore, OpenGovernment.org is currently "fund[ed] by Sunlight Foundation," and "outreach to other foundations is ongoing [in order to facilitate the service's] roll out in other states." As for long-term funding, Mr. Moore said that OpenGovernment.org looked to the Mozilla Project as a model. While keeping the basic OpenGovernment.org public service free of charge, PPF plans for OpenGovernment.org eventually to become "majority sustained by revenues" by means of charging high-use organizations for access. "Some of our data and functionality may be of use to media companies, political blog networks, [and] activist groups," who are likely willing to pay for it, he said. Mr. Moore added that PPF also intends to seek long-term funding for OpenGovernment.org from other "philanthropic …partners."

What's Ahead?

Currently, OpenGovernment.org covers six U.S. states — Minnesota, the sixth state, was added in June — and plans to cover all fifty states in the coming months. I asked Mr. Moore what challenges currently prevented PPF from including data from the remaining 44 states in OpenGovernment.org. The first "expected hurdle," he said, was that the Open States Project, PPF's "primary source for all legislative data," presently covers only 30 states. The second, Mr. Moore said, is "funding for open source development time; we could do a lot more with a couple more software engineers." Mr. Moore noted that OpenGovernment.org "is focusing on legislatures" for now, because the Open States Project has succeeded in making much U.S. state legislative data free and open. However, much key government "data isn't yet liberated," notably most court decisions, as well as "spending data about the executive branch” in most states.

I asked Mr. Moore what additional features and functions he would like to see in OpenGovernment.org. Our "data aren’t yet real-time enough," he acknowledged. The goal, he said, is to create a “digestible activity stream” of real-time legislative data. "We have good data for votes, committee memberships, [and] bill texts," he said, "but users' experience will be better [when legislators'] statements, more video, and [legislators'] public schedules" are added to the system in close to real-time. He noted that video and legislators' public schedules are “really important to our users.”

Acknowledging that many U.S. citizens' primary language is other than English, Mr. Moore stated that OpenGovernment.org "plan[s] to develop a multilingual interface." Meanwhile, Mr. Moore noted that "our data can be remixed for this purpose" [i.e., translation]. He observed that OpenGovernment.org partners with the Miro Community to enable users to post their own videos about legislation to OpenGovernment.org; and the Miro Community supports subtitles from Universal Subtitles, the open subtitle service. Mr. Moore notes that with Universal Subtitles, users can "create semantic subtitles for campaign ads [and] videos of floor speeches," and can create "permalinks to [particular] statements" in a video. Mr. Moore noted that the ability for users to acquire and re-use OpenGovernment.org data for purposes of translation is emblematic of the site's open-data ethos: it's an "example of our dedication to accessible content.”

Mr. Moore then described PPF's "Wish List" for OpenGovernment.org. The overall vision, he said, is to add to the service "a whole range of watchdogging functions, with engagement tools on top." "Soon, we'll offer free HTML widgets, so [users] can track bills, and members, and issues," he said. In the coming months, the service plans to offer state-delegation pages, with links to blogs that cover legislation in each state, similar to the state-specific pages on OpenCongress (such as this page for California). OpenGovernment.org will soon allow users to "like" particular bills, and to vote on bills, as users can now do on OpenCongress.

Other features and functions that PPF hopes to add to OpenGovernment.org in the near future include: apps for Android, iPhone, and other mobile platforms; "[d]ynamic district maps" using GeoServer; more functions for contacting legislators; RSS feeds for more data and activities, including tracking of related bills in different legislative chambers; a "unified, easy-to-digest 'activity feed' of [all legislative] actions" that users wish to track; greater integration of video, through the Miro Community platform; and integration of data from Little Sis, the open network analysis service, that shows relationships between leaders in government and business. For more details on future plans for OpenGovernment.org, see the service's Wish List.

As a member of the open government data community, OpenGovernment.org is also advocating for open public access, in open, interoperable formats, to additional categories of law-related data. These include: legislators' social media profiles and posts; legislators' "public schedules"; state-level campaign contribution data respecting particular bills, similar to that provided by the MAPLight service; structured "[b]ill-text data," to foster such functions as "permalinking to individual sections of bill[s]," "version control" of bills, "tracking [of] changes" to bills, comparison of bill sections among chambers and jurisdictions, and "collaborative bill drafting by the public"; and "[o]fficial video streams of state government actions." For more details on data sought by OpenGovernment.org, click here.

How You Can Help and Learn More

As noted above, OpenGovernment.org welcomes assistance from volunteer developers. To find out how you can help, please visit the OpenGovernment.org Developer Hub and Pivotal Tracker project. To learn more about OpenGovernment.org and stay up-to-date on the service's activities, visit the service's "About" page, read the OpenGovernment.org Blog, or join the service's mailing list, Twitter feed (@open_gov), Facebook page, or IRC channel ( #opengovernment on irc.freenode.net ).

Indian Kanoon, Dr. Sushant Sinha's innovative free-access-to-law service for India, has recently received attention from several sources in the technology world.

First, Indian Kanoon (the Hindi word "kanoon" means "law") has been included by La Chaire en information juridique de la Faculté de droit de l'Université de Montréal in its IDRC-funded global study of the sustainability of free-access-to-law services. Second, MIT's Technology Review India in March 2011 cited Indian Kanoonin its recognition of Dr.Sinha as one of India's "Top Innovators Under 35." Most recently, Indian Kanoon was the topic of Dr. Sinha's VoxPopuLII post entitled "Indian Kanoon: The Genesis and the Legal Thirst."

In May, Dr. Sinha spoke with me from Bangalore about Indian Kanoon's technology and services, and about his views concerning innovation in legal technology and the significance of free access to law in India. The following is an account of our discussion.

Product Differentiation

We began by discussing product differentiation: How does Indian Kanoon distinguish itself from other free-access-to-law services in India, such as India Legal Information Institute (ILII) and Legal Information Institute of India (LIII)? Dr. Sinha responded by pointing to two factors: search functionality, and comprehensiveness of full-text content. The other free-law services for India "are not there," said Dr. Sinha, in terms of inclusiveness of legal content — there is "not much comprehensiveness" in their content, he said — or sophisticated information retrieval. He underscored the role that innovation plays in this kind of function-based product differentiation. Given the pace of technological change, he said, he must continually innovate to improve Indian Kanoon's search functionality, in order for that functionality to remain qualitatively distinct from his competitors' services.

Advertising

I asked Dr. Sinha about advertising, since one notable way in which Indian Kanoon differs from ILII is that the former does not display advertising on its user interface, whereas the latter does. In explaining his experiences with advertising on Indian Kanoon, Dr. Sinha noted that his advertising experiments thus far had not yielded desirable results, because the ad strategy was not targeted. "Advertising has to be targeted to be delivered" effectively, he said. Dr. Sinha said that he hopes soon to explore more targeted advertising in the form of an online lawyer directory. He explained that the availability of listings in such a directory might also offer incentives for lawyers to contribute content to Indian Kanoon's online forums, where citizens can ask legal questions and receive answers from legal professionals. He noted that India's laws prohibiting lawyer advertising posed a challenge respecting designing a compliant online lawyer directory and offering other ways in which lawyers could identify themselves on the site.

Dr. Sinha noted that he promotes Indian Kanoon via social media (such as his Twitter and Facebook accounts and his blog), through the indexing of the site's full text documents and forum comments on Google and other search engines, and via display of the "Indian Kanoon" brand name on documents downloaded from the site. Dr. Sinha told of his delight at learning recently that groups of lawyers in Delhi regularly download large quantities of PDF documents from Indian Kanoon at cyber cafés, since these documents, by displaying the Indian Kanoon brand name, serve as advertisements for the site.

The Forums

Currently, Indian Kanoon offers several online forums on substantive legal topics — where citizens can post legal questions to be answered by lawyers — as well as forums about the site's functionality, where Dr. Sinha responds to users' questions about Indian Kanoon's features and services. I noted that some of the forum discussion concerns not just the meaning of existing law, but also criticism of that law, and proposals for revising or reforming the law. In that way, the forums seem to provide a venue for public participation in policy making, albeit on a site hosted not by government but by a civil society organization. Dr. Sinha acknowledged this. He then expressed a desire to improve the functionality of the forum software, which he has written himself, and which he described as "not up to the mark." When I asked what improvements he planned to make to the forum software, he identified "threaded discussion, email notification [when a new post has been added to a thread], voting for comments, characterization of comments, search in the forums," and ways for lawyers to list their "affiliations" and "phone numbers." Dr. Sinha said that these features, which he plans to code himself and to introduce in the next few months, would improve interactivity and data transparency in the forums.

Users and Usage

I asked Dr. Sinha what types of users he had originally hoped to attract to Indian Kanoon when it launched in 2008, and what types of users most frequently use the site today. "In the beginning, of course, I hoped that common people," ordinary citizens, "would use the site," he replied. But today, he acknowledged, the data he has gathered suggest that "more than half [of the site's users] are lawyers or law students."

