CALIopolis

Pamela Jones and the hordes of relentless keyboard kommandoes have been clicking up a storm in these waning days of the SCO v. IBM litigation.

They have just posted a re-working of what PJ calls "IBM's Greatest Hits" and Groklaw's "Magnum Opus". It's titled ...

Declaration of Todd M. Shaughnessy with Unsealed or Redacted Exhibits

... but it's a massively linked documents from IBM of a good portion of the documents relevant to the case. It comes to Groklaw via Pacer as a PDF of images that the community has converted into HTML/text including pretty formatting, links (to all of the other documents in the Groklaw warehouse) and all spell-checked, i-dotted, t-crossed and worked over by volunteers who are more than happy to poke one more stick into SCO's eye.

Oh, no, this is not personal ...NOT.

But Pam is wrong.

The "great work" of Groklaw cannot be reduced to a single document or blog post. This is just the cherry on top, the icing on the cake, the ... the ... words escape me.

What if every injustice were pursued with the relentless zeal that the Groklaw community brings to their particular passion? Ponder that for a moment.

Law schools could teach entire seminars (several in fact) based on the just the court documents posted on the site, but the editorials and commentary bring color, life and emotion to this case. What a rich treasure of information .... all in one place.

The case is slouching towards conclusion and a recent blizzard of documents have been produced by both sides. 42 months into the case and you would think that there would be no ergs of energy left to transcribe these tedious lawyerly tomes. You would be wrong. With dispatch and depair (SCO's that is), the Groklawites have punched out the facts for everyone else to read, ponder and dissect.

Groklaw makes litigators out of all who read it and I mean that in the best possible way. We have learned all about trial tactics, motion practice, depositions, evidence, jurisdiction, summary judgement, contracts, copyright ... the list is long ... and in following Groklaw, I feel like I have been to law school and am ready to take the bar exam (well, perhaps not quite).

Kudos to Pam and the inexorable Groklaw community.

BlackBoard, take note.

I ran across ProjectPosner.org today and it's gave me an idea. Judges posting their own opinions - hence the title of this post. - MyJudgeSpace.

The purpose of Project Posner is...

"...Why this site? While Posner's books and popular writings are easily available to the public, his opinions are difficult or expensive for the public to access, let alone search. This site, for the first time, collects almost all of his opinions in a single searchable and easily readable database..."

It is not clear that Judge Posner is a participant in this project. The creators are Professor Tim Wu from Columbia and Stuart Sierra who works at Columbia are clearly fans of Posner's work...

"...Richard Posner is probably the greatest living American jurist. He has sat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago since 1981, and written several thousand opinions during that time. Posner is also well known for his extra-judicial writings and his deep affection for most members of the animal kingdom...."

I think the idea of Judges having a space to post their own opinion might be quite interesting, but, judges have to be careful about their public stateaments and can't be explaining all the time why they decided a case one way or another. The judiciary, however, does seem to be under attack for its "activism" and I believe that part of what fuels the criticism is the required silence from judges. They must 'speak' through their decisions, so what better way to speak louder than to make their decisions more accessible to the public.

Judge Posner is an exemplary case study in this.

"...One thing that distinguishes the opinions is the effort to try and get at why a given law actually exists, and an effort to try and make sense of the law. That can make them more useful than most case reports...."

Judges are busy people and doing the hard work of gathering the cases and creating the website would be too much of a burden, so maybe a service like MyJudgeSpace.com would lower the barrier. Even better, if judges have fan clubs like Posner, then the space should be a wiki where the fans could gather to post the opinions AND discuss them, link them out to other sources, etc. Maybe we should call this WikiJudgepedia.com?

I am thinking that this would be a neat project combining CALI's technical skills, law student volunteers, law librarians, law faculty and practicing attorneys.

Hat tip to the Orin Kerr for his post at the Volokh Conspiracy for the pointer to ProjectPosner.org.

Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center and also Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, Oxford University struck it rich recently. Rich in the sense that he got his latest article, "The Generative Internet" published on Groklaw where that large, voracious and didactic community tore into it in all sorts of interesting ways.

I confess to being a Groklaw addict and avid follower of the writings of Pamela, "PJ" Jones since she started Groklaw some years ago (gosh is it that long?). The main focus of the blog has been the SCO v. IBM litigation where you can find every single filing posted (in text and PDF) and long, circuitous and almost always insightful discussion of every single point of law that crazy case has taken.

PJ single-handedly created the notion of "open source litigation" where everything is visible, questioned, verified, researched and discussed. Regular followers of Groklaw have received a graduate level education in all sorts of legal issues, complex litigation tactics, intellectual property and beyond.

