 I would like to say to accommodate people speaking. My name is John Mayer. I'm the executive director of Cali. The Center for Computers is a legal structure. Pardon me while I take my gun out. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Bust in and ask questions or join in the conversations and participate in ways that we all manage it from. So please feel free to be a little loose with the ideas because we want to be able to share those between and amongst all of us. I'm sure Carl will reiterate on that. So, you know, welcome to this workshop on waw.gov and I'll turn it over to the chair. Thanks, John. My name's Jerry Goldman. I'm the director of the ODA project. Some of you may know about this project and one other chance to talk about it in a few minutes. And I'm a faculty member at York West University in the department of political science. When Carl was planning these regional workshops he invited me to be a co-initiator of this event and I'm delighted to be able to have my name listed under Carl's and John's for this workshop. Delighted that you're here. I want to reiterate that this is a relaxed and open environment. The opportunity to ask questions and provoke us and get us to think about our issues is critical. So please be good participants and help us out. So we reach where we'll be objective. This is a great idea, but that idea started from dialogue and interactions with many people and the principal element in these little collections of individuals is Carl Malmour. And it's my light-out turn that's pulling over to him. Carl? Thank you, Jerry and John. I really appreciate Bill Calle of the ODA project hosting this Law.gov workshop. I want to videotape in today's session as we have most of the other workshops and we will put the video online as well as making transcripts. And the purpose of that is to demonstrate that we've had an open process that really has been inclusive and heard all different views. I wanted to make a few remarks just to kind of set the stage for why we're doing Law.gov. Sometimes the most difficult things to do in society are to state the obvious, obvious things like access to justice and access to the law. And sometimes these very basic principles get tortured over time and they turn into the very opposite of what they should be. Abraham Lincoln was the master of that most difficult feat of stating the obvious. And that's a feat of rhetoric. That's a feat of starting the small facts to show big truths. And I want to give you two examples of how Abraham Lincoln was able to do that. In a second inaugural address, in a mere 702 words in less than seven minutes, Lincoln reminded America that there's no winners on a battlefield and that we all face the blame for the tragedy that was a civil war and that there wasn't a victorious north and there wasn't a banquet south that was only a United States of America and that all citizens must bind up with the nation's wounds, working together with matters course none, with charity for all, with firmness for the right. 27 years earlier, Lincoln's first major speech was in 1938 here in Illinois. It was at the Young Men's Leaseham in Springfield. And he spoke on a topic of the perpetuation of our political institutions. Saying that governments would only last if we adhered to a reverence for the Constitution and the laws. Saying that upon the east let the proud fabric of freedom rest as a rock for its basis. Lincoln understood the importance of the law as something that was an alternative to mob violence. He was actually speaking in reaction to a lynching in St. Louis. And he said that the law is something to be breathed by every American mother to the list being bathed that cradles under lap. Let it be taught in schools, in seminaries and in colleges. Let it be written in primers, spelling books and in our acts. Adam Gopnik has a book out called Angels and Angels. And in that book he teaches us that the genius of Lincoln was having seen something large and having found the right words to say it's small. To make the idea of law dot gov real, we've started with many small facts. Rather than patch a plan in the air and say that the law must be available, that the primary legal materials of the United States must be available in bulk and be authenticated. What we've done is started to form a series of workshops starting in January at the Stanford Law School and continuing on to top 10 law schools in the country. We're gonna be ending in June at the Center for American Progress where John Podesta will be our co-host and the Harvard Law School where John Palfrey, the law librarian will be the co-host of that workshop. And we've been learning a lot from this national conversation. This is the 11th of these workshops. Over 500 people have attended these. And it's been a true spectrum. It has not just been a bunch of free law radicals. We've had strong participation from Lexis Nexus, for example, their CEO will be at the John Podesta workshop. We've had Justia and Fast Case and Bloomberg and the other vendors all participating. A lot of members of the judiciary. And at each of these workshops we've learned something different. At Stanford, we heard Anurag Acharya tell us about how you put case law into Google Scholar. We heard from Jonathan Zittrain on how grassroots efforts can reach tipping points and affect great change in society. At Columbia Law School, we saw the CTO of Lexis Nexus sitting next to the deputy CTO of the United States discussing how to make the law more available. At the Colorado Law School, we learned from the Colorado Secretary of State, the chair of their Judiciary Committee and a justice of the Supreme Court the difficulties they face in placing state law and city law and county law materials online. We just finished the workshop for the University of California at Berkeley where the Secretary of State David Bowen told us that we can really change the way people own this country if they know how it works. In addition to these workshops, there's been a series of grassroots efforts of working groups. And one of the most prominent is the National Inventory of Legal Material which is a spontaneous uprising of the librarians of this country, the law librarians. And what they've been doing is looking at small facts that may have some big surprises. It was a surprise to learn for example that Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi and Wyoming just a list of few states all prominently worn their state statutes may not be copied without written permission. Sarah Glassmeyer, who you're gonna hear from a little later tweeted that she's bought fireworks with less warnings and disclaimers than the ones many state legislatures slap on their online law efforts. We found that 21 states assert copyright over state regulations. In California, over 50% of the over 408 cities assert copyright over their municipal codes. To accept the click through contract agreement to raise the official opinions of the state courts of California, you have to agree you will not share the materials. And there is a specific prohibition against quote public and non-profit uses of the official reports without license. You can obviously buy a license, but they're not cheap. In fact, it costs 10 to $50 million to buy enough case law to put yourself in the business of offering things. And that is an impediment to innovation and business. I think that's one of the reasons that we're seeing companies like Lexus, Nexus and other vendors participate in this process. But it's a huge impediment to research, legal researchers are unable to examine our district court filings to see if there are privacy violations or discrimination in civil rights or patent litigation across the different districts. Students are unable to access those same district court filings. 63 of 66 law schools surveyed don't let their students access the PACER system. It's an impediment to justice. Many lawyers do not have access to the materials they need to do their job. And by lawyers, I don't mean just solo practitioners. I don't mean jailhouse lawyers, pro se. I mean, obviously the public interest lawyers, but even lawyers in the government, in the Department of Justice, sometimes get memos saying, please stop doing so much research because we're over budget. When we are done with these workshops and this process is ending in mid-June, we will be putting together a report documenting this process. One reason we are doing transcripts in video. And then we will attempt to begin, many of us, not just me, begin briefing members of the government about what is a perceived issue, a problem, that the laws of the United States are not available as readily as they should be from the issuing agencies. That if you are an issuer of the law, a regulation of a legislature, a court opinion, you must make that material available. You should authenticate. 15 years ago, you didn't need to digitally sign things. But 15 years ago, you did put a rubber stamp on every filing coming in over as a clerk of the court. And in today's digital world, there's no reason why we can't be using a digital rubber stamp to authenticate this material. What is gratifying is that government seems to be listening to this process. The Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission has just sent in a letter saying that he is highly supportive of this process and would like a copy of the report to be delivered to the Commission for their consideration. The United States Senate has sent a letter of Senator Lieberman asking for a copy of the report to be delivered to his committee. We will be doing an event next week at the House of Representatives with Congresswoman Loughran and Congressman Lundgren and Eugene Meyer, the President of the Federalist Society and Roberta Schaefer, the Law Library of Congress to talk about access to the law and why it's important. And the Ninth Circuit of the Court of Appeals has invited us to come in for five minutes and brief the full court about the law and how to process. So today we have an agenda and hope is that it will be a deep guide into a couple topics that are important and that you will participate in this process. If people ask questions because we are videotaping, I will ask the people here at the front to repeat those questions so that we can hear it later on the video. We're gonna begin with a look at the Supreme Court of the United States. We're really happy that Jerry Goldman happens to be here in Chicago. The Oye Project is the face of the Supreme Court for many people. It is surely the most comprehensive collection of Supreme Court materials, including some extensive reworking of the oral arguments. He is joined by Lee Epstein from Northwestern and Jeff Parsons who has also been instrumental in making the Oye Project work. They will speak for an hour about the Supreme Court because it is arguably our most important law-making entity and in many ways one of the most neglected. If you wanna get a Supreme Court brief for example, that's actually very difficult to do and you would think if you were reading Marbury versus Madison, you might wanna read the briefs of the lawyers that argued in front of the Supreme Court. At 1130, David Curle is here from Outsell and I don't know if you folks know Outsell but they are the Gartner Group of the legal industry. They are the ones that monitor the retail industry. They look at the size of the market and the size of the players and David is gonna give us an overview on the size of the business and how it functions. We'll have an hour for lunch and ask this general discussion. And then at 1 p.m. we have Professor Stath from Chicago, Kent here is gonna talk about access to justice. Can we have access to justice under our current system of distributing legal materials? Are there things we can change? At 130, John Mayer from Cali is gonna talk about open law and education. About how making primary legal materials is not just about letting prosaic prisoners get access to a few priests or letting a few citizens who don't know how to read the law and aren't certified. This really is about how we teach our law students how to learn the law and argue the law and practice the law. At 2 p.m. we're gonna have a fun session. It's a national inventory of legal materials. We have five prominent law librarians and there's many others here in the audience are gonna talk about some of the materials they found as they survey the status of access to materials in Illinois, in Indiana, in Kentucky and some of the other jurisdictions. And then finally we'll have 15 minutes for kind of a conclusion of the workshop and we will end promptly at three o'clock. And so I wanna turn it over to Jerry now.