Dr. Sinha then discussed usage data for Indian Kanoon. One month after the site launched in 2008, Indian Kanoon received "500 page views per day, and 100-200 [daily] visitors." A year later, in 2009, the figures had risen to "8,000 page views and 2,000 users" per day. Today, the figures are "80,000-90,000 page views per day, and 15,000-20,000 users" per day; or more than 400,000 users and approximately 2.5 million page views per month.

He said that page views per person have remained steady at 4 to 5, a figure that he interprets as indicating that most users are not just downloading documents, but actually reading documents on the site.

Dr. Sinha related that "most users are from Delhi," India's "litigation hub," and noted again the anecdote described earlier of lawyers' downloading Indian Kanoon documents at Delhi cyber cafés. "Ninety percent [of Indian Kanoon's Web traffic] comes from India," he explained, while "UK and US users make up 10%."

He noted that Indian Kanoon's "search" page views — that is, the number of pages of lists of search results viewed by users — seem to be increasing, compared to "document" page views — that is, the number of pages of retrieved documents viewed by users. Today, he said, approximately "50% [of total page views] are search page views, and 50% are document page views," and "search [page views] used to be lower." He attributed this shift to improvements in Indian Kanoon's search functionality that he has introduced over time, improvements that he announces in the forums. (See, e.g., this post explaining changes to the search engine's stemming function, and the expansion of abbreviations in the site's index.)

Dr. Sinha observed that lawyers and law students had contributed much feedback respecting proposed improvements to Indian Kanoon's search functionality, and that most of the improvements to that functionality had been made in response to that feedback.

Positive user reception of these search enhancements also seems to be reflected in the fact that today there is "more searching on the site" than before. Earlier, most retrieval from the site occurred through queries executed in Google, which indexes Indian Kanoon's content. But today, a higher percentage of search queries are being executed directly on the site. In addition, today more queries take the form of "navigation queries," indicating that more users are engaging directly with Indian Kanoon — as opposed to retrieving its content through Google or another search engine — and using Indian Kanoon's search and navigation functionality to identify and use desired information.

How did Dr. Sinha receive feedback from users about Indian Kanoon? I asked. He replied that, although social media services had not yielded much user feedback, the Indian Kanoon forums had produced "very good feedback," respecting both ideas for enhancing software functionality, and the identification of content problems, such as "outdated laws." He added that "email and phone" are also valuable channels of user feedback. He related that many of the ideas about software enhancements that lawyers had contributed — notably suggestions for adding advanced search features, such as restricting search queries to the "author" field (to enable searches of opinions by particular judges) and the "citation" field (to enable quick retrieval of known sources of law) — had come via telephone and email inbox.

Technology

Dr. Sinha then described the technology underlying Indian Kanoon. Scraping programs that he has written harvest — on a daily basis — full-text court decisions, administrative decisions, statutes, and regulations from dozens of Indian federal and state government Websites, and report in a log problems with or changes to these government sites' interfaces. I asked Dr. Sinha about the challenge of frequently updating scraper programs to fit constantly changing government Websites. He acknowledged that at first this had been quite difficult, but that it had recently grown much easier, due to automatic notification of government Website changes via the log, and due to the relative stability of many government Websites, especially those of the judiciary. "Many [government Websites] are pretty stable, pretty consistent," he said.

I asked Dr. Sinha whether he believed that the Indian national and state governments would continue in the future to publish full-text law free of charge on their Websites. He responded optimistically, noting what he perceived to be a strong commitment on the part of many Indian government technologists — and particularly the "in house technology" personnel at India's Ministry of Law and Justice and the Indian national judiciary, to whom, he said, "much credit must be given" — to make full-text law available free of charge to the public. I asked Dr. Sinha whether he had met with government technologists to discuss harvesting data from their sites. He said that no such discussions had occurred, and that Indian government technologists tended to keep their distance from civil society technologists like himself. He asserted that, nonetheless, he had ascertained indirectly that many of these government technologists were committed to making law available to the public free of charge via the Internet.

After Indian Kanoon's scrapers have harvested full-text legal documents from government Websites, the documents — which originally are in a variety of formats, including PDF, HTML, and word processed formats — are processed and stored in a PostgreSQL relational database, which Dr. Sinha has customized with some of his own code. (Click here for details on these modifications.) Some of the document metadata are stored separately in XML, Dr. Sinha said, but the main full text documents are not marked up in XML.

PostgreSQL also furnishes the search engine for Indian Kanoon. As noted above, Dr. Sinha has modified the search engine with his own code, in order to customize it to accommodate queries from non-lawyers, and in response to requests by users who are lawyers or law students. Notable functions of the Indian Kanoon search engine include stemming, expansion of abbreviations, and relevancy ranking. The advanced search page lets users search by keyword, words in the title, citation, author, venue, and date; limit the search to statutes, court decisions, administrative decisions, or other material types; and specify whether results should be sorted by relevance or date. If the latter function is not used, search results by default are ranked by relevance, but the results display allows users to re-sort results by date — from most recent to oldest, or from oldest to newest — with a single mouseclick.

Respecting document output, Dr. Sinha uses HTMLDOC open source conversion software to deliver individual documents as HTML and PDF. Individual documents are output initially as HTML, and the interface displays a "Get the document in PDF" button that enables rapid delivery of a PDF version of the document.

Other components of Indian Kanoon's architecture include Django open source Web applications software, the Linux kernel, and the Apache Web server.

Respecting new technology to be added to the site in the near future, Dr. Sinha identified — in addition to the improved forums and possibly a directory of lawyers — an online document assembly service. This service, which Dr. Sinha is developing from scratch, would enable legal professionals, for a fee, to assemble and download litigation, transactional, or advisory documents that include content from Indian Kanoon. Dr. Sinha said that he hopes to launch this new service in the next year or two.

Open Source

I asked Dr. Sinha whether, as the operator of a free-access-to-law service, he felt an ideological commitment to using free, open-source software (FOSS) in the architecture of that service. His answer was complex, and reflected an interesting perspective on the role of innovation, entrepreneurship, and information sharing in the free-law sector. Dr. Sinha acknowledged that practical considerations played a "very important" role in his decision to build Indian Kanoon with FOSS. Yet he said that ideology also played some part in this decision. Characterizing the entire Indian Kanoon code base as "open source," he observed that he adheres to a principle of publicly disclosing all of his original code (much of the code has been posted on Google Project Hosting) — including the code for the forums, which he has developed from scratch — and, where that code consists of modifications to FOSS, of always contributing the code back to the relevant FOSS community. (Dr. Sinha provides more detail in this post.) He admitted to taking pride in the fact that several of his original PostgreSQL patches had been incorporated into the main PostgreSQL code. He said that his motivation for fully disclosing his code and contributing it back was to participate in the common enterprise of innovation that characterized these FOSS communities. Open sharing of code "helps a lot of other products to come in, new products that could not be envisioned" by programmers working entirely on their own, he observed.

Dr. Sinha further underlined the benefits of the division of labor within the FOSS communities. Each developer acquires expertise in particular areas or functions, or gains in-depth knowledge of the needs of particular user communities, and that distinctive knowledge gives rise to fine-grained innovations. If all of the resulting innovations are shared with the entire FOSS community, then community members can pick and choose from a great variety of finely customized features, to meet their particular local needs. It would be inefficient for a programmer who is unfamiliar with users of legal information to create new software features adapted to those users' needs, he observed. "I'm the best person to do that," he concluded.

"The Thirst for Law"

In his recent post for VoxPopuLII, Dr. Sinha interpreted the Indian Kanoon usage data as suggesting a remarkable hypothesis: that the provision of free access to law via the Internet was actually increasing demand for access to law among ordinary citizens; Dr. Sinha called this rise in demand "the thirst for law."

I asked Dr. Sinha about the evidence that had given rise to that hypothesis. He replied that he had observed in the Indian Kanoon transaction logs a consistently high percentage of "descriptive queries" — search statements consisting of non-legal language used to represent legal issues. He noted that he was struck by the contrast between these queries and the many queries in the log that used legal language with great precision. He concluded that the descriptive queries must be entered by non-lawyer citizens with no formal knowledge of law, whereas the precise legal queries must be coming from legal professionals, or citizens with substantial legal knowledge. In addition to this, he said that he had seen much anecdotal evidence, in the form of comments in the forums — such as this — and direct communications from users.

But the most persuasive evidence, he said, came from two kinds of usage statistics. The first is the very large numbers of users — which Dr. Sinha interprets as indicative of a user community numerically much greater than the community of lawyers in India. The second is the consistently high rate of page views per user, which suggests that a very large percentage of users are reading full-text documents online. Dr. Sinha expressed his belief that the latter behavior is more characteristic of non-lawyers than lawyers, who might be expected most often to search for and download known-item documents to be read off-line. Dr. Sinha concluded that, taken together, this evidence suggested that a very large and growing number of users of Indian Kanoon were non-lawyer citizens who had little knowledge of the law, and whose interest in acquiring legal information was being fueled by free access to such information through services like Indian Kanoon.

