Isabelle Moncion of Lexum and Mariya Badeva-Bright of the African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII), have posted Reaching Sustainability of Free Access to Law Initiatives, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, the authors summarize the key findings of the recently completed “Free Access to Law – Is It Here to Stay?” Project, on the sustainability of legal information institutes (LIIs). The methodology of the project -- funded by the International Development Research Centre and conducted by the Chair in Legal Information at the University of Montreal -- consisted of case studies of the use and management of LIIs in Burkina Faso, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Niger, the Philippines, South Africa, and Uganda.

In this post, the authors identify key principles emerging from those case studies, and illustrate the potential utility of those principles by reference to the case of AfricanLII.

Among the major findings of the study are that LIIs are more likely to be sustainable when they operate at a jurisdictional level at which revenues can be realized, and offer content and services appropriate to that level; identify core user groups willing to pay for content or services; target content and services to those core user groups; and engage with those core user groups in the development of content and services.

This post will be of interest to the free-access-to-law community, to the legal publishing community, and to advocates of access to justice and to government information, as well as to those who study information and communications technology for development (ICT4D).

Eve Gray of the University of Cape Town IP Law and Policy Research Unit, has posted Incomprehension Compounded by Mistranslation - The Imperatives of Access to Legal Information in South Africa, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Ms. Gray describes the South African legal publishing industry, and the factors that inhibit competition and innovation among established firms in that sector. Using the example of the Report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ms. Gray describes how those factors limit most South Africans' access to legal information.

Ms. Gray describes the South African Government's progress in providing access to legal resources on its Website, and the efforts of the Southern African Legal Information Institute (SAFLII) to extend and enhance that access.

Ms. Gray identifies nonprofit organizations and research centers -- which employ new business models featuring open access digital publishing combined with fee-based access to services or printed works -- as sites of innovation in South African legal publishing. Ms. Gray concludes by describing several of these innovative organizations and assessing their impact on public access to legal information.

This post will be of interest to members of the legal publishing industry, to the legal community generally and the access to justice community in particular, and to advocates of open access to legal information.

Ed Walters, Esq., of FastCase, has posted Tear Down This (Pay)Wall: The End of Private Copyright in Public Statutes, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Walters describes the extent to which U.S. state governments and for-profit legal publishers assert copyright in U.S. state statutes, and the problems this poses for due process of law, as well as for competition and innovation in the legal publishing industry. Mr. Walters explains the U.S. legal authorities prohibiting copyright in state statutes. Mr. Walters then proposes an innovative strategy with which state governments can preclude assertions of copyright in state laws.

In the course of his argument, Mr. Walters notes the recent approval of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act, which has the potential to make important contributions toward freeing state statutes from copyright restrictions.

This post will be of interest to advocates of open government data, as well as to government technologists, legal publishers, developers of legal information systems, and all who seek greater competition and innovation in the U.S. legal publishing market.

Ryan Calo, Esq., of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, has posted Open Robotics, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Calo explores the transformative potential of robots, and how legal liability arising from robot conduct could inhibit the socially beneficial development of robot technology -- particularly robotics developed according to an "open" and "generative" model. Mr. Calo offers a proposal for limiting liability of manufacturers of "open" robots, analogous to liability limitations introduced in order to benefit other transformative industries and technologies, such as aviation and the Internet.

This post will be of interest to those in the robotics, artificial intelligence, and open technology communities, as well as to ethicists, lawyers, and policy makers.

John Mayer of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), has posted The Free Law Reporter - Open Access to the Law and Beyond, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Mayer describes The Free Law Reporter, CALI's new free and open database of decisions from U.S. federal and state courts, built using data from Public.Resource.Org's RECOP database. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement.

Mr. Mayer underscores the ebook functionality of Free Law Reporter: the system allows users to automatically transform their Free Law Reporter search results into ebooks in the open EPUB format. These ebooks can be used as casebooks for law school courses, as well as in other applications.

The Free Law Reporter's ebook functionality complements CALI's other legal open educational resource services, the eLangdell free and open digital casebook/textbook service, and the Legal Education Commons, where law professors share their instructional resources online.

Mr. Mayer's post also discusses the principles underlying The Free Law Reporter. The first of these is the idea that law professors and law librarians should have the freedom to customize databases and course materials to meet the particular needs of their students and the particular objectives of their courses; as Mr. Mayer writes, "Academic law libraries should have free and open access to the law, access that allows them to define and construct the educational environment for law students."

In addition, Mr. Mayer characterizes The Free Law Reporter as a generative resource, that can foster innovation, creativity, and collaborative effort among law professors, law librarians, and other members of the legal educational community.

Mr. Mayer's post should be of interest to law professors, law librarians, legal information systems developers, continuing legal education providers, ebook technologists, and the open educational resources community.

The Electronic World Treaty Index is a new post by Paul Poast of the University of Michigan Department of Political Science, Daniel Martin Katz of the University of Michigan's Center for the Study of Complex Systems and Computational Legal Studies, and Michael J. Bommarito II of Systematic Global Macro and Computational Legal Studies, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, the authors describe the content and functionality of The World Treaty Index (WTI), a new, updated, digital version of Peter Rohn's pioneering reference source.

