Recent Articles

Text of the CALICON10 plenary talk

June 27, 2010 23:29

[NB: VIDEO is now available here. The talk has gotten an astonishingly wide and positive reaction, which is very gratifying for my ego.  So much so, in fact, that I may simply abandon the LII and wander the Earth, like Kwai-Chang Caine, righting wrongs and spouting incomprehensible  but...

Outage!

February 21, 2010 17:36

I have had a miserable couple of days, here at the keyboard, working through the effects of the Great LII Outage of 2010.  I spent a lot of time on repairs, and on measures that sharply decrease the chances of another.  But this is the Internet, after all,  and a highly complex system, and we...

Once more, we ask for your support

November 20, 2009 15:57

Friends: For some of you, we can keep this really, really short: go to our donation page, right this very minute, and make a tax-deductible donation.  For those who can be convinced to do so by conventional means, I reproduce the letter that we are sending to our supporters, below.  But I think...

More West: What Legal Information Business Should The Government Be Out Of?

November 10, 2009 14:01

West Group’s edit of Bob Berring’s remarks on free access to law leads with the interesting assertion that government should get out of the legal information business because “every time government has tried to take over the provision of legal information it’s...

The West Video and the Free Market

November 08, 2009 18:18

Some people just can’t let go of things. Just yesterday, I was confronted by a progressive friend who corrected me when I referred to a certain airport in Washington, DC as “Reagan”.  For better or worse, they changed the name over a decade ago, and no amount of beating could...

Berring on the merits

November 03, 2009 01:44

I haven’t rushed a response to Bob Berring’s comments on free legal information, partly because I wanted my response to be thoughtful rather than rushed.  I also felt that I’d made most of my rebuttal points in a previous response to a VoxPopuLII post by Dan Dabney, a West Group...

Hey, Joe, whaddaya know?

October 19, 2009 10:36

The facts, at least, are simple:  Joe Arpaio, the controversial sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, claimed that Federal law lets him arrest suspected illegal immigrants during street sweeps.  He provided a press handout that quotes extensively from “8 USC 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv)(b)(iii)”....

What’s opera, doc? A note to our supporters, past and future.

June 03, 2009 13:45

Somewhere in the snowdrift of paper on my desk is a program from an opera performance I attended a few months ago.  Among other things, it’s a document that tells you what the opera company is doing and who, specifically, is doing it.  It  also tells you — less directly —...

Two really simple ideas

May 14, 2009 11:17

Lately, I’ve been tempted toward complicated prose that urges rethinking of legal-information fundamentals.  Why? Because the idea of public access to law in a global digital society makes some fundamental rethinking necessary.   It would be swell to explore those notions in some longwinded...

What are we about?

April 17, 2009 13:01

Over in VoxPopuLII this week, Dan Dabney makes a number of good points about the proper role of LIIs and other public legal information providers. In his view, our useful purpose is to drive innovation up a ladder of value-added legal information providers.  West Group, unsurprisingly, occupies the...