If we assume this theory to be correct, I then asked Dr. Sinha, were there particular attributes of free-law services that might foster or inhibit this "thirst for law"? Dr. Sinha pointed to the two factors he identified in his VoxPopuLII post as encouraging the increase in desire for access to law: the absence of paywalls, and improved search technology. Dr. Sinha speculated that the mere removal of pay barriers initially attracts large numbers of non-lawyer users to a free-law service. Then, when non-lawyers use the high quality — and very "forgiving" — search functionality of the site, their experience of quickly receiving relevant information, coupled with the absence of a charge for that information, gives rise to a desire for additional legal information.

Dr. Sinha's notion of the "thirst for law" reminded me of the role that knowledge of legal rules plays in Professor Amartya Sen's theory of "development as freedom." In his book of that title, Professor Sen asserts that citizens’ access to law, and knowledge of law, are necessary conditions of certain basic human freedoms or capabilities for living. These include the freedom to participate effectively in markets, to make informed political decisions, to hold government officials accountable, and to vindicate one's rights to basic social services such as education, health care, and emergency food supplies. This framework suggests how a "thirst for law" might arise in a developing nation: As citizens and small business owners use free-law sites to increase their knowledge of laws that relate to their lives and their freedoms, those users may come to believe that such knowledge of law contributes significantly towards increasing their freedom and their capacity to live well. That belief could well create a desire for access to other laws that relate to the users' lives and freedoms. Thus, within the "development as freedom" framework, free access to law via the Internet could generate increased demand for access to law.

I asked Dr. Sinha whether he thought the "development as freedom" framework was consistent with the evidence he had seen for the "thirst for law." He acknowledged that he had "no evidence" directly supporting the "development as freedom" explanation for the "thirst for law" phenomenon. However, he said, he found the explanation quite plausible, because of particular attributes of India's governments and society. Free access to legal information, he asserted, "is far more important in India" than in the U.S., because of the vast social inequality, great disparities in power, and the pervasiveness of government abuse and corruption in India.

Dr. Sinha illustrated this point by citing two examples. The first concerned Mohammad Adil Hossain, a student in mass communication at Aligarh Muslim University, who, after criticizing university officials online, reportedly was suspended and banned from campus in 2010 on the ground of "‘tarnish[ing] the image of the University by resorting to and misusing the internet." During the administrative proceedings, the university purportedly refused to disclose its evidence to Mr. Adil Hossain. Mr. Adil Hossain researched the law, using services including Indian Kanoon, and found precedents in which courts had upheld students' freedom of expression and required due process in university administrative proceedings respecting discipline of students. Mr. Adil Hossain appealed the university's decision to the Allahabad High Court, which reportedly reversed and remanded the university's decision. On remand, the university reportedly "revoked the suspension" and reinstated Mr. Adil Hossain.

Dr. Sinha then related a second circumstance, in which gated communities in India purportedly assert control illegally over public roads, and prevent members of the auto-rickshaw union from using those roads in the course of business. In his recent post on this topic, Dr. Sinha explained that he had researched the law, and found that the applicable law prohibited assertions of private control over public roads, and that such assertions of control may also violate the right to freedom of movement protected by the Indian Constitution. This legal information could potentially be used by members of the auto-rickshaw union to compel gated communities to open their public roads to union members and other members of the public.

Both of these instances, Dr. Sinha contended, were consistent with the "development as freedom" view of free access to law. Not only did free access to legal information enable citizens — actually in the first instance and at least potentially in the second — to vindicate their legal rights. One could also plausibly argue that the citizens in both examples could experience such access as affording them knowledge that increases their freedom, their capability to live fully, in one instance free from unfair restraints on speech and from unfair treatment by university officials, and in the other, free from impediments to their rights to move freely and to earn their livelihood. "This [free access to law] is very important" to ordinary citizens, he concluded.

Partnerships

I noted that, after several years of operating independently, Indian Kanoon had recently reached out to another organization: Dr. Sinha agreed to allow the new Legal Information Institute of India to harvest content from Indian Kanoon.

I asked whether Dr. Sinha foresaw Indian Kanoon's engaging in additional partnerships in the near future. Dr. Sinha replied that Indian Kanoon was currently involved in such a partnership, with PRS Legislative Research, which provides research and legislative history services to members of India's national and state parliaments. In its partnership with PRS, Indian Kanoon is adding to its content the full text of debates of the Indian National Parliament from 1998 to the present. Dr. Sinha said that this content was currently being loaded and indexed in Indian Kanoon, and should be available in the coming months.

This partnership with PRS illustrates an interesting kind of relationship that often arises between civil society-based free-access-to-law services, and government users of legal information. As Tom Bruce recently noted at the Princeton Law.gov Workshop, many free-access-to-law services have reported — to researchers conducting the IDRC-University of Montreal study described earlier — that government employees constitute one of their core user groups: Many government personnel find that free-law services offer access to law superior to that offered by the government itself. Through its partnership with PRS, Indian Kanoon will offer additional evidence of this phenomenon by delivering key legal information to Indian government officials — Indian legislators and their staffs. By enhancing a government's access to its own information, free law services like Indian Kanoon can be said to serve as components of that government's own technology services — its "e-government" services. By supplementing inferior government information technology, free law sites can contribute to the efficiency of governmental operations and the improvement of governmental services offered to citizens. This kind of complementarity between civil society-based free-law services and government seems consistent with the model of public-sector information provision set forth by Robinson et al. in their influential paper, Government Data and the Invisible Hand.

Business Models and Sustainability

I asked Dr. Sinha to describe his current business model, and how he expected that business model to change in the coming months and years. Dr. Sinha answered that he currently funds the operations of Indian Kanoon entirely from his own resources. He said that he plans in the coming months to develop revenue streams for Indian Kanoon, notably the fee-based online document assembly service and, possibly, the lawyer directory service mentioned earlier.

Dr. Sinha set out a two-tiered business model for Indian Kanoon. "Search [of Indian Kanoon's full text primary legal content] will always be free," he affirmed, explaining that charging for access to primary legal information "doesn't make sense" and "is not going to help people." However, he acknowledged, value-added services on Indian Kanoon — such as the planned document assembly service, and possibly also access to legal commentary, "judgment summaries," or other kinds of secondary legal information — may be provided in the future on a fee basis. Revenue from such sources are intended to make Indian Kanoon sustainable in the long-term.

I observed that this two-tiered approach resembles models being adopted by other organizations in the online legal publishing sector, in which services for retrieving primary law are considered to have become commoditized. As a result, large, for-profit legal information providers are abandoning those services and concentrating on more lucrative value-added services, while smaller for-profit providers are experimenting with free or low-cost primary legal search, funded or supplemented by advertising or by moderately priced value-added services. Dr. Sinha affirmed that "Indian Kanoon is a for-profit" enterprise, and his business model going forward is consistent with that view.

Conclusion

Several themes emerge from Dr. Sinha's account of Indian Kanoon. First, innovation is a value that informs several aspects of the organization. In Dr. Sinha's account of Indian Kanoon's distinctiveness as a product, superior search performance is the key, but constant innovation is required to maintain that superiority. Dr. Sinha identifies the opportunity to participate in the culture of innovation that characterizes the open-source software development community as one of his primary motivations for adopting an open-source approach to Indian Kanoon's technology. The challenge of innovation also marks Dr. Sinha's decision to create and improve Indian Kanoon's forums using his own, original code, rather than relying on software created by others.

Second, and relatedly, Dr. Sinha adopts an entrepreneurial approach to legal information provision. His model has several dimensions, including a desire to serve the needs of ordinary citizens; a willingness to take substantial risks, including funding the organization in its initial stages entirely with his own capital, creating key services with original code, and offering all code back to the community as open source; an interest in filling a market niche; a willingness to continually adapt the service to accommodate the needs and desires of key users and to stay one step ahead of competitors; a strong interest in operational independence coupled with a willingness to enter into selected, beneficial strategic partnerships; and a basic, long-term profit motivation.

Third, Dr. Sinha insists that a commitment to serving the public interest — by providing free, high quality access to primary law — is consistent with a for-profit business orientation. He argues persuasively that, particularly in the Indian context, citizens must have free access to law in order to vindicate their legal rights and enjoy their fundamental freedoms, and that both government and civil society organizations have an obligation to facilitate that access. But he also asserts confidently that such a commitment to free law accords fully with the view that charging fees for value-added legal information services or access to secondary legal information created in the private sector is appropriate. In Dr. Sinha's view, fee-based services — by providing revenues that enable sustainability — facilitate and complement free-law services.

Within this framework of innovation, entrepreneurship, and commitment to public service rooted in sustainable business practices, Dr. Sinha envisions a bright future for Indian Kanoon.

