 My name is Carl Malamud. I am the president of public.resource.org, and I would like to welcome you to this event about access to the law, the raw materials of our democracy. Law.gov is an effort based in many of our major law schools, a series of workshops, to examine the question of, can we increase access to primary legal materials of the United States, to court opinions and briefs, to executive branch regulations, to legislative information, not only at the federal level, but in the states and in the municipalities. Abraham Lincoln in 1838 gave a speech about mob violence and the rule of despots, and he said the only way we can counter mob violence, and he was speaking specifically about a lynching in St. Louis, is by a reverence for the laws in the Constitution, and he said the laws should be in every primer and every spelling book and every almanac. But today in the United States, it's actually very difficult sometimes to access legal materials, and the purpose of Law.gov is to examine the implications of broader access, to ask what are the privacy implications, what are the financial implications, what are the implications for innovation and justice. And so today we're very pleased to be here on Capitol Hill at the Committee for House Administration. We have two very distinguished speakers that will open up this event. The first is Congresswoman Lofgren, who is Vice Chair of the Committee on House Administration. The Committee on House Administration, of course, has oversight of the Library of Congress, which includes the Law Library of Congress, the largest law library in the world. So it's very appropriate that we're here in this hearing room. Congresswoman Lofgren is a longtime representative of Silicon Valley, and Law.gov is as much about innovation as it is about justice. It's about business being able to build on top of legal materials and create value-added services. She's a longtime advocate of open government and access to government, and a member of the Judiciary Committee. Also here, and we're very pleased to have Congressman Lofgren, who is also on the Judiciary Committee. He is the ranking member of the Committee on House Administration. He is a former attorney general of the state of California, and as a longtime advocate for justice and the rule of law, the former chief law enforcement officer of the state of California. He is also able to address these issues in a really meaningful way. So I'm very pleased that they're both here. After we hear from the two members of Congress who may have to leave to attend to their other duties, as you know, this is the last week before the break. After that, we have a panel that I'll introduce, but right now I'd like to turn it over to Congresswoman Lofgren. Well, thank you very much, Carl, and to the participants here in our hearing room, as well as our online participants. I think this is a very important step forward in the quest to make the law accessible to all. Who owns the law? Americans do. And in order to fully exercise their ownership rights, they need to have access, not only to the legislative branch, but to the judicial branch. And I think that seems quite obvious. I'm glad to be here with my colleague, Dan Lundgren. We have often collaborated on law library issues. We also both serve on the Joint Committee with Oversight over the Library of Congress. And it seems to me that the Library of Congress, really the biggest library in the world, is a good place to start with law.gov. Now, having said that the law needs to be accessible to all, and as a bedrock principle, I believe that's true. Obviously, there are issues that need to be flushed out and then addressed as we move forward on this effort. Someone earlier, as we were talking, waiting for the beginning of this session, said, you know, it's sort of practical privacy. When you've got material, social security numbers, other matters that are in paper filings, they're really not accessible. You have to go down to the courthouse and get them. But if they're online, there's a privacy issue that is pretty big. And so we need to deal with that. How do you protect the privacy of individuals while still gaining access to the law? And I think it may, in the end, result in a change of judicial behavior in terms of privacy and the like. So this is a very important session here in Washington. I know that Carl's going around the United States to get smart people thinking of what are the barriers? How do we address them? How do we overcome them? And that's the best way to achieve our goal, which is to make sure that the primary documents of the law are available to all. So thank you very much, Carl and everyone else. And my colleague, Dan Lundgren, has already been introduced, so maybe I can just ask Dan to come up and welcome you as well. And thank you very much for your interest and your help in this effort. Dan. Thanks very much. So when we were in this room last, which was last Thursday before we adjourned, we were having a markup of a bill. And for some reason, the chairman had difficulty distinguishing between Lofgren and Lundgren. But that is all Lofgren. I'm Dan Lundgren. If you look up on the board that shows how we vote, you'll notice for some reason, most people just have their name without a middle name in it. Mine is Daniel E. Lundgren. And I asked why they put it up there, and they said, that's to distinguish you from Zo Lofgren so that there is no error. So we're very careful around this place. And also, thank you very much, Carl. About the sixth time he said longstanding, I wondered if I needed to bring a wheelchair or something up here. Both Zo and I started very, very young. So even though we're longstanding, we are still hopefully vigorous. I'll try to be brief, which is always strange for people coming from the law profession whose ponderous documents when filed with the courts are known as our briefs, but I will try to be brief. In the cacophony of voices in our culture, I don't think there's any doubt that law is so important and often helps us rise above that cacophony. You know, you think of the Magna Carta, you think of the U.S. Constitution, the Reconstruction Amendments, the Civil Rights Acts, the Geneva Conventions, Nuremberg Trials, Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They form the legal architecture of our culture, of the way in which we go about ordering our lives to some great extent. They enshrine some of our most cherished principles. They talk about the value of life, the freedom of conscience, religious freedom. The founders had a phrase in which they said, "'The law is king.'" And that's sort of an extraordinary