 Thank you, John. Thanks for the remarks and for hosting us today here at the Center for American Progress. And thanks to all of you for coming to this 14th Law.gov workshop. Law.gov is an idea, an idea that the primary legal materials of the United States are the rules of our society, of the raw materials of our democracy, and that these materials should be and easily could be more readily available for all to use. The sophistication and complicated nature of primary legal materials in the United States over the last two centuries has brought out the best in American innovation and in the practice of the mechanics of American jurisprudence. Henry Wheaton created the Golden Book of American Law when in 1816 he started reporting the Marshall Court, establishing a record for the Supreme Court and helping to establish the standards for reporting for all of our courts. The National Reporter System was created by John West in 1876 as a weekly newsletter about the courts in Minnesota, and by 1887 had evolved into a system covering every state jurisdiction with a standard citation system, well-structured metadata, professional summaries of the key points of law. In the early 1990s, the federal judiciary created PACER, a system that the honorable Jay Rich Leonard, one of the architects of PACER recounts, is the most robust and comprehensive access program in any court system in the world currently. He goes on to say, those of us who have had a hand in it over the years are proud that we originated it entirely within the federal courts without any external requirements, showing what remains our complete internal commitment to transparency and accountability. Judge Leonard is correct. These are great accomplishments and they should be commended. They served the legal profession well, and they served democracy well. William Jennings Bryan, in his famous cross of gold speech, said that changing conditions make new issues and that the principles upon which democracy rests are as everlasting as the hills, but they must be applied to new conditions as they arise. The Internet is a new condition that has arisen, and we must once again apply the principles upon which democracy rests. For the last six months, Law.gov has been a national conversation about our legal system and how primary legal materials are distributed. The conversation began in January at the Stanford Law School and concludes this week here at the Center for American Progress later this week at the Harvard Law School. Fifteen workshops around the country have involved 650 participants. As we've examined the basic premise of Law.gov, government institutions that make the law, entities that originate primary legal materials, these jurisdictions should make their work product available in bulk with no restrictions on use, and this work product should be held in authenticated, well-formatted, and complete repositories. This principle goes across all three branches of government, reaches a lowliest water district through the cities, counties, and states, to the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the President. By primary legal materials, we mean the work product of these lawmaking institutions, including their documents of primary authority, but also the supporting documents they issue that one must use to interpret the law. Now, this is a slippery slope, a definition that's most clear on the peaks of our legal system, and becomes harder to apply as we descend from the hills into the depths of the lower jurisdiction. So for the Congress of the United States, this means not only the public laws, the statutes at large, the U.S. code, but also the hearings, reports, and rules of the House and the Senate. Given the place of the U.S. Congress in our society, this also means that the full archive, all the laws, and all the hearings, and all the reports should be available. For the Supreme Court, I'm sorry, for other legislative bodies, such as a municipal council, the collection need not be as complete, but even a municipal council should make available in bulk with no restrictions the current ordinances they promulgate. For the Supreme Court of the United States, this certainly means all the opinions and briefs and oral arguments should be made available as an authenticated repository signed by the court and accessible to all. And again, as we move down into the 7,436 state courts, or the 3,140 U.S. counties, or the 19,289 incorporated municipalities, the definition of primary legal material should be adjusted to meet the circumstances. There's been a tendency in our courts to avoid confronting the question of what's public and what is private. There are clearly cases it should be sealed, information that should be redacted for security or privacy reasons, social security cases, family law, bankruptcy, all pose very difficult issues of what should be public and what should be private. But we can't depend on security through obscurity, thinking that we can avoid the hard decisions on what to publish simply by saying the materials are only available for those with a credit card. Security through obscurity doesn't work in the internet age, and our courts must confront the issues directly of what is public, not just say that the records are public for the rich and therefore are safe. There's a number of uses of legal materials that are not possible under the current system. Uses that are forestalled because of the restrictions on access, restrictions that control how the legal materials can be used. Even the multi-billion dollar legal information industry is not