 I deeply appreciate being included in this important conversation as Carl has noted my interest in electronic access to primary legal materials stretches back more than two decades to a time when that meant dial-up access to bulletin boards and disk distribution. And it was that interest that led 18 years ago to the establishment of Cornell's Legal Information Institute with my colleague Tom Bruce. The first dedicated law site on the internet still going strong at www.law.cornell.edu. From our early outpost on the net we watched through the 1990s and into this century as court sites gradually appeared providing full text versions of appellate opinions on day of release. Well at first these developments seemed to give us much to celebrate. My principal observation in the year 2010 is how far short of the full potential of this new environment the U.S. courts have fallen. And my focus in these brief remarks will be on courts rather than the full panoply of lawmaking bodies that Carl has sketched. Particulars in a moment but first two other general observations grounded on our institute's experience. First a decade and a half of processing the text files released by the U.S. Supreme Court and New York's highest court for full featured web access has provided countless painful examples of how powerfully small, invisible to the eye technical details in the files that courts release affect the cost usefulness and quality of case law collections built from them. Those are barriers of a third kind alongside those that Carl mentioned. Second our institute's users have taught us time and again of the meaning and value of public access. From the start we've been stunned by the depth of the interest in and need for primary legal materials among educators and health care workers those employed in the financial services industry and high tech endeavors those running small businesses as well as the public sector folks from police officers to agency officials. We have found that in truth there is no sharp boundary between the information needs of lawyers and of the public. Fifty states countless variations it would be all too easy to get tangled in the details of Alaska, Georgia, Illinois and Texas. Time is limited so I will for the most part describe dominant practice and significant variants identifying only a few illustrative states where that's useful. By now the judicial branch in most states maintains a website that not only serves diverse public information and educational functions but also provides access to the jurisdictions appellate decisions. As soon as opinions are released by the court they are posted and in a majority of states subsequently stored in an open archive. As generally practiced however these measures fail seriously as a means of improving access to the component of our legal system that professionals refer to as case law. Let me illustrate using three state court decisions of last week all posted promptly on the respective website. A decision of the Florida Supreme Court last Thursday setting out the responsibility of real estate lawyers for overseeing access to escrow accounts. Second, a Kansas Supreme Court opinion released last Friday laying out the standard of proof confronting insurers seeking to rescind the policy on grounds of fraud. And third also from Friday a ruling of the California Supreme Court resolving a circuit split on an issue of bail forfeiture. For anyone closely following a particular case or the work of these courts in general or monitoring one of those issues immediate web access to these decisions is an incredible boon and redistributors publishers no matter their type of purpose are free to harvest this data add value and republish it. However, because of the heavy hand of print sector practices and entrenched interests all three decisions were posted in a form that is seriously incomplete and destined to remain so. Two years ago in an address to the association of reporters of judicial decision I argued that taking electronic distribution of case law seriously required judicial bodies to do four things. And the first and most critical is that they must furnish the general public and publishers with access not just to slip opinions but to opinions in their final official citable fully edited site checked quote checked form. The judicial sites of Kansas, Florida and California are typical in failing to meet this threshold test. Institutional factors vary but in all three instances the day of release versions of the opinions I've just mentioned will not later be replaced by their final citable text. During the latter half of the 20th century well over half the states surrendered the dissemination of case law in the form of print law reports to the commercial sector and in nearly all cases that meant ceding the field to what was then the West publishing company. Florida was one of them. As a result the editorial work on the published decisions of its appellate courts the case summaries and head notes and the compilation are all the work of the editors of the national reporter system and copyrighted by Thompson formerly West. The Florida Supreme Court's website warns users that the opinions contained in its archive which now reaches back over a decade are quote subject to revision before publication in the southern reporter third series and since the court's publication process is in commercial hands and the court hasn't altered its decision preparation and post release revision practices so that it even possesses electronic copies of the decisions in their final official form Florida fails my threshold test and that failure widespread through though not universal among the states that during the 20th century abdicated responsibility for law report publication bestows a huge competitive advantage on a single commercial publisher now at first blush it's odd that one finds a similar approach in kansas one of the 14 states in which a public official a reporter of judicial decisions is still responsible for the publication of law reports the case law archive at the kansas judicial branch website reaches back to 1996 from top to bottom the decisions are in slip form with the site warning quote slip opinions are subject to modification orders and editorial corrections prior to publication in the official reports consult the bound volumes of the kansas reports and the kansas court of appeals reports for the final official texts here statutes and deeply resistant bureaucratic practices continue to assert the primacy of print despite the dwindling demand for official reports in print form change here would not so much threaten commercial advantage but public jobs turf and status and my third example california is also among the few states still employing a public reporter to oversee publication of law reports but the size of that state's legal information market generates incentives to cling to the nominal