sense, if you think about it. It is the idea that we have non-arbitrary law. We are a country of laws, not of men, in a very real sense. And you can thank our greatest jurists for their contributions to the law. Blackstone, the Framers, Justice Marshall, Justice Harlan. I have to confess, I've not always enjoyed the study of the law, particularly with some of my semesters in law school. Perhaps those were the times when I least enjoyed the study of the law. But even there, and in Congress, on the Judiciary Committee, when I was privileged to serve as Attorney General of my state, and in the one opportunity I had to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court, I've come to have a deep and abiding appreciation for our legal history and a dedication to the laws and its perpetuation. This is important. I love the title. The raw materials of our democracy broader access to primary legal materials in the United States. It might scare some people if they read that title. It basically means allowing people an opportunity to read those documents that are so fundamental. I am one of those who has for a long period of time argued that the Supreme Court is wrong when they don't allow televising of their deliberations. I can understand why we don't allow it in some circumstances in trials because of undue influence or the undue impact on witnesses and perhaps jurors. But I find really no relevant argument against televising the deliberations of the Supreme Court. Because in some ways, what happens in my judgment is it reminds me of that famous movie which ends with the wizard being behind the screen. And when we make it so difficult to access those who are the final arbiters, if you will, of issues engaged in the law, it creates an artificial mysteriousness that I think is not helpful. I think we ought to have greater access. The idea that only people steeped in the law can understand the Constitution because the words are so technical or what they say is not what they mean, to me, is an absurdity. And to the extent that we can grant greater access to the raw materials of our democracy so that people can read them for themselves and attempt to understand them with the meaning of the words found there, I think the better off we're going to be. So I, for one, view this as an interesting argument, interesting subject matter, and I will be working along with Zo and others to ensure that we do have greater access to these fundamental materials of our democracy. And in that process, I will still work to encourage the Supreme Court to see the wisdom of my ideas. It's much easier for me to say that from here than when I was at the podium appearing before the members of the court. That is an interesting experience because they tell you that when the light goes off, you are to stop in mid-sentence, if not mid-word or mid-syllable, unless you are addressing a specific question of the court. And I remember when I was preparing for my argument, I was observing some of the arguments that went before me and about a month before I argued, there was a member of the bar arguing and a question was presented to him about a case with which he was obviously not familiar because one of the members of the court said to him, not the Chief Justice, and how do you believe that such-and-such case is relevant to this? Or how do you interpret such-and-such case? And his fellow stopped for a minute, he thought, and he finally said, well, for purposes of the matter before this court, we really don't have to know how that decision was decided. At which point in time Chief Justice Rehnquist looked up and said to him, counsel, maybe we don't, but you do. As I say, it's easier for me to make suggestions about the court from here than it was from there. But once again, we all should be working with our eyes glued on those raw materials of our democracy. Thank you very much. Thank you, Congressman, that was good. Robert Oakley was the distinguished law librarian of Georgetown, past president of the American Association of Law Libraries. And he told me once that cameras in the Supreme Court was not about courtroom TV and it wasn't even about C-span bringing their cameras in. It was about law students all over the country being able to see the best lawyers in the country arguing at the height of their career. And it was about legal education. It was about making sure that the kid at Indiana University had the same access to view those arguments as the kid at Georgetown. And that was one of his big issues that he was working on. I'd like to ask our panel to come up please and we're gonna do the next section of this program. Thank you very much, Congressman. You can sit any place you want. We are gonna start this morning. We have a very distinguished panel. I'm very pleased. Briefly, we have Roberta Schaefer, who is the law librarian of Congress in the middle. We have Eugene Meyer on the end, who is president of the Federalist Society. And we have Roger Skalbek, who is with the Georgetown Law Library. We are gonna start with Roberta Schaefer, who is the law librarian of Congress. She is a former Fulbright scholar in the law in Israel. She was dean of the School of Library Science at the University of Texas. She's worked as a corporate law librarian at Covington and Burlington. A long record of public service, including running the FEDLINK program, which is what gives access to information services to the rest of government. So Roberta, thank you so much for being here. Make sure you hit the little button that turns green when you're ready to speak. I'm green now. So that's always a good sign in today's times. Thank you, Carl, and good morning, everyone. I don't know that I'm compelled to give my normal disclaimer this morning about the fact that what I'm going to say today reflects my opinions, but I want to, because I want you to understand something at the outset about how decisions are being made regarding sharing of information and access to it at the Library of Congress. So I want you to understand that within the institution, we don't have singular decision makers. What happens at LCE, and that's what we call ourselves, is that we make group decisions and decisions that are being made today about how information is being handled, preserved, distributed, accessed, organized. All of that is being done in a very collective way. And we have, for example, something called the Web Governance Board, which looks at content. And we also have something called the Information Technology Review Board, which looks at how we invest our resources in information technology. Tends to look more at the infrastructure than it does the