Law.gov, fascinating push by the public.resource.org people (behind the EDGAR SEC data move way back) to quote:
Law.Gov is an effort to create a report documenting exactly what it would take to create a distributed registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.
By primary legal materials, we mean all materials that have the force of law and are part of the law-making process, including: briefs and opinions from the judiciary; reports, hearings, and laws from the legislative branch; and regulations, audits, grants, and other materials from the executive branch. Creating the system from open source software building blocks will allow states and municipalities to make their materials available as well.
To whit, all we have to say is, Kafka: before the law…
Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years.
We’ll leave it to you to find the end of the story.
The push has an equally fascinating assortment of people working on the specs: our question is, do they delineate a ‘crowd’?
- Professor Pamela Samuelson, Berkeley Law, University of California
- John Podesta, Center for American Progress
- Professor Tim Wu, Columbia Law School
- The Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
- Professors James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, Duke Law
- Professors Lawrence Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School
- Professor Jessica Litman, University of Michigan Law School
- The Oyez Project, Northwestern University
- Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media
- Professor Edward W. Felten, Princeton University
- Robert Crown Law Library, Stanford Law School
- Professor Terry Martin, University of Texas Law School
- Professor Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School
Check out the full page spec at the law.gov page on public.resource.org.
Terms Used: law.gov,