A key trend in eGovernment today is enabling more public participation in policy- and law-making. One very meaningful way to increase the public's involvement in lawmaking is by crowdsourcing the drafting of legislation, as the Brazilian Câmara dos Deputados has done through its e-Democracia platform.

Now, crowdsourcing of legislation has come to the U.S., through LexPop, a new wiki created this month by Matt Baca and Olin Parker, both students at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. [Baca is also a law student at New York University.]

As its first effort, LexPop is hosting the drafting of a net neutrality bill, to be introduced in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. State Representative Tom Sannicandro has announced his commitment to introduce the bill when drafting is complete.

Recently I spoke with Matt Baca about the development of LexPop, and the LexPop vision for empowering citizens through technology.

The Big Ideas

Key to the LexPop approach is collaborative government, an idea similar to Professor Beth Noveck's concept of collaborative democracy: government that actively seeks and uses input from the public, meaning ordinary citizens, not lobbyists. LexPop cites the U.S. federal government's Gov 2.0 projects ExpertNet and Peer to Patent — both Noveck's ideas — as inspirations for LexPop. Baca also cited Dr. Joshua Tauberer's POPVOX project as a model for LexPop.

Another concept informing LexPop's approach is lightweight policymaking, an idea derived from Tim O'Reilly's concept of lightweight programming. As the LexPop team explained in a recent post, in lightweight policymaking, after a new statute is enacted, the public reviews the law, monitors its implementation, discusses its effects, and, if the law proves to be flawed, the public uses LexPop to quickly draft amendments.

Two other ideas are basic to LexPop. First, circumventing special interests is a fundamental goal of the project. As Baca wrote last week, today in the U.S., political participation is

[...] a game of power in which the public is losing. There's no secret about the amount of money spent by big companies on lobbying. Just today, Nicholas Deleon of CrunchGear suggested it has cost ISPs about $1 million to defeat net neutrality legislation. That’s no fun, at least if you think discussion and debate, rather than dollars and cents, should drive policy creation. This is what LexPop is all about. It provides a forum for the public, rather than lobbyists, to write the policy legislators will introduce.

Second, LexPop seeks to enable contributions by citizens who have any level of time, interest, and knowledge, including both novices and experts, as the team explains in this post.

How It Began

Baca explained that LexPop began during a course at the Kennedy School that he and co-founder Olin Parker both took during fall 2010. As they read about Web 2.0 initiatives in government (or Gov 2.0, in Tim O'Reilly's terms) Baca and Parker concluded that "eventually this will result in the co-creation of laws." They explored Brazil's e-Democracia site, but could find no analogous service in the U.S. So they decided to experiment themselves.

In November 2010, they started a wiki called writethebill, on the Wikispaces platform. writethebill was designed to enable anyone to launch the crowdsourcing of any bill on any topic. According to Baca, writethebill was "a free-for-all wiki," whose activity was largely unstructured.

After some drafting had been accomplished on a total of thirteen bills — on topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the improvement of teacher quality — Baca and Parker began to seek a different platform that would enable a more structured approach to crowdsourced bill drafting.

How It Works Now

Earlier this year, Baca and Parker decided to move their project to the MediaWiki platform, and to rename the project LexPop. LexPop premiered earlier this month.

The desire to provide more structure to the bill-drafting process is evident from the LexPop homepage. There, the visitor learns that LexPop offers two options for bill drafting: "WikiBills", the original unstructured approach used at writethebill [and "WikiBills" includes all of the legislation originally drafted at writethebill]; and a new, more structured method, called "Policy Drives".

In the "Policy Drive" approach, the drafting process occurs in three stages, paralleling those used in most legislatures: "Hearing," "Markup," and "Build the Bill."

During the "Hearing" stage, wide-open information-sharing and public discussion about the issue take place, and participants try to find a legislator who will agree to introduce the bill once it has been drafted. [LexPop's Massachusetts net neutrality bill is currently in the "Hearing" stage.]

During the "Markup" stage, participants choose which policies to adopt, and express these in an outline of the content of the bill.

Finally, during the "Build the Bill" stage, participants draft the legislation.

Although the first LexPop Policy Drive concerns Massachusetts legislation, LexPop can be used to crowdsource bill drafting for any jurisdiction. Indeed, several of the draft bills in LexPop's "WikiBills" section are federal.

Team and Research

According to Baca, the LexPop team currently consists of him and Parker. Neither is a programmer, and so they hope that civic-minded coders, developers, and designers will be among those who volunteer to contribute ideas about functionality and features to LexPop.

When asked about the role of formal research in LexPop, Baca replied that the team does not currently have a formal research program focused on LexPop, but they are currently using Semantic MediaWiki to gather usage and other data about the site.

Getting the Word Out

Respecting marketing, to date the team has created a YouTube video, issued a press release, promoted the service on Twitter and Facebook, created a Google Group, launched a LexPop Blog, and presented the service at Harvard's 2011 Social Enterprise Conference Pitch for Change.

What's Ahead

Baca said that LexPop does not currently have outside funding, and is not seeking funding at the present time. However, LexPop is currently seeking volunteers. LexPop is looking for volunteers to participate — by such means as contributing content and suggesting/creating new functionality — as well as to spread the word about the LexPop approach to crowdsourcing lawmaking.

According to Baca, since both he and Parker complete their current academic programs this coming May, the LexPop team intends to devote Spring 2011 to publicizing LexPop, facilitating the first LexPop Policy Drive about net neutrality, and growing the LexPop team and community with volunteers. Baca said that longer-term planning for LexPop will take place this summer.

How to Be Part of It

Baca encouraged readers who would like to participate in LexPop to contact the LexPop team at the LexPop Website.

Exciting developments in citizen lawmaking and technology have enlivened the last several weeks. These efforts suggest that in the coming year, more and more of the Web's democratic promise may come to fruition:

Respecting ePetition and eConsultation:

• Beginning in 2011, UK citizens will be able to propose legislation on the Direct.gov.uk Website. Proposals receiving a threshold level of popular support will form the basis for legislation which will be introduced in Parliament.
• Rules have been finalized for the European Citizens' Initiative, a direct online democracy mechanism for the European Union. Initiatives receiving a certain level of support must be considered for action by the European Commission, though the Commission is not obliged to act on them.
• ExpertNet is a new, online citizen-consultation platform of the U.S. federal government. On ExpertNet, officials of the U.S. federal executive branch will pose policy questions on which they seek input from citizens who have in-depth knowledge of the relevant subject matter. These consultations could enable citizen involvement in the earliest stages of the development of new legislation or regulations. ExpertNet is based on an idea proposed by Professor Beth Simone Noveck of New York Law School in her book, Wiki Government.

All of these programs require eParticipation technologies capable of addressing difficult problems of online communication, document and user authentication, security, and privacy. These programs are also likely to borrow from or integrate to some extent existing innovative platforms, such as Legislation.gov.uk and the European e-Justice Portal. They may also integrate new technologies being developed through endeavors such as the EU project IMPACT: Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis. The IMPACT team is creating a suite of innovative tools for enabling automated processing of comments that citizens contribute on eConsultation platforms.

In the area of eRulemaking, the coming year may see substantial activity, on three fronts in particular:

• We could see more inspiring technological innovation, building on the prodigious accomplishments of initiatives such as Princeton CITP's FedThread system, Cornell's Regulation Room, and WestEd's GovPulse.
• We are likely to see more valuable scholarship about the effectiveness of eRulemaking systems, from the University of Albany's National Science Foundation-funded DeER (Deliberative E-Rulemaking) Project, led by Professor Peter Muhlberger of the Texas Tech University and Professor Jennifer Stromer-Galley of the University of Albany.
• The recently revived Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) may well issue novel policy proposals — as well scholarship and technological recommendations — respecting the U.S. federal eRulemaking platform, Regulations.gov.

Online voting pilot projects — testing technologies that could be implemented in states that permit citizen lawmaking — are likely to be launched in the U.S. in the coming months, pursuant to the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. Dr. Joseph Hall of Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley has written a persuasive commentary on these efforts.

Two other innovative U.S. state-level projects concern voter guides, the information resources on which many citizens base their direct-democracy lawmaking decisions:

• The Living Voters' Guide — a National Science Foundation-funded collaboration between the University of Washington's Center for Communication and Civic Engagement and Design – Use – Build Group; City Club of Seattle; and Reinspire Me LLC — is a crowdsourced commentary on direct democracy proposals in the state of Washington. It allows citizens to get involved early in the process of considering citizen-proposed laws, and to consider those laws with the aid of information provided by their fellow citizens.
• The Oregon Citizens' Initiative Review (CIR) convenes small groups of Oregon citizens to learn about, deliberate about, and vote on proposed Oregon ballot initiatives. Statements expressing the groups\rquote votes, and the reasons for their votes, are then included in the voters\rquote guide distributed — in print and online — to Oregon voters before the election concerning the ballot initiatives. Oregon voters, as they make up their minds about proposed ballot initiatives, can consider the insights and votes of the CIR participants, who are their neighbors. Professor John Gastil of the University of Washington Department of Communication and his National Science Foundation-funded research team recently completed a study of the Oregon CIR which found that the CIR's statements influenced voters' views of direct-democracy proposals. The coming year may see more valuable research from Professor Gastil's team.