content, which is more the purview of the Web Governance Board. We're also very active in something, and my staff who are here know that I don't like to miss an opportunity to say the name because you know how fabulous acronyms can be in the federal government. And this one is among my favorites. It's fudgy, and every time I say it or think about there, convening, I always sort of find my mouth starts to water and I think, mm, that sounds like the best pasta dish. But anyway, it really isn't a pasta dish, although like many pasta dishes, it brings together diverse ingredients to come together and collaboratively make a wonderful end product. But fudgy is the Federal Agency's Digitization Guidelines Initiative. And if anyone's interested at the end, we can share their website with you. So looking at Carl's title, just like Dan Lundgren did, I was fascinated by it, and particularly the prominence of the word democracy, because it made me think back to the Greeks. And as many of you know, one of the guiding principles of Athenian society was that good citizens had to have access to the law. As a parenthetical, one of the things that was also a guiding principle of Athenian society was that good citizens needed to be literate. And universal literacy was a key component of Athenian society. If we fast forward a little bit and look at Roman society, the Justinian codes in many, many ways were motivated by the emperor's opinion that if he was going to tax his citizens and also encourage them to engage in trade with his colonies, then he needed to let them know beforehand the kind of trade that would be encouraged and the kinds of tariffs and taxes that he would be imposing on that trade. So again, access to information, legal information. And then Dan Lundgren mentioned the Magna Carta. So let me not give short shrift to that document. In fact, just to show you that he didn't inspire me, but a recent article in the New York Times did, I was fascinated to reflect that, in fact, Carl, your origins are in the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta came about because the barons were concerned that the king was promising to do lots of things. But then when push came to shove, quite literally push came to shove, the barons found that he wouldn't be doing what he said he did. So they gathered, they said to him, okay, John, let's meet here and let's get this straight. We have to know when you're holding the trials. We have to be able to not be held against our will. And we are going to demand that you put it in writing and then that copies are made so that everybody can know about it. It backfired a little bit, and as we know he tried several times to revoke it, but it backfired a little bit because then those people over whom the barons had authority said, hey, what about us? And the happy result is the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and myriad constitutions that have followed our example through the two plus centuries. Now let's talk about the birth of America and how libraries and law come together. Benjamin Franklin, the father of American intervention, excuse me, invention, invented something that we hold very dear as a guiding principle of American society, and that is the concept of a free public library. And one of the key reasons that he believed so strongly in a free public library related to the fact that he believed if you could know about scientific invention, it would help to create innovation. And he saw as a key principle of America that we would need to be an innovative country, and I'm happy to say that that has followed through as a theme throughout our history. So, access to laws, what do we know? Good citizenship, understanding your rights and responsibilities, and I guess when you'll be taxed and when you won't be, still very, very true today. And last but not least, access to the laws as a way to inspire innovation in a society. Excellent motivations for providing law to the people. So what we look at at the Library of Congress as our principles of providing access to law are basically what we call the four A's of legal information. And many of you who've attended law school hear about this when you are in law school, and they relate to the concept of authentication, authoritativeness, accuracy, and access. And it is in fact those four A's that guide the principles that the Library of Congress follows today. But as we all can appreciate, we don't have to be technologists or lawyers to know that technology creates both enormous opportunity, but it also creates some kind of frightening things that can happen as a result of the wrong people having access to information on a very large scale, coupled with our incredible ability to share information. So that very frightening things can happen very quickly and without any warning. And we need to be sure, as we, the stewards of information, make policy that we do nothing that will create the negative, that will create evil or something that cannot be quickly controlled or contained. And those are the challenges that I think we face today. So how does the Library of Congress deal with all of these challenges, all of the four A's? Well, the first is that within our collecting principles, we collect materials in their best format. And when we think about the best format, some people are lucky. They only need to live in one time zone, in one time frame. The Library of Congress, we actually live in three time frames, we're like the ultimate time travelers, I think. And that is because we need to be concerned about information from the past. Naturally, we need to be concerned about information in the present, but last but not least, we need to worry about information in the future. And that means that we need to be able to assure what we are collecting today and thinking has value today for tomorrow will in fact be here tomorrow. And in the technological age, that is not always the easiest challenge. Do I have to admit that I do have floppy disks in my attic? I do. I know that they have important information about my life and my work product. And God love them, I'll never get that information again. The next thing we do is that we are setting standards for preservation. And that in many ways relates to that great fudgy group that we participate in. We're working with a variety of federal agencies, across agencies, looking at the different challenges that will face them because ultimately, that information will need to be maintained by a few of us, NARA, GPO, and the Library of Congress. And we want to make sure that we're looking at life cycle at birth, not midlife and not at death. Because if