Computer media for the legal profession.

• Author: Volokh, Eugene

INTRODUCTION

This is a review not of a book, but of a set of communication media. The year 1995, we're told, was the year of the Internet.(1) Anything as heavily hyped as the Net has been is guaranteed to have gotten overhyped, and many have become justifiably skeptical of claims about How Cyberspace Is Changing Our Lives Even As We Speak.

Still, there are indeed many cyberspace resources that are already useful to lawyers, law professors, and law students; and there are valuable opportunities for legal professionals to profit from creating more such resources. In this review, I want to briefly explain what the new communication media are, what their best specimens today seem to be, and how people can benefit both from using what's already out there and from creating new resources themselves.(2)

Cyberspace -- which encompasses more than just the Internet -- includes at least three different kinds of media:

Electronic Books, Bookshelves, and Libraries: The much-talked-about World Wide Web is essentially a collection of electronic books, bookshelves, libraries, and other research tools. Each Web site is a collection of material that you can go to and read, like a book, but is generally free, accessible directly from your computer, and more easily searchable.

Electronic Newsletters: Just as you can subscribe to magazines or newspapers that will arrive in the mail, so you can subscribe to electronic magazines and newspapers that come in the e-mail. Like electronic books, though, electronic newsletters are cheaper to produce than their print counterparts and as a result tend to be available for free.

Electronic Conferences: Here we come to the famous Internet "discussion lists" or "news groups"; conferences on non-Internet services, such as Prodigy, Compuserve, America Online, and, especially relevant for the legal profession, Counsel Connect, also qualify. These groups let one participant communicate (more or less through e-mail) with all the other participants, and can be fora for debate, for asking questions, for floating trial balloons, and for other things.

These new media -- under optimal circumstances -- can be considerably cheaper, timelier, and more flexible than their physical-world analogs, and this means two things. First, it makes it possible for some of them to supplant the old media, at least to some extent. Thus, Cornell's LIIBULLETIN, which delivers abstracts of U.S. Supreme Court cases (and, if you like, the entire decisions) the day they come out, is a viable competitor to BNA's U.S. Law Week Supreme Court opinions service. LIIBULLETIN currently has 6600 subscribers.(3)

Likewise, http://www.census.gov contains a vast amount of U.S. census data, which one would otherwise have to go to the library to get;(4) other Web sites house similarly valuable material. Many electronic conferences, though certainly not all, let you participate in thoughtful, substantive discussions with some of the best people in the field, often more productively and certainly much more cheaply than could happen at a traditional conference.

Second, and in some ways more intriguing, the medium's low cost and greater flexibility make possible publications that otherwise never would have seen the light of day. If only a few hundred people throughout the country want a certain sort of information -- for instance, instant updates to a casebook, or abstracts of articles on constitutional law, or a collection of material on an esoteric legal topic -- the information won't get published. Printing and mailing it to subscribers, or distributing it to law libraries, costs too much. But online, the only serious cost is the editor's time -- a nontrivial matter, but one that can be much less of a barrier.

1. WORLD WIDE WEB SITES

   1. The Electronic Book (or Bookshelf)

      A Web site is a way for someone to make material available to anyone who has Internet access. Setting up such a site is like publishing a book, but generally a good deal cheaper both for the author and for the readers, assuming both already have computer hardware adequate to the task.(5) There are no printing and distribution costs, and no publishers, bookstores, or libraries to be persuaded that it's worthwhile to print the book and stock it. Put the data on the Web site, and that's that.

      For instance, as I mentioned above, the Census Bureau has put an amazing amount of statistical data on its http://www.census.gov site: population information arranged by state, by county, by race, by language spoken in household, by income, and by various combinations of these and many other factors. Of course, this information is listed in various print publications, but few of us have them in our offices. But if we have an office computer with access to the Internet and a so-called "Web browser" program (such as Net-scape), the census site lets us get the information in minutes.

