Impacts

International Impacts:

With input from, and credit to, their fall semester M.Eng. students, and building on that work for the rest of the academic year, Dr. Sylvia Kwakye and Matt Carey placed a paper and gave a presentation in the Automated Semantic Analysis of Information in Legal Texts (ASAIL) workshop at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL) conference. They presented the paper as part of a session on Structure and Explainability in Legal AI.

Earlier in FY25, Co-Directors Sara Frug and Craig Newton attended the Law Via the Internet Conference (LVI), where Craig presented on U.S. litigation regarding AI and copyright and Sara presented on accessibility and visual law. The conference also incorporates the annual meeting of the members of the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM), the group that formed from the Legal Information Institutes inspired by Tom Bruce and Peter Martin’s work starting in the early 1990s. LII also supports FALM by hosting the Journal of Open Access to Law and through Sara’s service on that journal’s editorial board. In FY25, that work particularly included establishing permanent digital identifiers for the journal’s content.

We were also pleased to support open access on the international level by hosting an extended visit from German Ph.D. student Olcay Aydik. Olcay has dedicated himself to improving public access to the law in Germany.  LII staff, along with Director Emeritus Tom Bruce, taught him all he could ever want to know about the challenges of publishing legal information in an evolving technology environment , both historically and today. Perhaps someday we will see Olcay at one of these international conferences representing a newly-formed German LII!

Regional Impacts:

Closer to home, LII remains mindful of its important role in fulfilling Cornell’s land grant mission to serve the people of New York.  For example, Nichole McCarthy serves as the Parliamentarian of the Association of Law Librarians of Upstate New York (ALLUNY), a local chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL). Nichole also served on the planning committee for the ALLUNY Spring Institute at Syracuse University in April; and, she  wrote about the experience for the ALLUNY newsletter. The conference theme was “Finding Future Law Librarians: Promoting the Profession, Mentoring, Networking, Hiring.” Attendees, both in-person and online, explored recruitment, mentorship, and the evolving identity of the profession.

Even closer to home, LII was proud to “sponsor” the Ithaca High School mock-trial team so that they could gain weekend access to the Moot Court Room for trial rehearsal prior to their spring competitions.

Online Impacts:

We are proud to report that educational institutions, news outlets, nonprofit organizations, and all branches of federal, state, and local governments continued to entrust us with their readers by linking to our resources. Although much has changed (our top referrer this year was ChatGPT, with Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot all ranking among the top 20), we were pleased to see continued referrals from long-standing traffic sources like Wikipedia, Google, and Microsoft.

Traffic continued to track the news, with top pages including the Wex articles on due process, defamation, habeas corpus, and Chevron deference. We were especially pleased to see referrals from news outlets including the Associated Press, the Washington Post, CNBC,Time, Newsweek, and Vox, and from social media across the political spectrum.  The U.S. Department of Justice, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, and the Library of Congress referred their users, as did the governments of California, Ohio, and Arkansas. Most encouragingly, learning management platforms such as Canvas, Blackboard and Google Classroom, as well as library guides from dozens of higher education domains trusted us as a reliable reference source for their students.