we look at life cycle at birth, we have a better chance of assuring that this information will live and be available to the public for as long as possible. We're looking and asking members of Congress and their staffs, what are the kinds of information that your constituents are looking for from you? We're doing this by collecting information from staff and we're also looking at the kinds of information that they're asking us for. We're not looking at the distinct micro of the information, but we're looking at it in a macro way so that we can build our enormous Thomas database in a way that reflects the needs of people, who we call concerned and curious citizens, who tend to be the ones who actually are looking for information from us. And then we're trying to keep abreast of what other countries are doing, particularly in the authentication area. We're fascinated to be watching this whole concept of document DNA. And what that document DNA means is that no matter how information is repurposed, if you click on any bit of that information in someone else's document where it's been repurposed or reused or recycled, you can still know the origin of that information. So the authentication challenge, be it potentially changed because of misfeasance, malfeasance, or plain old mischief. With document DNA, we don't have to worry because someone will always be able to know the original source of that information. And then finally, we're using various social media techniques and our person who's in charge of that is in the audience today, should you ask questions about that? We're trying to expose more people to information. And this is incredibly helpful. Now I don't know if Elena Kagan is happy about the Library of Congress collection this morning. As many of you noticed, her transcript from Harvard was accessible because we have organized Thurgood Marshall's papers and because she applied for a job, also known as a law clerk to Thurgood Marshall, her Harvard transcript is part of our collection. So now everybody knows that Elena got a B minus in criminal law the first year of law school. But in any event, our focus continues to be on content and on the ability of the American people to come to this phenomenal collection, this national asset called the Library of Congress and marry together not only government information, not only US government information, but government information from over 220 jurisdictions worldwide with manuscripts, with maps, with anything at all that might spark their curiosity and their innovation. Thank you so much, Carl. Thank you, Roberta. Next time I see Fajy Alfredo on a menu, I will make sure to order that. With pesto sauce. With pesto sauce, yes. Our next speaker is Eugene Meyer, who is the president of the Federalist Society. It's an organization that he helped create. He's led it for 25 years. It's grown from a handful of students in a law school to an organization with 42,000 members now. Eugene is a noted voice on the topic of rule of law, has taken an interest in how our legal system operates at a very in-depth level for 25 years. He's also, I noted, an international chess master and I'm very pleased to welcome Eugene here to the panel. Thank you. Well, thank you, Carl. Thanks for what you're doing, I appreciate that. And I'm gonna start with a complete aside, but I'm gonna come up with other people's asides and consistent with the Federalist Society's interest in debate, although I wanna say I'm anything I say here that might be an opinion since the Federalist Society doesn't take policy-position opinions would be my own and not the Society's. But the cameras in the courtroom conversation, without necessarily saying, I don't know what I think about that, but I do, one thing I thought might be worthwhile mentioning is I know a lot of the concern about cameras in the courtroom has been from people who are worried that in the real world, telephones and cameras being on people will cause them to slightly adjust what they say before the court. And that, I think, is one of the things that judges have been concerned about. So I just wanna mention that as part of the discussion I think a lot of viewers could wonder what could be the problem there? And that's one of the problems that could exist. Now, to our topic. For the Federalist Society, much more broadly than that for the Society at large, civil serious debate and discussion is central to our democracy. We need more of it. But it becomes easier to have that kind of discussion when we know what it is we're debating or discussing. And I just wanna mention two very quick examples which have been in the news a lot. The Arizona law and health care. Both extremely widely debated. Both very important issues. And in both cases, some of that debate has been over things that were not in the legislation. Now, when a bill has just been written, that's perhaps understandable. But there's no excuse for such a problem after the first few weeks. It's difficult enough to have the type of discourse which is essential to democracy and to have a vigorous exchange of ideas when we have our facts right. And we know in the real world that people will twist facts to support their arguments on all sides. But there's no reason why in the internet age, the legal materials and the laws that we have should be difficult to access. Certainly there are the type of privacy concerns that you mentioned and there are ways we need to look at addressing that. But one thing that is highly desirable is that we'd be able to see what these laws are. There's an old story from the early days of football. There was a play in the middle of the line, everybody fell on top of everyone else as happens in football and the ball burst. Now today that might not be a big deal but at those days they didn't have another ball. So they're all standing around wanting, what do we do now? And one big burly tackle with a little bit of blood dripping from his eye and glowing with the joy of the battle said, or rather bellowed, to heck with the ball, let's get on with the game. Now, the big tackle's correct if the rules of football are just blocking the other guy. And if the goal of government is just to win politically, there's no reason to be terribly persnickety about exactly what laws are, either new ones or older ones, which we're discussing and trying to figure out what some kind of fairly obscure state law or local ordinance or whatever is. But we're trying to form intelligent policy and the real world of politics creates plenty of problems in doing that. It does seem to me though that lack of access to legal materials tends to create a situation where