Texas Law School, May 4, 2010
Co-Convenors: Harry S. (Terry) Martin III and Carl Malamud
Tarlton Law Library
The University of Texas Law School
727 East Dean Keeton Street
Austin, TX 78705
Registration and Questions to Terry Martin via email: TMartin at
law.utexas.edu
We would like to invite you to a Law.gov session at the University of
Texas Law School on May 4, 2010, from 10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. Law.Gov
is an effort to create a report documenting exactly what it would take
to create a distributed registry and repository of all primary legal
materials in the United States.
By primary legal materials, we mean all materials that have the force
of law and are part of the law-making process, including briefs and
opinions from the judiciary; reports, hearings, and laws from the
legislative branch; and regulations, audits, grants, and other
materials from the executive branch. Creating the system from open
source software building blocks will allow states and municipalities
to make their materials available as well.
Law.gov would be similar to Data.Gov, providing bulk data and feeds to
commercial, non-commercial, and governmental organizations wishing to
build web sites, operate legal information services, or otherwise use
the raw materials of our democracy.
There are numerous issues related to this proposal. Archive.org wants
to be sure this information stays available. Citability.org wants to
be sure the links stay effective. The American Association of Law
Librarians produced a State-by-State Report on Authentication of
Online Legal Resources in 1997 at the AALL National Summit on
Authentic Legal Information in the Digital Age. The Texas report was
prepared by Marcelino A. Estrada, then of the Texas State Law Library.
A summary of this report as related to Texas is attached. The National
Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws now has a Committee
on State Electronic Materials and hopes to produce a uniform law: the
Authentication and Preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials
Act.
Similar Law.gov sessions are being held around the country focusing on
various aspects of the situation. Announcements of the other meetings
are here: http://groups.google.com/group/law-dot-gov. Carl's general
info page is here: http://public.resource.org/law.gov/. The exact
agenda for the Texas meeting is still being worked out and your early
involvement will help shape our time on May 4th.