There are plenty of lawyers present daily as well as geeks and greybeards (the SCO case careened right into the old UNIX/ATT/BSD litigation long ago) and they provide expert commentary, war stories, personal recollection and hilarious commentary on the train wreck that is the SCO case.

Now take that gang and toss in a scholarly law review-type article and the results are fascinating.

If Professor's Zittrain's skin is thick enough (and having met the chap, I believe he will see this for the jackpot of riches it is), he will be able to reap a whirlwind of insight and market-testing for a paper that looks like it wants to be a full-length book someday.

I can't comment on the paper itself - I'm still slogging through it and from the reactions of the non-lawyers and non-law professors (see the graphic above), I am not the only one slogging.

Still, as an invited guest of PJ's, many of the responses are reasoned, intelligent and innovative. PJ's community is rich in intelligence and intellectual diversity and pretty polite. (PJ has ruthlessly enforced a no-profanity policy in the comments which makes her site one of the purest pleasures to read).

Politeness aside, this gang is a tough audience and they make for a rich learning experience for Zittrain or any other law professor who wants to write to a wider audience.

A month back, I pointed to videos of sentencing hearings posted on YouTube by the judge in the case. Most of the cases seemed to be drug-related. These videos were a little thin on content, but I asked the question "Is this legal education"?

Lawyer, Allison Margolin has posted a video that is part marketing, part public information and part social commentary. This IS legal education of a sort.

Here's the YouTube link so that you can view it yourself...

She also includes contact information at the end of the video...

But she goes much further than just describing her practice and her firm work. There is a short interview with a client and also commentary about drug-related criminal defense work that she does.

It's a very well-produced video with lots of cuts, shaky "NYPD Blue" like camera work and Allilson dressed in clothes that are not button-down, suited lawyer - more accessible and friendly to the clients she wishes to attract.

Except for the phone and email contact information, I would not have been too surprised to find this on a legal aid website. This is markets as conversations a la Cluetrain. YouTube may just become a big educational website where microniches of professionals education and advertise at the same time.

Having recently posted about the Legal Guide to Podcasting from Creative Commons, I was delighted to learn that there is a Legal Guide for Bloggers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Now I must go off and read it!

This the second in a series that riffs off Rob Reynolds insightful post at Xplanazine titled "Five Laws of Product Development for Education in the 21st Century. Here is Part One: We No Longer Know How They Want To Know.

2. Convergence Will Stay Ahead of Content

Here's a quote from the Reynold's post...

"...Every aspect of a course or textbook should be able to map to the technological convergence present via a cell phone or advanced iPod and should do so in such a way that allows the user to control the experience... "

Let me riff on this in two ways.

"... user to control the experience ..."

In education, there are two users. The faculty who are constructing the environment that will most efficaciously allow students to learn it and the student who takes what they are presented and try to make sense of it for their own personal learning goals.

This is Rip, Mix, Learn from both the faculty and the student viewpoints (and incidently, the theme of this year's Conference for Law School Computing).

Traditionally, the tools and materials that were available to faculty to construct the learning experience were rather blunt. In legal education, it is primarily the lecture and the casebook.

Faculty can do whatever they want in the lecture - that's their creative domain, but they are often constrained by the need to 'cover the material' and this limits their opportunities for deep or more relfective discussion before the class time us used up.

Faculty typically parse the casebook by creating a playlist of sorts that points to the casebook and the lectures telling the student what to read, when to read it and when it will be covered in class.

So a syllabus - which is essentially a time-based outline - also maps nicely onto a hyperlinked model of a table of contents - which maps nicely onto an outline that is hyperlinked into the chapters of the book. Since it is all time-based, this maps nicely onto the blog/feed/RSS model of delivery of legal education. I see why edubloggers are so excited. about the use of blogs to transform education.

But back to convergence.

Before we can put things together the way we want to - in other words - before instructors can construct the educational environment in the way that is best for the students, they have to have the pieces to do the construction. The Mix part of Rip, Mix, Learn is so much easier if the ingredients can be mixed together.

In the digital realm, this means that the pieces have to be disaggregated or at least disaggregatable. It is hard to disaggregate a paper textbook. What faculty need is a digital textbook where the chapters, sections and paragraphs can be re-used or re-purposed or re-placed or re-sequenced without a lot of stress, work or intellectual property rigamarole.

Next, instructors need tools to construct the course from the pieces. The final product has to be updatable (when you teach the next semester) and deliverable in different media (like websites, RSS, PDF for printing, etc.). This is where the converge part of convergence starts to happen in education.