These examples demonstrate that, all around the world, there is a wealth of technological and policy innovation and insightful research currently underway in the area of citizen lawmaking. This activity involves creative partnerships among programmers, policymakers, technology administrators, scholars and their universities, government funding agencies, philanthropic organizations, for-profit firms, and the nonprofit community. Through cooperative efforts like these, the promise of technology-enabled citizen empowerment is becoming a reality.

My last column addressed an odd feature of current legal periodical publishing: a number of legal publishers do not expose interoperable metadata for their periodical articles on the free Web, and do not sell or license individual periodical articles online.

We saw that these practices seem unusual because they are inconsistent with industry trends, and because these publishers already use digital publishing processes, have access to free or low-cost ejournal platform and ecommerce software, often have access within their own corporate families to expertise in implementing such software and services, and, given the size of the global market and the interdisciplinary appeal of much of these publishers' periodical content, seem to be foregoing substantial marketing opportunities and revenue streams.

Given all the factors weighing in favor of freeing up metadata and implementing article-level ecommerce on the Web, what could be holding these publishers back?

Here are some suggestions:

• Low levels of competition. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has observed that legal publishers — like producers in other industries — when faced with minimal or no competition in a market, tend to resist innovation, due to a lack of incentives;
• Fear of cannibalizing print subscriptions. Some publishers may worry that improving Web access to periodical content will cause some print customers to cancel their subscriptions, resulting in overall declines in revenue for periodical content.
• Fear of cannibalizing online subscriptions. Legal publishers may worry that, if interoperable metadata and ecommerce for articles were offered on the Web, online periodical subscription customers might cancel their subscriptions in favor of purchasing articles on an ad hoc basis, and that this, too, would result in overall declines in revenue from periodical content.
• Failure to understand the scope of potential demand. Some of these legal publishers may not realize the scope of potential demand for their periodical content, especially among nonlawyers, in their own nation and in other countries. My previous post offered several examples of evidence of such demand.
• Failure to envision second-order benefits. Some legal publishers may not have considered desirable second-order effects of the new approach. Such effects include a higher Web profile for all of the publisher's content; possibilities for engaging with existing and new audiences in new ways; receiving innovative ideas from customers and discovering new business partners through Web 2.0 technology; and developing innovative new products and services built upon periodical metadata or content.

How might the legal community and the broader scholarly/professional publishing community respond to these concerns? Here are some ideas:

• Competition: Members of the legal community who have not previously engaged in publishing could enter the legal periodical publishing market. Given the low costs of ejournal publishing today; the availability of a variety of free or low-cost publishing platforms including ejournal, blogging, and content management systems; and the abundance of legal academics and professionals willing and able to supply quality content, the potential for new market entrants to increase competition in the legal periodical article market seems great.
• Cannibalizing print subscriptions: Legal publishers' concern about reduced print subscriptions' leading to overall reduced revenues seems reasonable. Yet we saw in my earlier post that most major U.S. and U.K. scholarly and professional publishers have adopted the new free metadata plus article-level Web ecommerce model despite such concerns. The behavior of those publishers suggests that legal publishers' concerns about cancellation-related revenue loss may be overstated. Alternatively, the conduct of most scholarly and professional publishers might reflect an industry consensus that print's future is bleak, while Web ecommerce's future is bright, and that those who act now to develop free Web metadata distribution and article-level ecommerce capabilities may realize considerable early-mover advantages. The legal publishers we are discussing might counter that their content is so narrow in subject scope compared to that of most scholarly/professional publishers (for whom law is just one of many subjects in which they publish), that a move to the free Web would present the former with substantial losses in print subscriptions without compensatory gains from ecommerce. One response might be to ask whether those concerns are based on empirical evidence or on speculation, and, if based on the latter, to encourage these legal publishers to experiment: these publishers should offer Web-based metadata and article-level ecommerce respecting a small number of titles, and then evaluate the results, both in terms of overall revenues, and in terms of second-order effects.
• Cannibalizing online subscriptions: This also seems to be a justified concern, respecting which two responses come to mind. First, many subscription customers subscribe to packages of content of which periodicals constitute just one item; such customers are unlikely to cancel those subscriptions if periodical articles alone are offered via Web-based ecommerce. Second, individual articles available via ecommerce could be priced — in light of the high probability that the customer base for such articles will include those who cancel online subscriptions plus a substantial number of new customers — so as to make up for lost online subscriptions.
• Potential demand: One way to help these legal publishers understand the scope of potential demand for their periodical articles is for legal scholars and practitioners to educate the publishers. Law professors, practicing lawyers, and legal information professionals could discuss this issue with publishers at programs and informal conversations at legal scholarly and professional meetings. Since much of this demand may come from beyond the publishers' home-country borders, international conferences may be especially suitable settings for these discussions.
• Second-order benefits. Independent publishing consultants, epublishing and ecommerce specialists within the legal publishers' own corporate families, and representatives from the broader scholarly/professional publishing community might be best equipped to help legal publishers learn about the kinds of desirable second-order effects that can arise from the provision of Web-based metadata and ecommerce.

The anomaly of some legal publishers' declining to provide Web-based access to their article-level metadata and content need not occasion despair. Rather, this circumstance may yield promising opportunities: for the legal community to create alternative platforms for publishing their valuable article-level content; and for legal publishers, the legal community, and representatives of the broader scholarly and professional publishing community to engage in productive dialogue and collaboration.

Like many of my North American colleagues, I keep up with new law journal articles by subscribing to alerts from Current Law Journal Content (CLJC), the free table of contents service published by the Washington & Lee School of Law Library and the University of Texas Tarlton Law Library. Particular characteristics of certain of the commercially published law journals indexed in CLJC have recently puzzled me: the practices of these journals seem out of step with today's norms for distributing metadata and content of scholarly and professional articles. Here's what I've seen:

• Many of the articles in these journals are of substantial interest to legal scholars and practitioners, often in multiple jurisdictions;
• Many of the articles in these journals are likely of substantial interest to a large audience of nonlawyer readers, again often in multiple jurisdictions;
• Someone who is not a legal information professional may have difficulty learning — in a timely manner — what is in these journals, or whether those articles are relevant, because either tables of contents or abstracts of articles in these journals are not published on the free Web;
• If one learns of the articles in these journals and determines they are relevant, one may have difficulty obtaining access to the full text of desired articles, because one cannot purchase individual articles on these journals' Websites.

In other words, these articles constitute hidden treasure: they are of potentially great interest to an audience of readers much larger than their current audience; yet many of these potential readers either never learn of the existence of these articles, or learn of them too late, or don't receive enough metadata to determine whether the articles are worth reading in full text, or, having made that determination, encounter substantial obstacles to reading them.

Some Examples

Here are three examples arising from CLJC alerts I've recently received or CLJC searches I've recently performed (the indexing and computer assisted legal research (CALR) services referred to below are those commonly used by the U.S. legal community, so services such Legal Journals Index, Lawtel, and non-U.S. versions of the major CALR services, are not considered here):

The Environmental and Planning Law Journal, published by Law Book Company of Australia, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters, seems to offer no access to its tables of contents or abstracts on the open Internet, nor can one purchase individual articles via the journal's Website. Further, though an online version of the journal appears to be available via fee-based subscription, the journal does not appear to be listed in the Westlaw database directory. The journal is not indexed in Current Index to Legal Periodicals (CILP), a table of contents service widely available in U.S. law schools. The journal is indexed in the legal periodical index LegalTrac, but the coverage is at least 21 months out of date; as of today, the most recent issue indexed is dated January 2009. The journal is indexed in Index to Legal Periodicals and Books (ILP), another well-known U.S.-based legal periodical index, but the coverage appears to be three months out of date; as of today, the most recent issue published is from July 2010. Access to current legal articles matters to academic and non-academic readers alike, because of the increased rate of change in law, policy, technology, finance, and related fields. Further, the citations for this journal's articles in LegalTrac and ILP appear to lack abstracts. Abstracts are an important type of metadata for potential readers of legal articles because the article's title, authors' names, and journal title, considered by themselves, frequently do not furnish enough information about the content of an article to enable a reader to determine whether the article is relevant to his or her needs.

