The Legal Information Institute
The co-founder of the world’s first legal information website will be heading a project to improve digital access to federal legislative information.
Thomas Bruce, an ABA Journal Legal Rebel, helped Cornell Law School put legal information online before the web even existed. He is director of the school’s Legal Information Institute, a nonprofit group dedicated to making the law available online, without charge. Now he will work with the Library of Congress to better organize and present materials such as congressional bills, presidential documents, committee reports, public laws, and the U.S. Code, according to a press release.
The project will redesign “legislative-metadata models” for the Library of Congress, the Legal Information Institute says on its website. The aim is to improve the material that can be retrieved, linked and referenced by the free THOMAS search system used by the public as well as by Congress’ own internal searching system. “This sounds like really geeky stuff (and it is), but the effects for government and for citizens should be pretty big,” the Legal Information Institute says on its LII Announce blog.
“The discovery we’ve made is that there is an enormous audience and appetite for legal information that goes well beyond lawyers and the population lawyers think of,” says Bruce, 55, who isn’t a lawyer, but rather describes himself as a computer guy who wandered into a law school one day and never left.
“Legal research is like insurance,” Bruce says. “People buy insurance only up to the value of the goods they are insuring. My thought is the less expensive it is to do good, competent legal research, the lower the cost to avoid risk.” And in a field dominated by costly legal research behemoths, Bruce hopes to provide “insurance” not only to lawyers but also to everyday business people.
Link: http://www.law.cornell.edu/