well served by the current system and it's a strong participation of our commercial colleagues in the law.gov process. The PACER system for access to our federal trial courts is a good example of inequitable restrictions on access to the law. PACER proceeds funded $129 million in 2009 expenditures for the administrative office of the U.S. courts. A revenue stream they've come to depend upon to purchase courtroom technology and they're loathed to relinquish. PACER has over one million account holders. The administrative office, a conference of the courts, is proud that they waive fees that are $10 a quarter or less and they say that over 50% of their users don't end up getting billed. But $10 per quarter at 8 cents per page translates into four 30-page documents and you can't do a lot of serious research with four 30-page documents every three months. So you have to think that perhaps the demand for these materials is artificially constrained by the price. We should not forget that if you want to be one of those one million account holders you have to have a valid credit card and if you don't have a valid credit card you can go petition a judge for free access but I'm not convinced that petitioning a federal judge is a lower barrier to access. So what uses are not possible under the current system established for PACER? In the law.gov process in the last few months we've heard a few very compelling examples. First, many valid public interest uses of the bulk data in PACER are essentially prohibited. When my organization was able to audit 20 million pages of PACER documents, documents which would have cost over $1.5 million to purchase at retail, we found 30 district courts in substantial violation of our privacy laws. That audit of 30 district courts led to a change in the judicial conference privacy procedures but the audit was only a small portion of the federal district courts and our audit did not extend to the bankruptcy courts. We cannot afford the price to continue the audit, a price tag of millions of dollars, a barrier to access that stopped our efforts dead in their tracks. I put it to you that being able to audit the district courts of the United States for privacy violations, for discrimination in the application of civil rights laws, or any other examination of how our system of justice functions is technically possible today, and only a paywall keeps us from performing those valuable public functions. It's not just applications like legal research and public accountability that suffer when the law is not available. It's our system of legal education. A survey of 66 law schools found that 63 of them do not let their law students access PACER because of cost considerations. Our law students do not learn from our federal trial courts because of the cost, and law students are not the only ones who suffer. Most other semi-professional uses, such as journalism and business research, are all self rationing because of the cost. There's two other effects of the paywall on a system such as PACER, and effects are both about innovation, innovation in the legal market and innovation in government. Innovation in the legal market has been slow and painful for the last 20 years, and this is because the law has been parceled out to a series of exclusive concessionaires, private fences around the public domain, which has meant that acquiring the rules of our society, America's operating system, if you will, acquiring the source code is an expensive proposition indeed, and it's hard to understand why it's not open source. The estimate to purchase rights for a decent collection of case law statutes and regulatory materials in the United States is 10 to 50 million dollars. If you want to be an internet startup, if you have a better idea how to get the law to consumers or an idea for a better citator or fact checking system, you need big bucks to get started. That barrier to innovation is large enough that even Google took two years searching around for a decent collection of case law before they were able to purchase the cases to add to their Google Scholar product. Artificial barriers to entry have meant little innovation in the private sector, and the innovation we've seen is big company innovation, which is of course useful and necessary to serve large enterprises such as the big law firms, but the mind-bending startup, the innovative new business model, the previously unthought of niche player, those are not possible today. There's a flip side to innovation in the market and that's innovation within government. Judge Leonard says that Pacer was originated entirely within the federal courts without any external requirements. But one of the virtuous cycles of the internet is that we all learn from each other how to do things better. External requirements are good. Judicial independence should be independence from other branches of government, not from the public. One of the things I've learned in 30 years of building computer networks is that on the internet there's always somebody smarter than me, and if I put the data out there somebody will invariably do something I haven't thought of. This afternoon we're going to hear from the government printing office and the office of the federal register about the innovations that flourished when they made the official journals of government available as a bulk feed of authenticated data and how those innovations have cycled back to make their own work easier. This virtuous cycle of innovation and efficiency has not been possible in the Pacer system because the courts did indeed