 I'm here, really, to do a brief warm-up for one of the men who inspired me and I think should inspire all of you. Back in 1993, when the World Wide Web was in its infancy, Carl Malamud helped put the SEC, Edgar Database online, put the Patent Office online from the outside, actually ran some of the first big government websites as a non-government person and then actually donated them to the federal government as a way of bootstrapping the federal government web presence. I mean, this is a guy who's incredibly prescient at his urging and with his help and actually I was, I should say, he convened with my help an incredible meeting about open data which really kicked off my thinking about this area. He is really the father, I think, of open government in America and he's now working to free the law, which he says is America's operating system. Please give a very, very warm welcome and a very big debt of gratitude to my good friend Carl Malamud. Good afternoon. Thank you, Tim. In September of last year, I stood before you at the Government 2.0 Summit and spoke about primary legal materials, the statutes, opinions, regulations and other rules that govern our daily lives as a society. If code is law, then the law is America's operating system and in my talk, I laid out the history of how this common good has been subdivided and fenced off. Our democracy is based on the rule of law and access to justice. But how can we be a nation of laws, not a nation of men? How can we have due process under the law? How can we have equal protection under the law when the law has been locked up behind a cash register, stamped with an unwarranted copyright assertion and then shrink-wrapped in a click-through license agreement creating private parcels from the public domain? My talk was in the morning and the Government 2.0 Summit ended with a keynote discussion later that day between Tim O'Reilly and Andrew McLaughlin, the Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States. Tim asked Andrew what his takeaways from the summit were and Andrew said one of his takeaways was Carl.gov, which he explained meant that there were some things that were clearly obvious that the Federal Government should be doing and that the idea that things that have the force of law are not freely available to everybody in the country is appalling and that the White House should be using its moral authority and convening power and perhaps even more direct measures to get data out into the open. While the prospect of Carl.gov was certainly intriguing, I called up the White House and suggested that a way cooler domain name would be law.gov, a distributed, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States, reliable bulk access to the raw materials of our democracy from the August pronouncements of the Supreme Court across all three branches of government, across all 50 states, down to the counties and cities, the water districts and school districts. Sometimes the most difficult things to communicate are those most obvious, principles like access to the law so we may have access to justice. Abraham Lincoln was the master of that most difficult feat of rhetoric, showing us the obvious when the obvious has been clouded by a fog that gradually accumulates until we all forget where we started and what we stand for. In his second inaugural address, a mere 702 words delivered in less than seven minutes, Lincoln reminded America that there are no winners on the battlefield, that we all faced the blame for the tragedy that was the Civil War, there was no victorious North, there was no vanquished South, there was only the United States of America, and that all citizens must bind up the nation's wounds, working together with malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right. 27 years earlier, in Lincoln's first major speech, his 1838 address to the Young Man's Lyceum of Springfield, he spoke on the topic of the perpetuation of our political institutions, saying that our government would only last if we adhered to a reverence for the Constitution and laws, saying that upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest as the rock for its basis. Lincoln understood the importance of the law as something to be breathed by every American mother to the lifting babe that rattles on her lap, let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges, let it be written in primers, spelling books, and almanacs. Adam Gopnik, in his book Angels and Ages, teaches us that the genius of Lincoln was having seen something large and having found the right words to say it's small, using small facts to build a big truth. To make the idea of law.gov real, we have started with small facts and many questions, a national conversation in the form of a series of workshops that began in January at the Stanford Law School, continuing on to a dozen top law schools around the country, and ending in June next month at the Center for American Progress and then Harvard. We have learned much from this national conversation. At Stanford, Jonathan Zittrain explained how grassroots efforts can reach a tipping point and then change the world. At Columbia Law School, we saw the chief architect of Lexus Nexus and Beth Novak, the deputy CTO of the United States, sitting side by side discussing how to make the law available to all. At Colorado Law School, we learned about Western law from the Colorado Secretary of State, the chair of their Judiciary Committee, and a justice of their Supreme Court. At the University of California workshop, we heard California Secretary of State Deborah Bowen tell us we can really change the way people own their country if they know how it works. In addition to these 15 workshops, we have seen the spontaneous formation of grassroots working groups, such as the creation by law librarians of a national inventory of legal materials, an effort to document the state of our code. What these librarians have found are many small facts that perhaps might be a big surprise. It was a surprise to learn that the states of Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi and Wyoming to list just a few examples all prominently warn that their state statutes may not be copied without written permission. As librarian Sarah Glassmeyer tweeted, I've bought fireworks with less warnings and disclaimers than the one some state legislatures slap on their online law offerings. The librarians have found that 21 states assert copyright over state regulations. They have found that in California, to access the official reports of the courts, you have to accept a click through license agreement where you agree not to share the materials with a specific prohibition against public and nonprofit use. With these many small facts, we hope to present this fall in the form of a report and recommendations, the case that the infrastructure for our legal system must change, that America's operating system can and must become open source. The United States Senate has already requested a copy of the law docket of report as has the Federal Trade Commission. The House of Representatives hosted a bipartisan law docket event two days ago and the Ninth Circuit of the Court of Appeals of the United States has requested a briefing. This conversation, while many years in the making, really began to take off at the government 2.0 summit last September when we traded Andrew McLaughlin's Carl.gov for a shot at law.gov. There is no more valuable piece of furniture than a well-made soapbox and the best carpenter in the public domain has to be Tim O'Reilly, who has created many platforms we can all share, places to meet with our peers, combine our voices to make big things from small pieces to work on things that matter. Just as the open source convention brings together the programmers of Pearl and Python, just as the Maker Fair has inspired a generation of what President Obama in his first inaugural address so aptly called the risk takers, the doers, the makers of things, the government 2.0 expos and summits are becoming a place where we can all work on ways to make our government reflect who we are as a people, to make government reflect the better angels of our nature, a government where the rule of law is breathed by every American and access to justice becomes part of the proud fabric of freedom. Thank you.