The new digital World Treaty Index includes metadata for nearly 75,000 treaties that entered into force in the twentieth century. Users may search by numerous access points, including citation; title keyword; party name (including countries and organizations); "Correlates of War" country code; subject; whether the treaty is unilateral, bilateral, or multilateral; and signature date.

Visualizations and data export are among the notable functionality in the new digital WTI. Display results include a visualization "of the distribution of the requested treaties over the requested time period," a function that highlights the data visualization expertise of the founders of Computational Legal Studies. In addition, users may export search results for bilateral treaties, and may export metadata for multilateral treaties in bulk, in both instances in .csv format, for use in standard statistical packages. These features render WTI both a legal reference source and a valuable data set for research in political science and law.

In the coming months, the authors plan to extend WTI's coverage through 2011, add metadata about "treaty terminations and renegotiations," enhance the multilateral treaties interface, and add links to full text of treaties.

This post should be of interest to researchers in international law and political science, legal information professionals, developers of legal information systems, and those who study legal metadata.

Isabelle Moncion of the Chair in Legal Information of the University of Montreal, and Lexum, has posted Building Sustainable LIIs - or Free Access to Law as Seen Through the Eyes of a Newbie, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Ms. Moncion describes two IDRC-funded studies into the use and sustainability of legal information institutes -- sites that offer free Internet access to the full text of primary legal information -- in Asia, West Africa, and Southern Africa. The studies are being conducted by the Chair in Legal Information of the University of Montreal.

The first study addresses the use of, and potential demand for, legal information institutes in four West African countries: Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal, and Togo. The second study concerns the sustainability of legal information institutes, in Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa.

Ms. Moncion's post discusses the methodology and summarizes preliminary findings of the studies.

This post will be of interest to advocates of access to justice and to government information, and to the legal publishing community, as well as to those who study information and communications technology for development (ICT4D).

Dr. Sushant Sinha of Yahoo! India has posted Indian Kanoon: The Genesis and the Legal Thirst, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Dr. Sinha describes the origins and development of Indian Kanoon, the free legal search engine for India, for which Dr. Sinha was recently named one of “18 Young Innovators under 35 in India” by MIT’s Technology Review India.

Indian Kanoon provides free online access to Indian statutes, judicial and administrative decisions, debates of India's constituent assemblies, reports of the Indian Law Commission, and articles from selected law journals. Indian Kanoon also hosts several discussion forums, in which users can ask and receive responses to questions concerning substantive legal issues or Indian Kanoon's functionality.

In his post, Dr. Sinha identifies as the principal goal of Indian Kanoon the "empower[ment of] citizens" by enabling them to become informed about "their rights and privileges" under the law.

Dr. Sinha observes that the number of visitors to Indian Kanoon is extremely large and steadily rising; and that the average visitor to Indian Kanoon spends substantial time viewing each retrieved document. Dr. Sinha concludes that these data indicate a growing demand among the Indian people for access to the law -- a demand he calls The Legal Thirst -- and considers possible causes for this increasing demand.

Dr. Sinha suggests that two factors in particular -- the provision of access to law free of charge, and improvements in search technology, including "forgiving" keyword search functionality and the ranking of results by relevance -- are fueling the desire of the Indian public to read the full text of the laws that govern them.

Dr. Sinha's post will be of interest to legal information systems developers, legal publishers, the ICT for development community, and all those interested in the free access to law movement.

Professor Dr. Vytautas Čyras of the Vilnius University Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics has posted On a Legal Framework in a Virtual World: Lessons from the VirtualLife Project, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Professor Čyras describes the regulatory infrastructure of VirtualLife, the experimental European Union-funded virtual world. In this infrastructure, legal and technological constraints are used together in an attempt to provide effective but flexible regulation.

Professor Čyras emphasizes the decentralized, "federalist" governance structure of VirtualLife -- which provides for uniform protection of core rights while permitting groups to form smaller communities and to customize the laws that govern them -- the peer-to-peer architecture of VirtualLife, which complements the decentralized governance structure; the VirtualLife e-contracting environment, which offers a variety of standard contract terms while allowing parties to create their own customized terms; and "virtual laws," which enable technological grants and enforcement of intellectual property and other rights.

This post should be of interest to all those who are interested in the legal dimension of virtual worlds, including developers, policy makers, legal professionals, information systems researchers, and information providers.

Nick Holmes of infolaw has posted Accessible Law, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Holmes discusses the state of the free access to law movement, and the challenges of making free law usable by ordinary citizens. Mr. Holmes describes FreeLegalWeb, his new free access to law service, that combines free primary law with expert legal commentary presented via blogs, to make the law more accessible to the people.

Mr. Holmes also discusses the recent debate between Bob Berring, Tom Bruce, and others over the quality of access to law provided by commercial computer assisted legal research services and free law services, as well as Jason Wilson's concept of online legal publishing as curation.

This post will be of interest to those who develop or manage legal information systems; to the legal publishing community; to the free access to law community; and all who are interest in improving public access to legal information.