everyone becomes entitled in the wisecrack, becomes entitled to their own set of facts. And that's what one's not entitled to. Practical difficulties will no doubt exist in implementing this, but I think there is no question that it will be good for everyone, and good for democracy at its core to have better access to such material. So I commend you for what you're doing here. Thank you. Thank you very much, Eugene. Our next speaker is Roger Scowback, who represents the American Association of Law Libraries, the AALL. AALL has been very helpful in the Law Dock of Effort. They've been working on the national inventory of legal materials, which is law librarians all over the country have been surveying their jurisdiction. And they've been asking questions like are the materials available? Are they copyrighted? Is there a paywall for dissemination? Are there authenticated versions of this information? Are there disclaimers that say this information is unofficial and you shouldn't rely upon it? Roger is the incoming chair of the AALL Copyright Committee. He's the Associate Law Librarian at Georgetown Law Library, and he writes very frequently on technical topics about the law and also on intellectual property. And so Roger, thank you very much for being here. Thank you, Carl. Thank you. Good morning, I'm Roger Scowback, Associate Law Librarian at Georgetown, and incoming chair of the American Association of Law Libraries. Mary Alice Bache, who's a AALL's Director of Government Relations, sends her regrets for not being able to join us today. So she asked me to come here and deliver the remarks and respond to any questions. She did ask me though to express our gratitude to representatives Lofgren and Lundgren for their strong support of the Law Library of Congress. And in light of today's topic, of course, it's unique and valuable digital initiatives. AALL is an educational organization with over 5,000 members who serve the information needs of the legal community and the public at more than 1900 academic, firm, state, court, and county law libraries nationwide. AALL's mission is to promote and enhance the value of law libraries, to foster law librarianship and to provide leadership and advocacy in the field of legal information and information policy. Our association has been committed to improving access to legal information since it was established in 1906 by a handful of visionary law librarians. We have a strong government relations policy based on the core belief that accessible government information is both an essential principle of a democratic society and a valuable public good created at taxpayer expense. Citizens must be able to access the laws and regulations that govern them. The development of the internet and the constant improvements to digital technologies have caused a sea change during the past two decades in how the public can now access the law. As law librarians, we have been leaders in advocating that governments move online, but that they do so in a way that guarantees that today's electronic legal information is as trustworthy as print and that it will be available to us in five, 10, 50, or 100 years. In 2007, AALL's executive board adopted new principles and core values related to public information on government websites that articulate policies on the creation, access, and distribution of government information in the digital age. I'd like to mention them briefly because they guide our association's legislative and technology policy efforts. We believe that the federal, state, and local governments have a duty to disseminate government information to their citizens through government websites. In terms of accessibility, the information must be easily searchable, available to the public without charge, and equally accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities. Regarding the need for reliability and trustworthiness, appropriate safeguards should be established to protect the integrity and authenticity of materials published in electronic formats. This is critical when government entities eliminate an official print legal title in favor of an electronic version available only through the web. It is equally important that the official status of the electronic version be clearly designated and that government entities establish and maintain a clear chain of custody for all electronic information published on the web. Federal, state, and local authorities must also ensure that government information is permanently available to the public and that it is preserved. And last and far from least, AALL strongly believes that government information, including the text of all primary legal materials, must be in the public domain and available to the public without restriction. Our core policies are well aligned with Parliament's goals for broader access to the law to all of the public. We're grateful to him for his role in raising national awareness for convening events like today and the ones that we've seen for the Law.gov movement throughout the country, breaking down walls and bringing together new allies to help us broaden public access to the rule of law here in the United States. AALL is especially pleased to be working in partnership with Carl and also with the Law Library of Congress. Hundreds of our members in every state and the District of Columbia have joined forces to form state working groups to help achieve Carl's goal of a national inventory of all legal information that's federal, state, county, and municipal. This is a daunting task, initiated by Paul Lomio and Erica Wayne at the Stanford University's Robert Crown Law Library with the assistance of members of the Northern California Association of Law Libraries. The California state inventory is almost completed and preliminary findings are indeed a little troubling. Of the nearly 540 municipalities and counties in California, most have online codes and ordinances. However, approximately 40% of these legal materials are not official and they have a strong web disclaimer about the use of their online versions. And in addition to that, approximately 50% of them have copyright assertions. Furthermore, a small sampling of these online materials found that none provide bulk access to these materials. At the state level, the administrative regulations are online, but there is a copyright assertion. And the cost for a subscription to the official print version is approximately $3,500 a year. As to the courts, the full archive of California Supreme Court cases is available on a vendor website. And to gain access, you must click agree to a license preventing you from using the data for legal