Impacts

International Impacts:

Our thirty-four year history as a global leader in open access to the law continues to draw collaborators to us. The legal heritage work described above is international by its nature, bringing together scholars of many legal traditions around a shared question about how legal traditions can be compared.

LII also continues to support the Free Access to Law Movement, the network of namesake Legal Information Institutes around the globe. We presented at last fall’s international Law Via the Internet conference (the Movement’s gathering) and are preparing our presentations for the upcoming conference. We continue to host the Journal of Open Access to Law (on whose editorial board LII Co-Director Sara Frug sits) and to participate in international conferences and symposia such as the Law Via the Internet Conference.

National  Impacts:

LII staff members again presented in June at the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) conference, which convenes law librarians, doctrinal and clinical law faculty members, and technologists focusing on practical uses of technology in legal education.

Near the close of Fiscal 26, the innovation team from the U.S. Congress Office of the Law Revision Counsel, which prepares and publishes the United States Code, asked to meet with us. They are planning a website update and wanted to understand how we use their data and what a modern government website would mean for our own publication of the Code. Our answer was that a high-quality government site and reliable data feeds would free us to focus on what we do best: integrating external data and building features that help people understand what they are reading.

Online Impacts:

Joanne Molinaro, a lawyer who now posts about both food and social issues as the “Korean Vegan” discussing federal stalking laws in reaction to online harassment. This video was viewed an estimated 20 million times on the major social media platforms.

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.

Generally speaking, traffic tracked the news all year, and the pattern is a reasonable index of what the country was arguing about. Readers arrived in unusual numbers at provisions prohibiting the release of personal information from state motor vehicle records, proscribing improper entry by an alien, and limiting federal spending in excess of appropriations. Tax provisions in Title 26 and their implementing regulations more than doubled. So did customs accounting and nonimmigrant status regulations. The two sections of Title 20 governing the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the duties of its board went from almost no readers to tens of thousands in the wake of the renaming. In March, pages on the war powers of the president trended, and a single day — March 16 — brought more than 645,000 users, more than twice a normal day. The Wex entry on the Jones Act spiked when the sixty-day waiver was announced. By the fourth quarter the heaviest traffic was going to immigration, voting rights, disorderly conduct, and, as the Term closed and the briefs piled up, amicus curiae.

We remain grateful that governments, news organizations, and nonprofits keep entrusting us with their readers. This year that included the U.S. Department of Justice pointing readers to the Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on denial or abridgement of the right to vote, Politico linking to the provision on apprehension and detention of aliens, and the Brennan Center for Justice linking to United States v. Wong Kim Ark on birthright citizenship. Referrals also came from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the California Department of Health Care Services.