Next Thursday (6/17) and Friday (6/18) the Harvard Law School Library
and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society will host two workshops
focused on the Law.gov initiative, a proposed registry and repository of
all primary legal materials of the United States. The workshops,
organized by Carl Malamud, President of Public.Resource.Org, aim to
convene advocates for the public domain, lawyers, policy makers,
librarians, archivists, students, and all those interested to discuss
issues around access to primary materials in Massachusetts, and to also
reflect on the national series of workshops held in the past year in
order to identify core principles and policy mechanisms for public
information.
The workshops will feature Carl Malamud, Berkman Faculy Co-Director John
Palfrey, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, the Honorable Dina E.
Fein, Boston College Librarian Joan Shear, Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic
Director Phil Malone, and many more.
Do we have access to all primary legal materials in Massachusetts? What
are the best practices for making information accessible? What
obstacles face institutions trying to make it available? Our hope is to
create a document outlining the most salient issues in accessibility to
Massachusetts legal information with suggestions of things that could be
done to effect the most accessible system possible in Massachusetts.
Law.gov: Putting it All Together (6/18)
The Harvard Law School Law.Gov workshop on June 18 is the last in a
6-month series of such workshops that have taken place throughout the
country. In this final workshop, participants will discuss the
implications of some core principles about access to primary legal
materials. Are these principles workable? What will it take to make them
real? What are the implications of these principles? Our hope is that
upon completion of this workshop, a crisp set of basic principles can be
presented and discussed, perhaps leading to the enactment of some of
these principles into policy through mechanisms such as judicial rules,
executive orders, or legislation.
We hope you will join us for one or both of these events.