research and even for public or nonprofit use. These preliminary findings of the California inventory should be a wake up call to us all about the clear lack of government policies and technology solutions to ensure equitable, effective, no fee public access to online legal information that is official, digitally authenticated, and that we can be assured will be permanently available to the public and preserved. Because these core principles are so critically important to our members, AALL has become a national leader in advocating for the need to digitally authenticate, make permanently available and preserve electronic legal materials. In 2007, we published the groundbreaking state by state report on authentication of online legal resources, which revealed that a significant number of state online legal resources are considered to be official, but that states had not yet implemented ready authentication by standard methods. We've just completed our 2010 state updates, and while we found few changes in the use of digital technologies to authenticate electronic information, even when there is no official print version, we are alarmed at how many state, county, and municipal governments in reaction to their serious budget shortfalls are eliminating a print official legal title in favor of online only. In addition to populating their state inventory, our working groups are also closely monitoring the situation in their states and speaking out against it to ensure that if an official print title is no longer published, proper digital authentication and preservation measures are implemented. We're pleased that as a direct result of our work, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Law's last summer named a drafting committee to help develop the authentication and preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials Act. One of our members, Professor Barbara A. Bintliff of the University of Colorado Law Library, is the reporter and AAOL has been actively engaged in the commenting process. The draft uniform law will have its first reading this summer and we anticipate that it is going to the states in 2011. As you can see, AAOL is deeply committed to making the law more broadly accessible and our members have stepped up to the plate to work on these issues in their states. Thank you very much for the opportunity to join you and describe some of our initiatives. Thanks. Thank you. Over 500 people have participated so far in the Law Dock of Workshops and it really has become a national movement in addition to the law librarians and I should say five past presidents of the American Association of Law Libraries have participated in these workshops. There's been a huge outpouring from people that have worked in the area of putting the law online for a long time. Tom Bruce from the Cornell Legal Information Institute and Professor Martin, who's the former dean of Cornell for example, have been instrumental in this process. Our colleagues at Princeton who have played a huge role in examining the finances of the law and also technically in looking at issues on how to repurpose public domain documents have played an instrumental role. Industry has been a strong participant in this process. The CEOs of Fast Case, Ed Walters is here today. Lexis Nexus has had representatives at five of our workshops so far. Tim Stanley from Justia who founded the find law system that West uses has been a strong participant. We've also had a lot of people from government that have played a strong role in these workshops. The Secretary of State of California was at the Berkeley workshop just last week, had a fascinating conversation with Tim O'Reilly about government as platform. And she said that if people knew how their government worked, they would have a stronger ownership stake in it. And I thought that was interesting. But we've also had people like David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, the Deputy Chief Technology Officers of the United States have participated and been strong proponents. Law.gov is about a principle. We're asking a lot of questions about things like privacy and technology and how do you do metadata. But there's a basic principle. And the basic principle is this, that if a governmental entity produces legal materials, they should make those materials available in bulk and authenticated. And the reason for that is any other organization be they a commercial player such as Lexis Nexus in West, a national library of the people like the Law Library of Congress, a public interest group such as mine that wishes to audit those materials for privacy violations, all those uses need to be available. And today it is very hard if you're a legal researcher, for example, running a civil rights clearing house at the University of Washington like Professor Margo Schlanger does to be able to access things like our district court filings in bulk and do a systematic evaluation. And there are many applications on our legal corpus that are unavailable today because of the way we distribute those materials. And because there are many questions such as privacy and technology and costs, that is why we have had this national conversation. And our hope is that after 15 of these workshops are completed, a report can be issued and some general principles can be drafted and perhaps those will be suggestions to the policy makers. Ultimately, many of these issues such as privacy are things that we've ignored or they've been dealt with on the outside. For example, my organization posted 50 years of Court of Appeals decisions and we were responsible for finding all the social security numbers in there and notifying the clerks of the court. We were responsible for coming up with a policy that said, gee, if your name is on Google and you don't like to see your name for whatever reason, we'll list you on our robots.txt file. And I feel very strongly that it is not my role to be deciding issues of what material should be distributed and not. It's the role of society through our formal mechanisms. It's the role of Congress. It is the role of the judicial conference. It's the role of the administrative conference of the United States. They should be making those decisions about what is public and what is private, not entities that are out there in the commercial sector or in the nonprofit sector. So I have a question for each of our panelists and if we have time then we'll take questions from the audiences. We have a sharp 11 o'clock cutoff because we are borrowing the space here from the United States Congress. So Eugene, I have heard the objection often that legal materials are really quite