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 »
Harlan Yu of the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) has posted Assessing PACER’s Access Barriers, on the CITP blog Freedom to Tinker. Mr. Yu’s post assesses the preliminary report of a study of PACER by the U.S. federal courts, and described in the new issue of Third Branch. While that report indicatesRead… Read more »
Mike Wash, CIO of the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), has been honored as “Federal Player of the Week” by The Washington Post and The Partnership for Public Service, with a profile story in The Washington Post. The article focuses on Mr. Wash’s innovative development of GPO’s FDsys content management system, and his commitment toRead… 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 »
Stephen Schultze and Harlan Yu, both of the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, today announced (here and here) the launching of The RECAP Archive, a new Web interface to RECAP, the free database of U.S. federal court documents. The RECAP Archive enables searching and browsing by court, case name, docket number, PACER caseRead… Read more »
Judge Dory Reiling, mag. iur., Ph.D., Vice President of the Amsterdam District Court, has posted IT and the Access to Justice Crisis, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School. In her post — which is based on a chapter in her recent book entitled Technology for Justice:Read… 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 »