 Questions, and we have a roving mic. Yes, we have runners on each side. OK. So Peter Martin, please. A library. It's working. A Library of Congress question, David, or observation. The Library of Congress won a few places where I thought that I could find a full set of official law reports of the states that still produced them. An inspection a couple of years ago indicated that there was a strong correlation between those it had in its collection and those it copyrighted it. That in fact, the Library of Congress was not expending public funds to acquire reports, but was simply relying on the law publications of the states which in fact were copyright registrations or deposits for their registration. I wonder if that's still the case. I'm not sure of the particulars for the reports itself, but it is true that the law library does rely a lot on the copyright deposits for adding to its collection. And that's simply because of funding. But I don't know, is there a specific state that you were interested in? I expected to find a complete collection and it was not there. And then I said, well, what's here and what's not here? And what was here were the states? Were the states that were copywriting, registering, and depositing? Right. And to the extent that we have availability of copyright deposits, we try to go that route. And to the extent that copyright no longer is asserted in law materials by states or other public bodies, then your collection will be impoverished. Or we may need to. Or you may need to seek other ways to address it. Exactly. Hi, Paul Verkyle from the Administrative Conference. Professor Tribe, it made me think of something. And we've talked already, but the connection between openness and access, which is your point of view, it struck me that Carl's example of the juice purveyor, the person who wants to enter the market and can't get all these rules together, is a perfect opportunity to inject another federal agency who's not at the table. And that is the Small Business Administration. And I'm just wondering whether we shouldn't make this effort to include, I mean, these are barriers to entry. These are small businesses that can't start up. There must be thousands of examples, not just the juice example, that we could collect. And we could intrigue an agency whose mission is to reduce these barriers. And access to judicial or non-judicial sources, your middle class focus, really, is access for people to have new jobs in a time when there was a hard to find. I think, Paul, you make a very good point. That is, we have in mind access not only to sort of static resources or to outcomes in cases where someone is being prosecuted or persecuted, being pursued in one way or another civilly or criminally, but access to entrepreneurial opportunity, access to things that have an affirmative thrust. And there's no reason at all why the Small Business Administration wouldn't be part of that, and subject only to the resource limitation of having a small office and trying to figure out whose portfolio covers which kinds of outreach. We are, in fact, reaching out to HUD, to the Veterans Administration, certainly to commerce. We plan to reach out to the SBA at some point. Hi. I'm Daniel Schumann with the Sunlight Foundation. The question I have has to do a little bit with the recursive nature of the information itself. Thomas makes available a tremendous amount of information to the public about all sorts of legislative materials. What is less visible, of course, is how well it is providing those services itself. For example, if a bill was introduced, does it take one day for it to become publicly available, or does it take five? The same sort of question can arise in the court context. What are the cases that people are looking at the most? What are the orders that folks are looking at the most? And this, of course, works with the executive branch as well when you're talking about access to OLC materials and things along those lines. So the question that I have for the panel is, to what extent, within the context of what we're talking about with law.gov, is the information about the information something that the public should have access to as well? Let me just make one comment about the meta information issue. There are two dimensions at least. I mean, one is to what extent people should have access to the information about the information. And I would say, in principle, that should be unlimited. But the other dimension is, how good are we at figuring out what information about the information to gather? And one of the emphases of my initiative is to work with the Office of Justice Programs on increasingly enriching the evidence, sort of the evidentiary base for various practices, figuring out what works, what doesn't work. To that extent, it's important that the pilot projects we encourage and follow are ones where the data is carefully gathered, but then one has to figure out what data. It's not just enough to know how many hits there are on a given site, but one wants to know something about what uses people are making of them, which searches are productive, which are not. And we're working, to some extent, with the National Institute of Justice and with others, probably also with some outside groups like the American Bar Foundation, on designing studies to figure out what uses are being made of the information and what kinds of access are particularly productive. I can add a comment to that. I think I have two comments going in slightly different directions, which I think can nevertheless be reconciled. First, getting the information about the information is critically important because it helps you to do not only to find individual materials, but to do much more meaningful, large scale analysis and that sort of thing. And so if, for example, you want to understand the general disposition of a particular judge towards the civil rights cases over time, it's important to have the metadata to understand that. On the other hand, and I'm sure I'm stealing a little bit of Harlan's thunder and he'll talk more about this in his panel, it's important not to let your pursuit of good metadata get in the way of getting the information. So if you can get the information before you can get the information about the information, that can often be useful. And in fact, if third parties are good at extracting the metadata from that core information, you may end up where you want to be, which is good information and good metadata. More quickly, if you, as an initial matter, make the core materials available and then work on the back end processes for the metadata. So it's important, but it shouldn't be a blocker. Let me just add to that very quickly. I just came back from meetings with mathematicians at Imperial College in London who have developed a new mathematical technique that will come out shortly in the proceedings of the National Academies that I have read and I'm completely unable to understand. But I think what it says is something to the effect of what they're able to do is to extract that metadata. In other words, to see the patterns, to find the communities, to find the groupings in data sets without having to know those correlations in advance, without having to have the metadata effectively. And it represents, as I have been told, an important mathematical advance in the analysis in graph theory of large-scale data sets, which has a tremendous application for things like, and has been tested on citation networks in particular, which