      Likewise, the Library of Congress puts many recent legislative documents (for instance, the text of pending bills) at http://thomas.loc.gov; the SEC puts the text of regulations and proposed regulations on http://www.sec.gov; the FBI puts information from the Uniform Crime Reports on http://www.fbi.gov; and other government agencies put their material on sites of their own.(6) A lot of this information changes quickly, so it might not even be easily available in print -- the Web sites may be the only convenient and cheap places to get it.

      For the last few years, most appellate courts have made their new decisions available online, many legislatures have put many of their state codes online, and some law reviews have created sites with the text of their recent issues. Various Web sites, such as Villanova University Law School's http://www.law.vill.edu and the Lawyer's Legal Research Index (LLR) site at http://www.llr.com provide access to this material. If you want, for example, the text of a recent Ninth Circuit opinion, you can go to one of those sites and view it, print it, or download it to a disk file. The LLR site even lets you do full-text searches of recent case law. Cornell Law School maintains many legal materials, including some otherwise hard to get foreign texts, at http://www.law.cornell.edu/source.html;(7) there's also an impressive collection of international links at http://www.hg.org. Today, probably the best index of all the law-related material online -- which contains pointers to these and many other sites -- is http://www.findlaw.com.

      Public interest organizations also use the Web to maintain clearinghouses of information that support their causes. For instance, the Second Amendment Foundation (http://www.saf.org) and the National Rifle Association (http://www.nra.org) have Web sites for anti-gun-control information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation keeps a Web site containing archives on cyberspace freedom and in particular on electronic censorship cases at http://www.eff.org/links.html. The ACLU has a Web site at http://www.aclu.org; free-market activists have one at http://www.free-market.com.

      On a more practical note, http://www.usps.gov/ncsc/lookups will give you the ZIP-plus-4 for any address in the United States -- again, you can also get these numbers, or at least the first 5 digits, from a book, but few of us have that book in our offices.(8) The http://www.switchboard.com site contains over eighty-five million phone and address listings compiled from White Pages all over the country; you can search them by first name, last name, city, state, or any combination. Similarly, http://www.four11.com has a pretty good directory of people's e-mail addresses. The http://www.books.com site will let you mail-order books from a selection of over 400,000 -- the equivalent of a print catalog, but bigger, easier to use, and more accessible. Finally, the http://www.cdconnection.com and http://www.cdnow.com sites let you mail-order CDs from a selection of over 100,000, and at a nontrivial discount from store prices.

      These examples illustrate the six advantages of online documents: They're (1) more accessible, (2) timelier, (3) cheaper, (4) easier to search, and (5) easier to copy into your own electronic documents; and, because of the cost savings, (6) the Web makes it possible to publish items that otherwise never would have been distributed publicly at all. It still takes time and money to put this material online, but much less than it would cost to print it and distribute it throughout the nation.

   2. What the Web Is and Why It's Called the Web

      We often speak of a "Web site" or a "Web page" as a physical object or a physical place, but a Web page is generally just a file on a computer that's directly connected to the Internet. At its simplest, it's only a bit more complicated than a WordPerfect document.

      If you have an article, for instance, that you want your colleagues to be able to read, you can simply ask your Internet service provider to put the article on the provider's computer. My provider is UCLA Law School's computer services department, so if I want to put something up it'll be called http://www.law.ucla.edu/ followed by the document name. Once this address is assigned, I can send an e-mail to my friends -- or, for instance, post a message to an electronic conference -- saying "If you want to read my article, look at http://www.law.ucla.edu/whatevernameischosen."

      I might want to get more complicated than that. For instance, I might want to create a clearinghouse of information on freedom of speech and workplace harassment, an area in which I have done some research. I might want to put up copies of articles (both my own and others'), copies of relevant cases, the scanned-in text of some unpublished cases, and so on.

      I wouldn't just gather these all into one document, because then someone would have to slog through the whole file to get the snippet he wants. Rather, I'd put each one in a separate file, a separate "Web page." Then, I'd set up a master page -- perhaps called...