Vice Dean John G. Palfrey of the Harvard Law School recently gave a lecture entitled The Path of Legal Information, on 9 November 2010, at the Harvard Law School. In his lecture, Dean Palfrey proposes the development of an open, interoperable system of digital legal information, and describes possible consequences of such a system forRead… Read more »
In 2011, Public.Resource.Org will publish a weekly release — called the Report of Current Opinions (RECOP) — of all slip and final opinions — in HTML — “of the appellate and supreme courts of the 50 [U.S.] states and the [U.S.] federal government,” according to a new post by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org. According toRead… Read more »
The Legal Bug Tracker — an open source database of the National Inventory of Legal Materials — for recording instances in which U.S. jurisdictions do not conform to the free access to law principles advanced by the Law.gov legal open government data movement — is now operating, according to a recent post by Carl MalamudRead… Read more »
Google, Inc. has provided a grant of $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to fund the Law.gov legal open government data project. The grant is given as part of Google’s Project 10^100. Click here for Carl Malamud’s announcement of the grant. Click here for more information about Law.gov.
The U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has released application programming interfaces (APIs) for four of its data collections, including FCC licensing data, through the License View API. Respecting the licensing data, the Commission’s instructional page says: The FCC issues licenses for use of the nation’s airwaves and other purposes. License View API provides snapshots suchRead… Read more »
An interview has been posted with Harlan Yu of the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), about the development of RECAP, the controversy over charging fees for access to court records through PACER, privacy respecting court records, the Law.gov legal open government data project, Mr. Yu’s Ph.D. research, and his presentation entitled GovernmentRead… Read more »
Free online access to U.S. federal legal information has been recommended in the National Broadband Plan released by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission on March 16, 2010. The Plan’s recommendation 15.1 seems consistent with the principles of the Law.gov legal open government data movement: Recommendation 15.1: The primary legal documents of the federal government shouldRead… Read more »
John Sheridan, Head of e-Services and Strategy at The [UK] National Archives — and a member of our community — has posted Legislation.gov.uk, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School. In his post, Mr. Sheridan describes the origins and functionality of Legislation.gov.uk, the innovative new official legislativeRead… Read more »
John L. Sheridan of the UK National Archives and his team have released Legislation.gov.uk, which presents UK legislation as Linked Data, and provides free public access — including bulk access via RESTful API — to UK legislation and legislative metadata in a range of formats, including XML. Legislation.gov.uk includes both statutes and statutory instruments. ClickRead… Read more »
The Law.gov Principles and Declaration — issuing from the Law.gov legal open government data project — are now available. The Principles and Declaration — which are also being referred to as The Law.gov Core Principles — begin by offering a definition of “primary legal materials.” The Principles and Declaration then set forth ten “principles [that]Read… Read more »