has potentially very important applications for analysis of legal information and extracting that metadata. So we'll be interested in trying to find people who can read the math better than I can to confirm it, but I'm confident that the National Academies knew what they were doing when they decided to publish this most recent paper. So maybe we'll be seeing some interesting advances in this area of knowing what we know before we know it. I think we had one more question comment down there. Yes. So the Alex Howard O'Reilly media. So the Supreme Court recently redesigned its website. And they're now posting decisions more or less in the same day when they come out often within the hour as PDFs. Often, though, different government entities take their nods from what's happened at the top of the federal government, so in terms of what's happened with different.gov sites. What expectation, this might be a question for you, CTO Novak, since you handled the technical innovation aside. What can we expect in terms of hyperlinking those decisions? Right now they're in PDFs. Do you think there's an expectation that it will be available in XML? And we'll have a lot of the code built into it that was described earlier. I think you're our official representative of the judicial branch here. I have no personal knowledge of the technical implementation in that regard. What I will say, piggybacking on my last response, I suppose, is, for example, what we're doing with district court documents is we're able to pull out of the, I wouldn't call it a proprietary PACER system, but the sometimes difficult to parse PACER system, metadata in such a way that we can then represent that in a variety of ways. And so it may not require, as an initial matter, I think we'll see good reasons why it is a good idea as an initial matter if it's possible to make it available in those formats. But it may not require that as an initial matter to get that working. That's not a great direct answer. I did want to comment on your initial note, which was that folks often take direction from what's happening at the top. And that's why I think, for example, that although PACER and what's in the district bankruptcy and circuit courts at that level is a fraction of the legal materials we're talking about. And it's not only that, it's the type of legal material that your average citizen does not deal with federal litigation very often. It's nevertheless, first of all, very important precedentially, but it's also very important as an example of what can be done. And I think that if the federal government were to take some strong, clear steps, if the judiciary were to take some strong, clear steps, it would serve as an example further down the line. So I think a win when it comes to PACER goes far beyond PACER in that regard. Let me say, Alex, that I think in part what you're going to hear more about this afternoon about the federal register, I think to the point about modeling out what's possible with regard to things like hyperlinking, I think will have a very important demonstration value. Let me just ask Mike Walsh if I can put him on the spot. Is there anything you know in response to this question specifically through your work with the judicial branch, since the GPO does some of the back end work for the judiciary? We've done the hosting of the Supreme Court website up until they launched their own site. We're still in negotiations with the Supreme Court about what content they want to provide to us. We have been getting their feeds of data, and we don't know what their intent is, longer term. It may be that they want to provide us with the bound opinions to go into our collection system, but that hasn't been determined yet. Do you have any sense that since you are also working with NARA on the federal register that there will be some opportunity to again show, look what's possible, and we could do this over here, is there some positive externalities to the work that you're doing with the executive branch? Not yet, but from the Supreme Court side, but I think that there's great opportunity, the earlier comments about references and linkages and hyperlinks, when you start to tie things in Supreme Court opinions to even the Constitution annotated and having those linked together and the work within the rules and regulations, there's just a wonderful opportunity if we can really get the linkages coordinated and do that up front. So I'm very hopeful we can do that. It's a matter of getting the opportunity to do that. I had a question for, I guess, Professor Tribe, and it's not really a question about access to justice. It's accessed by justice. Justice Department spends $4 million a year accessing the PACER system, and it's my understanding that there's been occasions where Department of Justice lawyers might get memos saying we're over budget, stop doing so much research. My question is, we know that access by the poor to justice is an issue. Is access by lawyers for the poor to legal materials an issue? Lawyers that work for legal services corporation or for nonprofits or public interest firms? I think the short answer is yes, but the longer answer is it's not something I've looked at in any detail. We're having, for the first time, discussions with LSC. Apparently for 35 years, there was a kind of separation of church and state between the legal services corporation and the Department of Justice. We have to still be careful about how we interact with them, but we're learning a good bit more about what LSC offices are finding obstructions to their attempt to be of service to their clients, and my sense is that access to legal materials is part of the problem, but not in their perception, a central part. I am curious about the point made about the Supreme Court. I mean, is John Roberts as Chief Justice and Head of the Federal Judiciary centrally involved in this, or is it something that's left to others? Because I was struck in one recent oral argument by his observation, and sure many of you have seen it, in which he sort of, he asked whether, when someone is getting a text message, you get a busy signal when someone else is trying to text you. And I was thinking that perhaps if the decisions about these issues were being made by someone sort of with a contemporary sensibility about these matters, it might make a difference. Yeah, and I don't know, simple answer. I'm not sure what's driving the decision process there. We work primarily with the IT organization within the courts, so. I see. One of the aims of Law.gov is to establish enough of an open record that we can in fact approach the Judicial Conference and the Administrative Office of the courts and discuss these technical issues. And to date, at least my experience has been that there's been very little outside input, certainly at the Judicial Conference level, and definitely at the Administrative Office of the US courts level. They're not working with the outside world. They're not working with the Princeton team, for example. They're not like the Office of the Federal Register working with the folks up at Cornell on ways to make their system better. At least that's my impression. We, I think, are just about out of time. So I think we're gonna have to cut this off. I'd love to keep this panel here all day, but I think we should break for lunch and we will start again at one o'clock precisely with the next panel. So thank you very much. Thank you. Lunch is outside. Go ahead and help yourself. Go ahead and bring it on in.