technical and while a few things obviously ought to be public, we ought to just pick and choose because ordinary citizens really are just in no position to be interpreting these complex materials. Now that's sort of a loaded question but I was wondering if you can comment on that. Yeah, yes, I'd be delighted to, freedom of perspective, first of all, what's the worst that can happen? They won't understand it. That's a risk with everything in life. But remember, a lot of the people who wrote the Constitution in the United States were not lawyers. And we, our system relies ultimately on the people keeping its government honest. And if you have something that's technical and it's out there, somebody can read it, not understand it, ask some people about it and probably get it explained and then they may discover it's not only technical but it's saying something which is really a problem here and I wanna complain about that but I wouldn't have known if I'd never seen it because it was too technical for me to understand. So I think that's a, I think that's not a good argument at all. And I think it's a lot of talking about elitism but I do, critically, but I do think it's sort of an elitist argument that is profoundly wrong to say, well, lawyers have this special knowledge and we understand and other people don't. And, or maybe if you have some special education you're not technically a lawyer, you might understand. But that's the wrong way to approach any area, including this one, to say, you have to have technical knowledge to understand this, therefore we won't let you see it. Thank you. Roberta, when I went and first saw you about Law.gov, you made a comment that I found very interesting. You run the Global Legal Information Network, which is laws of all the countries. And you told me that this was as much about international trade as it was about Americans being able to access the law. I was wondering if you could comment on the importance of access to our legal materials for people in other countries. Excuse me. And actually, Carl, I wish that it was all the nations of the world. Unfortunately, Glyn only includes 50 countries right now. So of course our goal would be that it would include every jurisdiction, not even just nations, but we have a long way to go on that one. But yes, as Justinian realized, it's important, of course, for citizens to keep their government honest by knowing the law. But it's also important that the law creates ways for citizens to interact with citizens all over the world. And it's not just government intervention, but it's kind of setting the rules of the game so that things happen in an efficient and effective way. And so the purpose, the reason that the Library of Congress has put so much, so many resources into Glyn is first and foremost, to be able to support the research needs of the US Congress. Many times those research needs include needing to have access to the laws of other countries. And many of those countries, unfortunately for all of us, are not at the point where they have sophisticated infrastructures that allow for their governments to easily disseminate the information, let alone have a commercial publisher who wants to come in there and add all the value add like a verifiable translation. So as a result, we believe that Glyn provides many, many functions in the information space. And that includes, of course, the diplomatic needs of the United States, the military needs of the United States, and then the trade needs of the US and any country, of course, that's participating because we do not limit access. It's policy of the Library of Congress, but it also applies to Glyn based on citizenship or credentials. I think that's a key landmark for our key difference between this democracy and many other governments and many other democracies. You don't have to have credentials to access the Library of Congress. Roger, so the Magna Carta was an interesting document and it was an issue in which sovereignty was no longer the King's, it was the Barrett's. And during the Constitutional Convention, one of the big issues was whether we could give the federal government certain powers because that would take sovereignty away from the states. And what they finally realized was that the sovereignty didn't belong to the states and it didn't be going to the federal government, it belonged to the people and the people were delegating those powers to the states and the federal government. There's a long standing public policy going back to Wheaton v. Peters that says copyright in the law is not there. There is no copyright because the people own the law and that principle has been applied to the state statutes and it's been applied to building codes. Yet as you've seen, many states assert copyright, many municipalities assert copyright. What are they thinking when they assert copyright over these documents? What is the rationale, do you understand that? I do understand that, I wish that I knew. I mean, I wish that there was some way to separate the sort of the federal issues from the state issue because it would be nice to say there can be no copyright in state issued government documents, but it seems like I've asked several copyright experts on this and they say, well, it sort of is and it sort of isn't and there's no real sort of justification for it but there's also no real explanation for it. There's no decided like statement that says you cannot have the copyright in these materials because copyright is a federal regime and the state government things are a state regime and how do you sort of get the two together? At Georgetown, we're involved in a PROG program that is in a couple of other jurisdictions where what we're trying to do is preserve legal information from other jurisdictions. In particular, what we're trying to do is it's not the bulk access and the canvassing of the law but it's finding legal materials from, it started with the District of Columbia and we're partnering with the university or with the State Law Library in Virginia and State Law Library in Maryland and the assumption is if it's a state government document, we're gonna take it and we're gonna put it into these repositories not really saying we're gonna ignore or flaunt this copyright regime but we're gonna say we're gonna put it there and you really have to come up to say that this is not going to be copyright protected or that you're gonna assert a copyright objection to it and I'm almost wishing that, sort of wishing but not wishing that there were a confrontation where we would actually get to the answer of that question of can it be copyrighted and then under what