Rob Reynolds over at Xplanazine has a great post called "The Five Laws of Product Development for Education in the 21st Century" that I would like to use to riff on legal education and law practice.

1. We No Longer Know How They Want To Know

Legal Education and Law Practice have had an electronic component in the research area that predates the web. I recall in 1988 when I was the computer guy at Chicago-Kent, giving out our seven Lexis passwords to all students so that they could do legal research from home. Today, all law students have 24/7 access to the near entirety of case law, citation systems, statutes and regs. This is available to attorneys as well for a price, but an increasing amount of this material is cheap or free via government fed or advertising supported websites.

This latter availability is important because it is also available to the rest of the world as well.

Books are still paper-bound, but there have been forays into ebooks in the past (Folio anyone?) and the emergence of companies like VitalSource and Fourteen40 seem to indicate that an increasing number of paper casebooks will be available in electronic format in the future.

Law Office Management and Case Management software has been around forever, and I have seen several open source projects starting to cropup that serve this vertical market as well. The presence of open source alternatives is sometimes an indicator of the commoditization of a marketspace.

A couple of years ago, I started to say things in my presentations like "Everyone Should be a Lawyer". It was meant to be provocative, but it's more true than ever. With the fact that everyone can represent themselves in legal matters, everyone IS a lawyer already - albeit an inexperienced or uninformed one.

State and County Law Libraries are on the front line of this and from lurking on their discussion list and being a member of the AALL-SIS devoted to these folks, there is a trend of fewer lawyers using these libraries and a huge increase of pro ses or self-representing litigants showing up and asking for help (pdf).

Combine these two notions - that e-filing on the web will open up a gigantic aggregatable marketplace for everyone to participate and that everyone CAN participate and there will be tremendous market pressure for those participants to be less experienced and less uninformed.

This is what I call the coming age of Legal Literacy.

E-filing is to law practice what blogs are to journalism - with one very important difference. Without the JD, you cannot represent someone else and there is that wide and opaque space called "unauthorized practice of law" if non-JDs or automated systems attempt to give legal advice to someone else.

The problem is what constitutes legal advice and what constitutes legal education? There's the opportunity. There are all sorts of ways to learn more about the law without going to law school, but this area has been barely scratched on the web. You could say its too hard to teach amateurs about the law, but who would have thought that so many people would have so much technical literacy or that so many people are playing journalist on evenings and weekends either (i.e. 30 million blogs).

Legal Literacy is in for a perfect storm on the web. Law is both technical and social. You can win your case if you have the law on your side or if your arguments are persuasive and you can avoid trouble or affect behavior with social engineering. The threat of legal action has always been the nuclear option in business negotiations. It is ripe for dis-aggregation as the rest of the populace realizes that lawyers have been using more fine-grained tools forever like negotiaion, alternative dispute resolution or just plain understanding the "source code" of the system to make it work. Shout out to Professor Lessig for that last sentence.

Code is Law on the Internet, but Law is Code for Society and Lawyers are Hackers.

With e-filing and self-representation, we can all be hackers and isn't that a scary thought. .

E-filing and the resultant surfacing of how the courts work (or don't work in some cases) will bring to bear an entire marketplace of ideas to rid the system of inefficiencies and unfairness. The Net hates inefficiency and tries to route around it. I am not saying that we are headed towards a utopian situation. I am saying that the system is due for a shake-up and we do not know how it will shake out.

How can we teach law students about that today? We don't know and that's the point of this first law of product development.

I will follow this thread in future blog posts as I look at the other four laws.

Image by Eric Molinsky who does great artwork for CALI lessons. This one is from Internet Legal Resources - Free Resources.

Received an email this morning from my friend Tom Bruce announcing the immeadiate availability of Wex, a collaboratively-edited legal dictionary and encyclopedia built on the MediaWiki platform. Here's a bit from the Wex FAQ:

What is Wex? WEX is a collaboratively-edited legal dictionary and encyclopedia. It is intended for a broad audience of people we refer to as "law novices" -- which at one time or another describes practically everyone, even law students and lawyers entering new areas of law. No doubt purists will be quick to point out the differences between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. We deliberately blur the distinction, as we are interested in providing objective, useful material in a range of formats.

Tom and LII crew have seeded Wex with the lot of original content that was developed for the LII's 'Law About..' legal subject area series. This looks like it will be another hit for the LII.

Next steps in RSS, Reading Lists - Think about adopting this idea of RSS Reading Lists for legal ed. Berkman's H2O Playlists come pretty close. John could elaborate more here.