Public Access to Legal Information.
John Wonderlich of the Open House Project has an interesting article on the “Legal Information Institute,” which is working to create public access to legal information. He writes:
All around the world, without centralized planning, institutes have sprung up in response to a pressing need: non-lawyers have a real use for legal information, but can’t get it. In countries across several continents, new initiatives online are successfully giving the general public information that they wouldn’t have been able to search before, information that used to be controlled exclusively by the legal information publishing businesses. As businesses, they have a mandate to make profitable decisions, and not necessarily to serve the greater needs of a society. As a result, the public gets locked out of the very laws that control their lives, unable to understand and analyze the legislation or case history that forms the legal structures under which their actions are evaluated by the government.
Not anymore, though. . . . (read more)