10 Rules for Radicals
restrictions, pay walls, and click-through contracts around the raw materials of our democracy.
How do you change something so basic, so fundamental as access to the law?
This year, people involved in the free law movement have been gathering together under the banner of the Law.Gov initiative, an effort to try and convince policy makers from water districts to the President and Chief Justice that access to primary legal materials matters.
Our strategy to get this basic principle—that access to primary legal materials must be unfettered and reliable, must be available in bulk, and cannot be subject to pay walls or copyright restrictions—has started with a national conversation, a series of working groups and workshops held in many of the top law schools in the country.
We are in the middle of this process right now, in fact have just completed our workshop at Duke Law School's Center for the Public Domain, a workshop that featured not only well known legal scholars, but had the active participation of the Archivist of the United States and Andrew McLaughlin, who is Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Executive Office of the President.
We will be completing this process of workshops and working groups in June, and will issue a set of recommendations to government officials. The Ninth Circuit of the Court of Appeals has granted us time to brief the judges, the U.S. Senate has asked for a copy of the report, and I've been very impressed at the number of top administration officials, members of Congress, and Chief
