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Friday, July 31, 2009

Law - "Finding Accurate Law Text Online Nearly Impossible"

The ABA Standing Committee on the Law Library of Congress had a panel today at the ABA's annual meeting in Chicago. The title: "WHEN IS A LAW THE LAW? WHY AUTHENTICITY AND QUALITY MATTER." The advance description:

In a world that is linked together through increasingly numerous and complex transactions, access to reliable, quality texts of laws, regulations and court opinions is essential. There can be no substitute for the words of lawmakers and judges. Given the vast availability of online legal resources, how easy is it to determine what constitutes a reliable source of information? How does one know when the law is the law that it purports to be? And why does it matter? This panel will address these issues in part by describing an effort designed to provide access to the official and authentic legal texts from around the world known as the Global Legal Information Network (GLIN). The standards developed for this global legal information system are equally applicable to U.S. federal and state online primary legal resources. The results of a survey conducted by the American Association of Law Libraries finds that online primary legal resources for U.S. states currently cannot be considered trustworthy. Finally, the critical need for access to trustworthy legal access in the context of Rule of Law efforts, legislative strengthening programs, and legal/judicial reform projects will also be discussed.
This afternoon, Lynda Edwards of the ABA Journal reports on the panel's session:
It sounded easy. Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s counsel, Denley Chew, slapped down some $2 bills and challenged a room of lawyers and legal researchers with laptops and iPhones to find the authoritative text of the landmark Fugitive Slave Act online.

“Authoritative” was the catch. The money remained untouched.

Panelists declared that finding accurate text of a law—on government websites, LexisNexis, Westlaw—is almost impossible. The recession forced state and federal governments to post laws online rather than print them. But Mary Alice Baish, government relations director for the American Association of Law Libraries, says there is no national or international body that ensures those online postings are accurate or updated with amendments.

“I don’t think the problem will end until someone sues over because the decision was a $10 million case was based on an inaccurate version of a law,” Chew said. “Until that market solution, we’ll be dealing with cracks and fissures.”

The AALL conducted a 2007 survey that discovered that eight states and the District of Columbia refer lawyers and judges seeking the text of a law to official sources so different that the versions conflict. States that posted laws online only had no consistent way of maintaining older versions of an amended law or showing errors had been corrected.

“The history of law is disappearing; older versions of a law, amendments, show the thought process of a people and how they evolved,” observed ABA Legal Technology Research Center director Catherine Reach.

Global Legal Information Network at the Law Library of Congress provided the hopeful glimmer. Trusted officers of the court in dozens of jurisdictions, from the Congo to Canada, authenticate legal documents from their countries with an encrypted certificate. GLIN director Janice Hyde proudly said over 170,000 legal instruments have been authenticated.

With respect to Indiana, I have written about this problem frequently, and would refer those interested to:

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 31, 2009 04:25 PM
Posted to General Law Related | Indiana Courts | Indiana Law