An article recently published in this journal — Cameron Holley, "Public Participation, Environmental Law and New Governance: Lessons for Designing Inclusive and Representative Participatory Processes," 27 Environmental and Planning Law Journal 360-391 (2010) (Issue No. 5) — exemplifies some of the problems arising from the provision of metadata and electronic full text of articles in this journal. The Holley article is of potential interest to a broad audience, consisting of scholars, policy makers, scientists, and business people in a range of fields, including environmental law, natural resources, land use, political science, and economic development. The article is also of potential interest to citizens interested in politics or the environment. Moreover, potential readers for this article reside, not just in Australia, but all over the world, because individuals engaged with these issues share information with, and learn from the research and experiences of, their colleagues in other jurisdictions. Yet neither the basic metadata for this article, nor the abstract, are listed on the publisher's Website. In addition, before I published the metadata and abstract of this article on my blog on 14 September 2010 — the author having kindly sent me the abstract and granted me permission to post it — CLJC appears to have been the only source of the author and title information for this article on the free Web, and the abstract was unavailable on the open Internet. As of today, only those who subscribe to the online version of the journal appear to be able to access an electronic version of the article.

Here is another, similar example:

The Australian Property Law Journal is published by LexisNexis Australia (formerly Butterworths Australia), a subsidiary of LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier. Like the publisher mentioned above, this publisher provides neither tables of contents nor abstracts of this journal's articles on the open Internet, and the publisher does not appear to offer the means to purchase individual articles via the journal's Website. The journal appears to be available on Lexis.com, so Lexis users who know of the presence of the journal on that service can use Lexis to learn of new articles and access full text. Though not indexed in CILP, the journal is indexed in LegalTrac and ILP, but apparently six months out of date — as of today, the most recent issue indexed is March 2010 — and the citations in both indexes lack abstracts. An article recently published in this journal — Justine Bell, "Greening the Land Title Register: How Can the Land Title Register Assist with Sustainable Decision-Making?," 18 Australian Property Law Journal 263 (2010) (Issue No. 3) — is of potential interest to scholars, policy makers, and practitioners in a number of fields, including environmental law, environmental policy, land use, property, political science, and egovernment, as well as to citizens in Australia and other jurisdictions. As with Dr. Holley's article, before I published the metadata and abstract of Dr. Bell's article on my blog on 17 August 2010 — with the author's permission — CLJC seems to have been the exclusive source for the basic article metadata on the free Web, and the abstract was unavailable on the open Internet. Dr. Bell has since posted the article, with title and abstract, to SSRN. Before Dr. Bell posted the preprint of the article, the only online access to the full text appears to have been via Lexis.com.

A third example concerns a journal published in the UK. Civil Justice Quarterly is published by Sweet and Maxwell, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters. The publisher posts, on the open Internet, tables of contents, in PDF format, for selected recent issues — at the moment excluding the current issue — without abstracts. For example, at present, respecting issues published in 2010, only the contents for Volume 29 Issue 2, are available, without abstracts, but the contents for Volume 29 Issues 1 and 3 are absent. The publisher does not offer the opportunity to purchase individual articles on the journal's Website. Civil Justice Quarterly is not indexed in CILP. It is indexed in LegalTrac and ILP, through the current issue, but without abstracts. Selected articles from the journal appear on Westlaw.

The circumstances respecting an article recently published in the journal — Christopher Hodges, "From Class Actions to Collective Redress: A Revolution in Approach to Compensation," 28 Civil Justice Quarterly 41-66 (2009) (Issue No. 1) — are telling. No table of contents on the publisher's Website lists the article's author, title, or abstract. The article concerns class actions in civil litigation — also known as "citizen suits" or "collective actions" — an issue of wide interest to many kinds of readers in many jurisdictions, particularly in the wake of the recent global financial crisis and recent environmental incidents affecting large numbers of people. Because of its subject and multijurisdictional coverage, the article is of potential interest to legal scholars and practitioners in many jurisdictions, and also to a wide range of nonlawyers, including businesspeople, activists, representatives of labor, investors, and scholars in fields such as political science and economics. Indeed, the article has been cited in a number of policy resources — including the 2009 Report of the Scottish Civil Courts Review and a law firm's response to the European Commission's Green Paper on Consumer Collective Redress — as well as in several scholarly works. To this day, however, the abstract of the article appears to be unavailable on the free Web, nor, apparently, can the article be accessed online except via Westlaw.

Why Existing Approaches Are Inadequate

One might respond that interlibrary loan and document delivery services are adequate responses to the problem. Yet these services only address the issue of access to the full text of articles; such services cannot make potential readers aware of articles relevant to their interests. Further, these services sometimes fail to enable full text access, because of licensing restrictions, a lack of lenders, or the borrowing institution's exhaustion of its borrowing quota respecting a particular journal. In addition, lengthy fulfillment times sometimes result in delivery after an article is no longer needed or no longer current.

A second possible response is that authors will solve this problem themselves, by taking the initiative to post article metadata, including abstracts, and even the full text if the publisher grants permission, on preprint services such as SSRN, or scholarly or institutional repositories, such as the bepress Legal Repository. To be sure, some authors of articles published in the journals discussed here have indeed taken it upon themselves to post their articles on preprint services, where they can provide abstracts and sometimes full text on the open Web. This results in improved awareness of — and often free or low-cost access to the full text of — the articles among the legal and nonlegal communities. See, e.g., Dr. Bell's article described above, and the preprint of Surya Deva's article, "Public Interest Litigation in India: A Critical Review," posted on SSRN.

However, placing the burden on authors to publish metadata and full text of their articles on the free Web is an inferior approach to metadata and content distribution, for several reasons. First, authors may lack the time, staff support, or technical expertise to publish metadata or full text of their articles. Second, even if authors possess the time and resources to post article metadata and content themselves, an economist would regard such activity as an undesirable use of the authors' time, because the activity squanders the social benefits arising from the division of labor. These authors specialize in research and writing in their areas of expertise. Worktime that they spend on other tasks — such as posting to preprint services — is time wasted in terms of social benefit. Third — and in notable contrast to authors — publishers are well suited to publish metadata about their articles, both because they have expertise in publishing, and because they have expertise in the processing and display of metadata.

Fourth, leaving the publishing of journal article metadata and content to authors and preprint services results in lost revenue to journal publishers. If these publishers were to post rich metadata about their journal articles on their own Websites, in conjunction with ecommerce services allowing readers to purchase full text of individual articles, publishers could realize new revenue. These online sales would likely augment, rather than cannibalize, the publishers' journal subscription revenues, because most of these one-off online purchasers are likely to be nonsubscribers. Moreover, article ecommerce systems can be configured so as to cultivate repeat customers — for example, by offering new article alert services via email or RSS (see, e.g., here) — and to encourage those repeat customers to become subscribers. To the extent that some subscribers would cancel their subscriptions in favor of purchasing relevant articles piecemeal online, publishers can compensate for such cancellations by adjusting their ecommerce pricing models.

Do Other Publishers Hide Their Treasure?

Commercial legal publishers' unwillingness to adopt these online metadata display and sales techniques seems particularly odd, since such unwillingness runs counter to industry practice. A large community of scholarly and professional publishers, including those who publish legal journals — such as Taylor and Francis, Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, and Oxford University Press, among many others — currently offers rich article-level metadata with abstracts on the open Internet — even for articles before they are published in print (see, e.g., here) — as well as opportunities to purchase individual journal articles online (see, e.g., here), and services alerting readers of new content (see, e.g., here).

The Costs of Hiding Treasure

That is, the current state of metadata and ecommerce provision by the publishers discussed in the "Some Examples" section above seems to result in a lose-lose-lose-lose situation:

• Potential readers in the legal community often do not receive timely news of articles relevant to them, and when they do, the absence of abstracts often leaves them with insufficient information with which to determine whether to acquire the full text;
• Potential nonlegal readers often never learn of articles relevant to them;
• Authors — trying to plug this metadata and content gap — waste precious time and resources better spent on research and writing; and
• Publishers leave untapped a potentially substantial stream of additional revenue.

What's the Problem?

What could be inhibiting these legal publishers from exposing their metadata on the open Internet, and offering article-level online purchasing options, particularly considering that:

• These publishers' production processes are already primarily digital;
• Effective ejournal platforms — such as Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems (OJS) — are available free of charge;
• Journal article ecommerce expertise and technology are readily available, and, in at least one instance, present within the publisher's own corporate family; and
• Given the size of the global market, the potential revenues from individual article-level purchases, as well as from new subscriptions arising from repeat online customers, seem substantial?

What do you think is holding these commercial legal publishers back? I welcome your thoughts on answers to this question, which will be the topic of my next column.

Introduction: Citizen Lawmaking Online

Citizen lawmaking seems ideally suited to today's Web. Government social media and online deliberation resources, coupled with widespread access to broadband in many nations, and much improved Internet access to laws, combine to furnish citizens with abundant means for participating in the creation of laws online. The category of information and communication technologies (ICTs) that enable online citizen involvement in lawmaking has many names, including eConsultation, eDemocracy, eParliament, eParticipation, eRulemaking, and Dr. Beth Simone Noveck's "collaborative democracy".