proceed without external requirements and external inputs. There's a thought that the law is just for lawyers, but one of the things that's always amazed me about the internet is just how popular real data is. When I put the SEC's Edgar database on the internet the thought in government circles was that real Americans would have no interest in the filings of public corporations. The same thing with U.S. patents. And even with the opinions of the Court of Appeals of the United States, a body of work to contain some of the finest writing in America, the work of judges Cardoza and Leonard Hand, judges Posner and Bork and Easterbrook, there was skepticism that people would be able to read these writings and understand them. In all cases these documents have proved wildly popular and incredibly useful. The public's appetite for the public's data is very much unquenchable, but we never know when the stream is stopped up at the source. Before coming out to Washington, D.C., I spent the weekend processing government videotapes, which is one of the things our nonprofit corporation does. For $25, the State of California's Department of Public Health sold me a fascinating two-hour training program about the safer processing of juice. Valuable information for those thinking of opening a juice factory and obligatory information for those already in the business. The video had segments on agricultural processes and raw materials, on processing design and packaging, on cleaning and sanitizing and personnel practices, but the longest segment by far was that on regulations, requirements, and legal guidance. And if you want to make juice in California, you need much more than a good supply of mangoes. You need to know about these laws. Title 17 of the California Code of Regulations deals with sanitation in food plants. The Office of Administrative Law of the State of California asserts copyright over this California Code of Regulations and contracts with Barclays to publish the document. You can view the provisions on their website, but I can't make a copy that looks differently, one that's aimed specifically at juice people. For your juice business, you also need to be familiar with the California Health and Safety Code Part 6, the California Food Sanitation Act. You'll also want to be familiar with Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations, particularly the standards on packaging or holding human food and on sanitation standard operating procedures. And of course, you need to be fully familiar with the HAASIP regulations, a series of detailed standards on hazard analysis and critical control points from the Food and Drug Administration. The HAASIP regulations, in turn, incorporate by reference a raft of technical standards, such as NC NSF standard number seven for commercial refrigerators and storage freezers, which is $100 per copy if you want to do due diligence on your freezer and read the tech spec. These documents are just the start for the serious juice professional. You must of course consult your public safety codes, all of which are only available from designated exclusive vendors such as the National Fire Protection Association. You'll want the building codes for your jurisdiction, the fuel and gas code, the plumbing code, the fire code. You'll also want your local municipal code, particularly the sections on zoning, factories and employment practices. Most of the municipal codes of California belong to one of the three major outsourcing companies and over 50 percent of municipal codes in California have copyright restrictions. My point is not that the ambitious juice entrepreneur is totally without resources to learn the law, but that if I wanted to create a new product or non-profit site aimed at the juice people of California, Californiajuicedukes.org, for example, I'd have a hard time gathering the material I need to set that site up. There's just too many copyright restrictions, paywalls, and other impediments to access bulk legal documents needed to create such a useful site. John Adams, in his thoughts on government, said a republic is an empire of laws, not of men. If our republic is an empire, it's an empire that's been balkanized by a complicated set of ownership claims. Walls and borders have split this empire. Walls and borders that deny access to justice and make equal protection under the law and due process under the law a function of the size of your wallet. The problem with an empire of laws is that empire implies property and implies that the law is owned by the state. And the law does not belong to the state, it belongs to the people. James Madison emphasized the importance of the rights and the sovereignty of the people to access the laws when he stated that a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both, knowledge will forever govern ignorance. An empire of laws implies that the law is owned. A better geographical metaphor than an empire is the shining city on the hill. Law.gov is an idea that we should all try to approach. A hill we should climb. It is an idea for us to adopt, as John F. Kennedy said, an idea that our governments in every branch at every level, national state and local must be as a city upon a hill. Ronald Reagan called this shining city a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans. A city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity and if there had to be city walls the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. It's not often that Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy saw eye to eye on the role of government.