circumstances can these things be protected? I know it came up in Oregon and you had had some issues there and they've essentially kind of backed down. We've got all of these California examples here that we're trying to grapple with and it really is a fundamental question of how can we make it so that they're not protected by copyright yet still protect and preserve this state sovereign status of things. Okay, well thank you. Do we have any questions from the audience? We have a couple minutes left for if there's any questions or comments in the back. So the question is whether there's any prospects for a consistent markup format for electronic documents, particularly consistent with the formats that are already being used by the House and Senate. Any comments on that? Do you want? No, go ahead. Well I'm under the impression, I'm not active in this but we do have a law library staff member who participates in an AALL panel that is looking at standard citation format across all documents and I think that that's going to be key. That's part of the whole challenge of access. If we do not have standard citation then it's very, very difficult for us to be consistently communicating with us. Representative Lundgren sort of talked about the, I call it the coral reef of the law and one of the prerequisites of having this hodgepodge of the creation of the jurisprudence tapestry is that we have consistent addressing no matter what the legal information is. So I take my hat off to AALL who's been really very active in this. I believe the American Bar Association has taken a supporting but subordinate role in this movement and I think you're involved in that. Am I casting it in the correct light in terms of the broad mandate that AALL is looking at? Absolutely. So I would say that. And then I'll make one comment on that and that has to be both at the document level but also at the section level. I mean section in the sort of literal sense of what section of the particular bill or statute you're looking at but also the paragraph, the sentence and things like that. So if for instance you're citing to something where you know the reporter volume or you know the case citation of something that's come out, you need to know what page, well not necessarily what page but what section, what paragraph, pinpoint what it is that you're looking for in order to really know what's being referred to. So in addition to the citation mechanisms, the idea of vendor neutral citation and consistent citation mechanisms, we had a two-day workshop at Cornell that looked in great depth at the issues of metadata, of markup of state statutes in particular. And one of the things we looked at are a variety of markup standards that are out there including what's being used by the house, what's being used in Europe where they've had to normalize their laws across many different countries. One of the leaders right now in this area is the government printing office which has been working with the office of the federal register and they've done really good work on the code of federal regulations and the federal register and working on that. I think the issue here is that this is a long ongoing process and it's a function of government that needs to be done on a regular basis. It's kind of standards that really work best in practice. So rather than sitting down once and saying this is the ultimate standard for markup or citation, there needs to be an ongoing attention to these issues within the government by the people charged with actually producing these documents. And that's actually one of the key things we're looking at law.gov is not can a super agency be created in the government that replaces West but instead can the government systematically be examining these issues of authentication and preservation and markup and citation and do so not just once but continue to do so on a regular basis. Ed Walters from Fast Case. Is it a question of copyrights, the properties, the money? Well, I'm not sure on some of the other areas but I do think there will be a cost factor. Obviously, you know, the cost is tight now, money's tight now and if anything's likely to get tighter. And one of the things I think can be very useful about this project, whatever the specific details end up being, is to set out, if it can succeed, is to set out and make it aspirational up and down the line that we want to make these documents available. If it turns out that the cost makes it not possible, do that if it turns out as fully as one would like and maybe we can find some less expensive ways to do it. I know this is a little bit contrary to what you said but there are small fees for service might be possible. At least the documents are, they may not be equally available to every single person but at least they're available and in practice can probably be gathered out pretty easily if the cost is very low. But you will clearly have privacy issues and in terms of any public laws, there shouldn't be copyright issues. I hope you get that case and you win it from the sound of what I've heard because I don't see how you have a justification in copyright on any publicly passed. Well, cost will be an issue. We have frequently posted documents and we have never been sued or even been given a nasty letter. The one exception was a takedown notice from the state of Oregon. We said, well fine, we'll go to court and they instead held hearings and decided to unanimously waive their copyright. The financial issues are really a key part of this. For example, as many know, I firmly believe that the dissemination of our district court documents should be without fee. On the other hand, that is $129 million a year used by the judiciary to fund courtroom technology and the dissemination system and you can't simply say that's gonna disappear. You have to look at that and say, well gee, if that happens then some things are gonna have to happen. For example, Congress or the executive branch may need to help fund some of these services. Perhaps filing fees might go up. We have to examine the business model if you will. State of California, the same thing. I objected strongly that the California Code of Regulations was only available for fee and when I talked to a state official, the official said, look, it's really not an issue of copyright or anything. It's an issue of $800,000 a year that's gonna go away if we give away these documents. And that's an important issue. Do we have any closing comments from our panel and then I think we'll wrap this up? No? Thank you very much, everybody. We appreciate it. Excuse me? Yeah Excuse me? Yes? Yes indeed.? Yeah. Excuse me? Yes.