Contact: Linda MyersOffice: 607-255-9735E-Mail: [email protected]Contact: Kathleen RourkeOffice: 607-255-7477E-Mail: [email protected]
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Today, anybody with access to the World Wide Web can find and read any of the current provisions of the U.S. Code. Those fundamental laws, which govern everything from federal elections to fair labor standards, are accessible at the web site of Cornell University Law School's Legal Information Institute (LII).
Soon people will be able to retrieve the law as it stood at the time of a particular legal decision or past event, thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Red Hat Center, a nonprofit foundation based in Durham, N.C., that seeks to make shared information, ideas and culture freely available to the public.
The LII, which provides free public access to a vast collection of U.S. laws, court decisions and related legal materials, is Cornell's most heavily linked-to site, the target of more than 125,000 links from sites around the globe and more than 9 million hits a week. The Red Hat grant will fund key improvements to the LII's web version of the code, including the creation of a data system that will let users read any portion of the code as it was in effect at earlier points in time.
"We are grateful to the Red Hat Center and very pleased about the grant," said Lee Teitelbaum, the Allan R. Tessler Dean and Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. "It will allow the Law School to accelerate our pioneering efforts to provide free access to the laws that govern our country for citizens everywhere -- from high school teachers in Oregon to lawyers in Zurich to government officials in Beijing."
Professor of Law Peter W. Martin, who along with Tom Bruce is co-director of LII, said: "Tom and I are gratified by the Red Hat Center's recognition of our institute's commitment to free and effective public access to legal information and are enormously excited by the improvements the grant will make possible. They will give people more flexible access to the U.S. Code's provisions and enable them to see and pursue connections between those provisions and related legal documents. Our conviction is that this will demonstrate even more forcefully what open access to law can mean."
Public access to current legal information in the public domain has been limited by the high costs of older publishing methods, explained Martin. Launched in 1992, LII has led the movement to improve public access to law in the United States by placing key legal materials on the Internet in a non-proprietary format, structured in ways that give people unrestricted reuse, he said.
LII's online U.S. Code is a model of open architecture that allows free and direct public access to quality legal information organized in a searchable way, added Bruce. The changes funded by the grant will allow users to extract large sections of the code in formats suitable for PCs, personal digital devices or printers and will link to relevant court cases, regulations and explanatory material, Bruce said.
"LII was one of the first sites providing ordinary citizens with online access to the real text of laws and court decisions," said John Gilmore, Red Hat Center board member and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I'm proud that the Red Hat Center is helping the Cornell law web site improve the public's understanding of the law."
Red Hat Center supports the growth of a healthy and robust information commons and public domain, through grants, programs and partnerships in the areas of law, medicine education, media, technology, academic research and the arts.
For more information about Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute, contact Peter Martin, (607) 255-4619, or visit http://lii.law.cornell.edu . For more information about Red Hat Center contact Tawnya Louder-Reynolds, (919) 549-8388, ext. 230, or visit http://www.rhcenter.org .
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