primacy of print that smaller states like kansas need not contend with the california reports like the new york reports and those of washington state georgia ohio in illinois are published under contract by one of the major commercial publishers tomson west holds most of those contracts but lexus nexus is at present the publisher of the of california's official reports a contract for the next five to seven years will be let later this month like the current contract for the rfp for the next one seeks to exploit the competitive advantage it will bestow on the successful bidder to secure a host a host of tangible benefits for the california judiciary performance of much of the post release editorial work on decisions free access for the reporter and staff to the publishers online legal research service and complementary copies of the print reports for california judges where the california or new new york appellate courts to release final edited and revised versions of their opinions with full citation information such contractual exchanges of privilege and access for free services would collapse for the final and official text of opinions california directs users to a lexus nexus website at that site internal page numbers necessary for precise citation have been stripped out and license terms for bid commercial use direct linking and all forms of redistribution of the contents this removal of internal pagination draws attention to the citability component of my threshold standard in the current environment citation norm norms that still rely on volume and page numbers in a subsequent print edition impose large and unnecessary costs on all publishers other than the one originally assigning them beginning with louisiana in 1993 a quarter or so of the states have moved to court applied public domain citations appellate courts in these states simply embed all necessary citation information in opinions at the time of release the approach places all publishers on an equal basis first it removes any proprietary copyright claim to the citation information tomson has still not relinquished its long-standing claim to copyright protection and the pagination of the national reporter system in addition court applied citations remove the logistical burden of extracting citation data from a later source or sources for insertion in opinions that were released without them the models are there and to date those models as embraced by the association american law libraries and the a b a have been adopted in varying degrees of completeness by fourteen states for impressive examples of state judiciary sites meeting my final official citable standard i point you to those maintained by north dakota and oklahoma my second criterion involves the attachment or inclusion of what geeks call metadata most state court websites awful offer digital files principally designed to replicate the paper documents for which they substitute therefore might reflect serious concern with how an opinions file will print but next to know attention to how easily and accurately computer software can extract from it such basic information as which circuit or district decided the case what judge wrote the opinion how it's organized when it was filed taking electronic dissemination seriously requires encoding the structure and key data elements of decisions not merely their appearance third it's far more important today than it was during the print era for researchers to have access to a single authoritative version of a decision against which they can compare critical language from a text they've downloaded from any one of the many unofficial sources available publicly produced print reports once served that purpose the contemporary analog is a digital archive of authenticated copies and of course by authenticated i mean more that the file that the files have emerged from a court computer system specifically that each decision carries a digital signature applied by the appropriate public official so that any question raised by discrepant versions can be put to rest for examples of this level of public assurance take a look at any recent public law available in digital format from the gpo or decisions available at the site maintained by ohio's reporter of decisions fourth and last some judicial opinions cast a very long shadow and for that reason the value of a digital archive of decisions grows over time a few jurisdictions have sought to accelerate that value accrual process by recreating or acquiring retrospective case law data from the print era whether or not that's done since case law is cumulative courts taking digital release seriously must not only provide initial access to courts in final citable authenticated form but they must commit to maintenance of a permanent archive of that data dominant commercial interests have encouraged us courts to believe that adapting their case law dissemination methods to a digital age is beyond their capacity and unnecessary fortunately within the experimental space created by our 50 state federal structure vision leadership and capacity have aligned in a number of jurisdictions to provide solid examples of what's possible on which other states and the federal courts can draw i've mentioned north dakota and oklahoma there are others but all too few my hope is that this law dot gov initiative will catalyze many more by providing visibility to the jurisdictions that have led and support to those setting off down the path of change arkansas for example last year arkansas ceased publication ceased publication of its print law reports pursuant to a rule of the arkansas supreme court the electronic version of appellate decisions posted on the judiciary website are the official report of those decisions the same rule charged the state's reporter with applying public domain citations to those decisions and with maintaining a secure database of authenticated copies recognizing that the previous distinction in weight between published and unpublished decisions made no sense under this new scheme the court's rule also provides that with the switch from print reports to official electronic publication all appellate decisions will be regarded as precedent to be relied upon and cited needless to say this past year has been a period of furious activity as the document management system capable of delivering on this ambitious charge has been designed and assembled arkansas reporter of decisions susan williams told me last week that she expects the system to be open to the public via the net by the end of this month the volume of my applause will be affected by what i see then and in the months and years to follow but i fully expect arkansas to meet and surpass the four criteria i've outlined and properly realized law.gov could assure that this initiative by one state is more than another isolated case against the national background of an airship. Thank you.