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 also to
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 Faculty 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.
We hope you will join us for one or both of these events. To learn more
or register, please visit the event pages for June 17 and June 18.
More about the workshops:
Law.gov: Massachusetts (6/17)
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.
Registration and full agendas for both workshops can be found at
http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgovMA and
http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/06/lawdotgov.