In the U.S., citizens in many jurisdictions already have the opportunity to participate in eRulemaking — the promulgation of new or amended administrative regulations through notice-and-comment rulemaking processes operated on online platforms, such as the U.S. federal Regulations.gov system, and experimental systems such as the University of Albany's DeER (Deliberative E-Rulemaking) Project, Princeton CITP's FedThread system, Cornell's Regulation Room, and WestEd's GovPulse. Before long, U.S. citizens are likely to engage in lawmaking respecting statutes and constitutional amendments via initiatives, referenda, or ballot propositions administered online.

The Key Question

Given that today's ICT environment seems a perfect match for citizen involvement in lawmaking, it's natural that a great deal of eGovernment research and development activity concerns creating and improving eParticipation systems. Designers of eParticipation systems consider a host of factors when building such systems. This post will address just one of these factors: When nonlawyer citizens engage in lawmaking online, what do they need to know about the laws they are making?

How to Determine What Information Is Needed?

One approach to answering this question is to consider a closely analogous query: What information about proposed laws is needed by governmental lawmakers — such as legislators, and regulators in administrative agencies — who are not lawyers? For decades, most U.S. legislatures and regulatory agencies have employed lawyers — such as legislative counsel and agency general counsel — to help nonlawyer lawmakers acquire the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about proposed legislation or rules. Since these advisory relationships have developed over many years, the current practices of legislative and agency counsel in advising nonlawyer official lawmakers about proposed laws likely reflect the official nonlawyer lawmakers' actual information needs. Nonlawyer citizen lawmakers likely need the same information about proposed laws that nonlawyer governmental lawmakers need. Therefore, there are reasonable grounds for believing that the kinds of information about proposed laws that legislative and agency counsel regularly give to nonlawyer official lawmakers closely resemble the kinds of information that nonlawyer citizen lawmakers need.

What Does the Literature Tell Us?

So what kinds of information about proposed laws do legislative and regulatory counsel in the U.S. give to nonlawyer governmental lawmakers? Here is a summary based on a preliminary examination of the literature:

1. Counsel often explain the policy objectives of the proposed law, the alternative means — other than enactment of the proposed constitutional amendment, statute, or regulation — of achieving those objectives, and the reasons for choosing lawmaking over those alternatives. Such alternatives may include:

• Taking no action, if an existing statute or regulation adequately addresses the issue;
• If the lawmaker is a legislator, and a regulatory agency has authority to regulate respecting the issue, allowing the agency to regulate;
• If resources rather than regulation could address the issue, taking fiscal rather than regulatory action;
• If clarification of the law is needed, requesting an Attorney General's opinion or (where permitted) a judicial advisory opinion; or
• If the lawmaker is a legislator in a jurisdiction in which resolutions have some limited legal effect, pursuing a legislative resolution rather than a statute.

2. Counsel often provide a plain language summary of the proposed law, and a line-by-line, plain-language explanation of the law. The latter is analogous to a literal translation of a foreign-language work into a language understood by the lawmaker.

3. Counsel explain the language choices made in drafting the proposed law, what the alternative language choices were, and why the chosen phrasings were preferred over the alternatives. Counsel's justifications for language choices often include achieving particular legal effects, avoiding legal challenges, or reconciling conflicting legal or political interests of stakeholders.

4. Counsel explain in detail the context of the proposed law. This context has at least five dimensions:

• First, there may be a broad policy framework for the proposed law. Often a law is proposed as a component of a largescale policy initiative that may be implemented by legal and non-legal means. For example, a governmental policy initiative to reduce cigarette smoking may include legal measures such as statutes and administrative regulations, but also non-legal methods such as public service advertising, voluntary collaboration between government officials and private healthcare providers to design health education materials, and industry self-regulation. Lawmakers need to see the full picture of the relevant policy framework, in order to understand the role and effect of the proposed law within that framework.
• Second, there may be a broad statutory or regulatory framework in which the proposed law will fit. A proposed law could take the form of an amendment to an existing, elaborate body of statutes or regulations. For example, much legislation and regulation today takes the form of long and complex laws having numerous components, but originally conceived as coherent systems, with discernible relationships to particular policy objectives. Notable examples include Revised Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, and Canada's Copyright Act 1985. In many instances, proposed legislation is intended to amend such an existing legal framework. Therefore, in addition to understanding the literal meaning of the proposed law, the lawmaker needs to understand the meaning of broader legal framework that the proposed law is intended to amend, and how the meaning of that broader legal framework would alter if amended by the proposed law. Since broad legal frameworks are often enacted with the intent of implementing particular policies, the lawmaker will need to know, not just the literal meaning of the existing broad legal framework, but the policies underlying that framework, the relationship between those policies and particular provisions of the framework, and how the proposed amendment will affect the way the framework achieves those policy objectives.
• Third, if the proposed law is itself a new, independent, "stand-alone" statute or regulation, then the lawmaker needs to know where the law will be placed in the jurisdiction's statutory or administrative code, because the location of a law in a particular code title, and its proximity to nearby statutes or regulations within that title, affect how courts will interpret the language of the law. For example, a proposed new statute on pass-through business organizations could be codified in the tax title or the business organizations title of the jurisdiction's statutory code, and that choice is likely to affect how courts interpret particular provisions of the statute. Lawmakers need to understand the legal implications of that codification choice, the alternatives, and why the chosen option is preferable to the alternatives.
• Fourth, the lawmaker needs to understand the origins and history of the proposed law. Such origins include the identities and affiliations of the drafters and sponsors of the proposed law; the statements those drafters and sponsors have made respecting the policy basis for the proposed law, as in committee reports or debates; and the statements of members of the public who have commented on the proposed law through hearings or notice-and-comment rulemaking processes.
• Fifth, the lawmaker must understand other contextual factors that courts are likely to consider in construing and interpreting the proposed law. These include canons of statutory construction, principles of equity jurisprudence, public policy principles that courts are permitted or required to consider in certain situations, and case law respecting the area of law addressed by the proposed law. These contextual factors may lead a court to give a meaning to statutory language not apparent from the face of the statute, as when a court uses case law to expand the meaning of a statutory phrase beyond its plain meaning, or interprets a statute as codifying, rather than overruling, a judicial precedent.

5. Counsel explain the likely legal effects of the proposed law. Such effects may occur within the area of law expressly addressed by the proposed law, or may arise in other areas of law. Delegation of regulatory authority provides an example of an effect on laws having the same topic as the proposed law. If the proposed law is a statute that delegates regulatory authority to an administrative agency, the lawmaker must determine whether the statute effectively grants the agency sufficient legal authority to regulate as the lawmaker desires. For instance, the wording of particular statutory provisions could expand or narrow the regulatory agency's authority to regulate respecting particular issues, or render the agency's regulations more or less vulnerable to challenge in court. Counsel also explain the ancillary legal effects of the proposed law; that is, the potential effects on laws other than the legal framework in which the proposed law will fit. For example, if the proposed law would amend a tax statute, laws concerning a range of other tax-sensitive subjects, such as business organizations or family law, could be affected.

6. Counsel explain the likely civil society effects of the proposed law. These may include economic costs and benefits, as well as social, cultural, health, or environmental consequences.

7. Counsel explain the likely public administrative effects of the proposed law. For example, if the proposed law concerns crime, counsel explains the likelihood that the law will be effectively enforced, the probable enforcement costs, and administrative problems likely to result from the law. If the law is a statute that delegates regulatory authority to an administrative agency, counsel explains why one agency was chosen over other possible agencies, the chosen agency's ability to regulate effectively in this area, and the budgetary implications for the agency.

8. Counsel explain the bases for possible legal challenges to the proposed law. Such bases include the content of the record supporting the proposed law, the procedures used to enact the proposed law, and the inconsistency of the proposed law with controlling laws of the lawmaker's jurisdiction, or of a superior jurisdiction (as when a state or provincial statute is arguably preempted by a federal statute or arguably violates a federal constitutional provision).

What Other Sources of Information Are Relevant?

In addition to the views of governmental counsel, the comments of nongovernmental lawyers who participate in the lawmaking process may also be valuable to the lawmaker. Such comments may reveal the interests of stakeholders whose views have not previously been considered, or may contain legal insights missing from official counsel's advice. The lawmaker will want to consider the views of lawyers who testify at hearings or who submit comments through notice-and-comment rulemaking processes. The need for access to this information underscores the desirability for making such testimony and comments available online as soon as possible after submission.

Conclusion, and a Look Ahead

This glimpse at the kinds of information about proposed laws that nonlawyer official lawmakers typically receive suggests that nonlawyer citizens engaging in online lawmaking need a substantial amount of information in order to make informed decisions. In a future post, I'll discuss how developers of eParticipation systems are dealing with the challenges of receiving, organizing, and presenting this information, to maximize the usefulness of this information to nonlawyer citizen lawmakers.

