Legal Information and the Development of American Law

Welcome

Richard A. Danner

Context and Legal Research [audio, video]

Barbara Bintliff (Professor of Law, Law Library Director-University of Colorado School of Law)

With preferences now firmly in place for electronic legal research, is it time to think about the consequences coming from the shift from print to electronic resources? In particular, how have the use and analysis of research results changed? This paper explores the changing context of legal research results occasioned by the shift from the defined and hierarchical legal research world of the digests and print resources to the almost unlimited information available electronically. Basic communication theory is used to understand how the changes affect our shared context.

Researching American Legal History in the Digital Age [audio, video], Q&A [audio, video]

Morris Cohen (Professor Emeritus of Law, Yale Law School)

The renaissance of interest in American legal history has been greatly aided by a variety of new developments in the materials and methods of legal research. Legal history has become a new center of attention in American legal education and scholarship and has attracted similarly enhanced interest in university history departments. Fortunately, this comes at a time when increasingly sophisticated research techniques and sources are gaining wide acceptance in the legal community generally more ...

Reading about Legal Information and the Development of American Law [audio, video]

Richard A. Danner (Rufty Research Professor of Law and Senior Associate Dean for Information Services, Duke Law School)

Bob Berring's writings on the influences of the forms and structure of published legal information on how American lawyers think about the law are part of a larger literature that explores the impacts of electronic databases, the Internet, and other media and communications technologies on legal research and practice. Far reaching in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, this rich body of work has enlivened the study of legal information, and fostered the development of a new and growing area of legal scholarship.

"A Few Platitudinous Things About Bob" [audio, video]

Christopher Edley, Jr. (Dean, Boalt Hall School of Law)

Speaker Introductions [audio, video]

Kathleen Vanden Heuvel (Director, Law Library; Adjunct Professor of Law; University of California School of Law, Berkeley)

Legal Research v. Legal Writing Within the Law School Curriculum [audio, video]

Roy M. Mersky (Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas at Austin)

The National Conference of Bar Examiners has proposed the development of a stand alone legal research component to the bar exam. This recognition of the importance of legal research skills highlights the need for increased attention to legal research instruction in law schools. The author looks at the history of legal writing and legal research programs in law schools, notes the continued demand by practitioners and the judiciary for improved legal research skills among recent graduates, and suggests curricular and instructional changes within the academy to address both these on-ongoing concerns and the expectations of a new generation of students.

Neutral Citation, Court Web Sites, and Improved Access to Case Law [audio, video]

Peter W. Martin, Jane M. G. Foster Professor of Law (Cornell)

In 1994 the Wisconsin Bar and Judicial Council together urged the Wisconsin Supreme Court to take two dramatic steps with the combined aim of improving access to state case law: 1) adopt a new system of neutral format citation and 2) establish a digital archive of decisions directly available to all publishers and the public. The recommendations set off a firestorm, and the Wisconsin court deferred decision on the package more ...

Should Legal Research Be Included in the Bar Exam? [audio, video]

Steven M. Barkan (Professor & Director of Library and Information Services, University of Wisconsin Law School)

Question and Answer Session [audio, video]

Law and Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology: A Prolegomenon to Future Law Librarianship [audio, video]

Paul Callister (Director, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law Library)

Following World War II, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger offered one of the most potent criticisms of technology and modern life. His nightmare is a world whose essence has been reduced to the functional equivalent of "a giant gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to the world [is] in principle a technical one ... [It is] altogether alien to former ages and histories." For Heidegger, the problem is not technology itself, but the technical mode of thinking that has accompanied it. Such a viewpoint of the world is a useful paradigm to consider humanity's relationship to law in the current information environment, which is increasingly technical in Heidegger's sense of the term more...

Legal Information as Social Capital [audio, video]

Virginia J. Wise (Senior Lecturer on Law for Legal Research, Harvard Law School) & Frederick Schauer (Harvard, John F. Kennedy School of Government)

Existing discussions of the value of legal information tend to focus either on its obvious value for individual practitioners and researchers, or on it value in enabling individual citizens to ensure that government behavior conforms with the requirements of formal written law. Not as widely recognized, however, is the way in which legal information can help foster that variety of horizontal collective initiative that Robert Putnam and others have labeled "social capital" more ...

Peer to Peer Meets the World of Legal Information: Encountering a New Paradigm [audio, video]

Ethan Katsh (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

The first significant entrance of information technology into world of law, over two decades ago, was through the library. At that time, machines could be found in some law libraries that, rather remarkably at the time, made it possible to access large collections of information located quite far away. Between then and now, access to legal information has become faster, easier and cheaper, each by an order of magnitude. Legal information has become available to new audiences and the pace of change has, if anything, been accelerating. Even so, there is little doubt that the migration of legal information from the physical to the virtual is far from over and the question of what this shift means is far from being answered...

Question and Answer Session [audio, video]

Dog Law [audio, video]

Dan Dabney (Senior Director, Thomson Global Services)

Lawyers sometimes conduct a kind of research in which the needed result is not so much an answer, but an answer space--a collection of all plausible answers. But what counts as a plausible answer depends, to some extent, on the research tools in use, and thus their choice of tools can affect the questions lawyers ask and the answers they are prepared to accept. The answer spaces characteristic of each of the five major classes of legal research tool--narratives, codes, intellectual indexes, citation indexes, and free text--are each briefly considered, and the difference between intellectual indexing and free text is explored in more detail.

Experience v. Authority: Open Source and the "Laws of Quality" [audio, video]

Paul Duguid (School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley)

The example of Wikipedia has encouraged people to think of moving "open source" processes outside the narrow world of software. Legal scholars such as Benkler and Lessig have promoted this idea, perhaps because the history of law itself has some intriguingly "open" aspects. Their arguments, I suggest, ignore another kind of law, such as "Linus's Law," which prevail in successful open source software projects but don't automatically transfer to other domains.

Closing Remarks [audio, video]

Bob Berring (Walter Perry Johnson Professor of Law; University of California School of Law, Berkeley)