Sources

I consulted the following resources in writing this post. The following list is not a comprehensive list of resources on this topic, but rather represents the results of a preliminary literature review; it excludes treatises, among other important sources:

American Bar Association Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice, Committee on the Status & Future of Federal e-Rulemaking, Achieving the Potential: The Future of Federal E-rulemaking: A Report to Congress and the President (2008).

Terry Carter, Silent Partners, ABA Journal, February 2001, at 22-23 (2001) (Vol. 87, No. 2).

Kathleen Clark, The Ethics of Representing Elected Representatives, Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 61, No. 2, 31-45 (1998).

Jeffrey J. Coonjohn, A Brief History of the California Legislative Counsel Bureau and the Growing Precedential Value of Its Digest and Opinions, 25 Pacific Law Journal 211-235 (1994) (Issue No. 2).

Frank H. Edwards, The Office of Legislative Counsel, Georgia State Bar Journal, February 1987, 114-115, 154 (Vol. 23, No. 3).

Michael J. Glennon, Who's the Client? Legislative Lawyering Through the Rear-View Mirror, Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 61 No. 2, 21-30 (1998).

Michelle Grant, Legislative Lawyers and the Model Rules, 14 Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 823-838 (2001) (Issue No. 3).

David A. Marcello, The Ethics and Politics of Legislative Drafting, 70 Tulane Law Review 2437-2464 (1996). (Issue No. 6).

Robert J. Marchant, Representing Representatives: Ethical Considerations for the Legislature's Attorneys, 6 New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy 439-465 (2002) (Issue Nos. 1-2).

Thomas O. McGarity, The Role of Government Attorneys in Regulatory Agency Rulemaking, Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 61, No. 1, 19-32 (1998).

Kevin C. Powers, Inside the World of the Legislative Lawyer, Nevada Lawyer, July 2002, at 7, 34-35 (Vol. 10, No. 2).

Roger Purdy, Professional Responsibility for Legislative Drafters: Suggested Guidelines and Discussion of Ethics and Role Problems, 11 Seton Hall Legislative Journal 67-120 (1987) (Issue No. 1).

The relationship of legal information to context is a key dimension of recent developments in legal informatics scholarship and innovation. These developments range from investigations in law and psychology to political and moral theory, from explorations in artificial intelligence and law to legal information theory, and from research on the legal Semantic Web to the creation of new applications that help nonlawyers contextualize legal information.

Professor Guido Boella, Dr. Guido Governatori, and colleagues are exploring ways to model legal contexts to aid automated legal reasoning. In their recent paper these scholars show how defeasible logic can be employed to represent the policy context of legal rules. Their approach could improve computers' capacity to assess legal compliance, and could contribute to the automation of the interpretation of legal language.

Recent research in law and psychology — particularly the research highlighted by The Situationist blog published by the Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School — emphasizes how context affects people's understanding and use of legal information. For example, Professor Adam Benforado's new paper explores how spatial situations affect the law-related behavior and thinking of various participants in criminal cases, while another of his recent articles argues that the context of the videotape evidence at issue in Scott v. Harris had a profound and unacknowledged influence on the way the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted that evidence.

In her recent post and her dissertation in progress, Christine Kirchberger explores the importance of context for making legal information usable by nonlawyers. Kirchberger highlights legal Semantic Web technology — such as that discussed in Dr. N\'faria Casellas\rquote s recent post on legal ontologies — and government eportals — like Austria's HELP service — as promising means of offering valuable context to nonlawyers using legal information. Kirchberger quotes Tom Bruce's 2001 paper on the need to build flexible systems that can present legal information in a range of different contexts, suited to the needs of different users of those systems.

Some free access to law services are providing this kind of contextual information by building secondary sources into their systems. For example, the Cornell Legal Information Institute's Wex legal encyclopedia — written collaboratively by volunteers — explains key legal concepts and terms that appear in the Institute's primary collections. As Staffan Malmgren explains in this recent post, his lagen.nu free access to law service for Sweden includes commentaries, written by means of an innovative crowdsourcing method.

Automatic linking is another method of furnishing context to users of legal information, as hotlinked citations enable quick retrieval of full text sources that make up legal context. Free access to law services such as CanLII provide such technology for linking to primary legal sources — as Ivan Mokanov explains in this recent post. In his recent thesis, conference paper, and post, Olivier Charbonneau proposes several ideas for delivering contextual information to users of free legal systems. These include personalized user interfaces; automatic display of citing sources when a cursor is placed over a passage of a primary legal document; automatic display of relevant commentaries below or alongside a primary legal text; and user ratings of user-contributed commentary, to help nonlawyers assess the quality of content.

Dr. Floris Bex in his recent dissertation and post explains how argument- and narrative-mapping technology can provide valuable context for prosecutors conducting criminal investigations. Dr. Bex describes his and his colleagues' research — and particularly the work of Dr. Susan van den Braak — respecting a variety of applications that provide visual displays of investigators' legal and factual arguments and narrative accounts of alleged crimes. These tools allow investigators to contextualize each relevant fact and point of law within a conceptual framework for their case.

Two current U.S. federal court technology efforts aim to help nonlawyers put legal information in context. JERS, the Jury Evidence Recording System, enables jurors in four U.S. federal district courts to view digital representations of trial evidence and exhibits in the jury deliberation room, and navigate through the information — including via zooming and scrolling — by means of video touchscreen. This access to evidentiary information not only helps each individual juror attain a contextual understanding of the applicable law and facts of the case; it also increases the likelihood that all members of a jury will share the same understanding of the context of the case. On April 27, 2010, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts announced that funding for JERS had been renewed.

Whereas JERS helps jurors place legal information in context, the E Pro Se document assembly application assists self-represented litigants in contextualizing such information. A customization of the A2J Author document assembly program created for use in law school clinics by CALI, the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, and the Chicago-Kent College of Law's Center for Access to Justice and Technology, E Pro Se conducts automated interactive interviews with pro se litigants in U.S. federal district court — for purposes of gathering contextual information from the litigants — and then processes that information to assemble pleadings and other court papers for the litigants. E Pro Se is now available online from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. According to The Third Branch, the federal district court in Minnesota has begun a pilot E Pro Se project, and such a project will shortly begin in the Massachusetts federal district court. (Thanks to CALI's Executive Director John P. Mayer for information on this topic.)

Nonlawyers who participate in policy discussions about proposed laws also need context to understand those laws. Researchers participating in the EU's IMPACT Project are creating tools to provide this context. These tools include argument mapping applications and Semantic Web technology — described in new papers by Professor Tom van Engers and Dr. Adam Wyner — for organizing policy discussions into subject-related threads, with visual displays of the reasoning underlying the arguments that make up the discussion, translation of policy arguments into the preferred language of each user, and Web 2.0 services facilitating users' participation in the discussions.

Professor Helen Nissenbaum has foregrounded the notion of context in the debate over privacy respecting court records. In her new book, Privacy in Context, and in her presentation at the 2010 Princeton Open Government Workshop, Nissenbaum defines the right to privacy as the right to what she calls "contextual integrity," meaning the use or "flow" of information consistent with the norm for information transfer applicable in the particular context — such as home, school, workplace, court, etc. — where the information was first transferred. For Nissenbaum, key characteristics of an information context — the sender of the information, the intended recipient of the information, the subject of the information, the type of information that is shared, and the purposes and goals served by the information context — determine which norm governs information flow in that context. In Nissenbaum's view, when information about individuals flows in a manner consistent with its contextual norm, "contextual integrity" — and those individuals' privacy rights — are considered to have been preserved, but if that information flows in a manner inconsistent with that norm, contextual integrity — and thus the privacy rights of those individuals — are considered to have been breached. Nissenbaum argues that when a new technology — such as a publicly available online database of court records — arises that arguably violates contextual integrity, a presumption should arise in favor of preserving contextual integrity and rejecting the new technology. On Nissenbaum's account, that presumption may be rebutted if the new technology can be shown more effectively to serve both general social values such as social welfare and national security, and also the particular purposes and goals of the original information context. Nissenbaum allows that the new technology might also prevail if it, or some aspect of the information available through it, could be modified to render it superior in vindicating both general and contextual values. Applying Nissenbaum's model to court records would thus entail a careful consideration of a variety of contexts in which those records are generated, the rejection of certain new information technologies, and also negotiations with technologists to determine whether certain new technologies, or the data they process, could be modified so as to render those technologies superior to the original systems in vindicating general and contextual values.

Context thus appears to be a focal point for legal informatics research, at the levels of theory, policy, and systems development. Research activity in this area appears to be vigorous, and embraces many disciplines in addition to law, including computer science, philosophy, political science, psychology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and information science. As the disintermediation of legal information professionals, the unbundling of legal services, and the participation of citizens in policy- and lawmaking proceed, the need can only grow for greater knowledge of how context affects individuals' understanding and use of legal information, and for systems that effectively provide nonlawyers with relevant legal contextual information.