Our People

Founded in 1992 by a law professor and a technologist, LII’s biggest strength remains its interdisciplinary approach. Decades later, our small staff still reflects that split of expertise between legal and technical training.

Our team draws from their disparate experiences in everything from library services and legal practice to legal publishing (government and commercial) and tech start-ups. This diversity of experience and perspective leaves us not only open to dreaming up unique solutions but also uniquely equipped to make those dreams become reality.

Staff

Sara Frug

Sara S. Frug

Co-Director

Sara wrangles engineering projects for LII, where she has been working from time immemorial. Although rumors persist of a dot-com stint and a research post at Harvard Business School, she remains skeptical. When she’s not looking after the welfare of a few hundred thousand web pages, she focuses on features which elucidate the connections between the law and things in the real world.

Craig Newton

Craig Newton

Co-Director

Craig is a 2007 graduate of Cornell Law School, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the LII Supreme Court Bulletin. He then spent six years at a large law firm in California litigating a broad range of commercial and technical disputes before returning to LII, first as an Associate Director and now as Co-Director. In his current role, Craig keeps one eye on our original content and the other on LII’s non-technical operations, such as budgeting, fundraising, etc.

Valarie Kimber

Valarie Kimber

Business Manager

Valarie serves as the Business Manager, overseeing daily administrative demands and ensuring LII’s smooth operations. She manages budgeting, tracks expenses, and coordinates staff schedules, while also overseeing student employment programs. Valarie is often the main point of contact for internal and external inquiries, handling communications with clients, partners, and university departments. She also organizes visits, meetings, and events, managing logistics and ensuring everything runs efficiently. With extensive experience in office management, Valarie plays a key role in maintaining organizational structure and supporting overall operations.

Neli Karabelova

Neli Karabelova

Director of Engagement

Neli Karabelova manages communications and engagement for the LII in order to further the Institute’s mission of helping the public find and understand law. Neli handles mass communications, identifying and building personal relationships with supporters and affinity groups, and strengthening the visual identity and overall brand of the LII. Her previous experience includes heading Marketing and Communications for an international law firm, and freelance photography.

Nichole McCarthy

Nichole McCarthy

Director of Student Research and Content Development

Nichole recruits and oversees the student research assistants who review and create original content for the LII. She also coordinates and manages the production of new content and the development of new collections.
Trained as a librarian, Nichole has worked in public, academic, and specialized libraries; she has previously supported the Law Library of Congress as a Metadata Intern and worked as a law firm librarian. Nichole volunteers as a digital archivist for KRIA: The Icelandic Constitution Archives and is a former adjunct faculty member at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. In addition to her M.S. in Library and Information Science, Nichole has a B.A. in Women’s Studies, and an M.S. in Criminal Justice Administration.

Sylvia Kwakye

Sylvia Kwakye

Developer

Sylvia uses data mining and natural language processing to transform dry legal texts into attractive, easy-to read, but accurate reflections of themselves. She also mentors Master of Engineering students on projects in these areas. (The LII works with ten+ M.Eng. students every year on various computer-and-law projects.)
With a BS in Engineering from Swarthmore, Sylvia began working with computers on her first job out of college as a research engineer with the Computational Biology Group at the DuPont Experimental Station in Delaware. “That’s where all the computer science courses I had taken for fun at Swarthmore College came to the rescue,” she says.

Eric Gullufsen

Eric Gullufsen

Developer

Eric Gullufsen is an Ithaca-based programmer. A self-taught technologist, Eric began his coding adventures at college in Northern California, where he earned a B.A. in Mathematics. Eric is adept in many coding environments and has contributed to several large open-source projects (LLVM, FreeBSD). Prior to working for LII, Eric was a senior software developer at the Alaska Department of Education & Early Development. Thus far at LII, his work has focused on Continuous Integration/Testing systems and server-side/backend code.

Matt Carey

Matt Carey

Developer

Matt is an Austin-based lawyer and software developer whose work at LII has a special focus on updating LII’s state regulations collections. He has worked for most of his career in legal publishing, including writing headnotes for California caselaw and developing open source software for legal authority automation. He blogs about legal tech at pythonforlaw.com.

Vivek Kumar

Vivek Kumar

Developer

Vivek has been very interested in technology from a young age, especially with using it to help people in their daily lives. He has started on this goal after going to Ithaca College to study computer science. During his time at college, Vivek has worked on fun and exciting projects with others, including a mobile app based off the Ithaca’s music festival, Porchfest. Additionally, he has worked as a summer research intern and a teaching assistant. Having graduated with a B.S degree in Computer Science, Vivek is now a developer for the LII team.

Student Employees Acknowledgement

No discussion of LII’s staff would be complete without an acknowledgement of the hundreds of law, computer science, information science, undergraduate and library science students who have helped us with just about every type of task we engage in–from creating content to maintaining fundraising records to tackling engineering challenges–since our inception in 1992.

Collaborators

Justia, Inc.

Justia, Inc. is a frequent LII collaborator, funding much of our research and development of new technologies and techniques for making legal information freely accessible online to the public. Justia also operates the Oyez Project in collaboration with LII.

Public.Resource.Org (PRO)

Public.Resource.Org (PRO) heads the Code Improvement Coalition, which obtains and publishes the regulations of all 50 states and Washington, DC. PRO has also helped fund LII’s work enriching that collection with unique features.

The Cornell Center on Death Penalty Worldwide (CCDPW)

The Cornell Center on Death Penalty Worldwide (CCDPW) provides critical support to our Women & Justice collection and the students who assist on that project. Jocelyn Hackett, who runs the Women & Justice collection, is a CCDPW employee.

EMERITUS

Over our many years of existence, there are a select few staff whose time at LII ended with retirement. Borrowing from academia, we call these folks our “Emeritus” staff, and we hold them in particularly high regard.

Thomas R. Bruce

Tom co-founded the LII in 1992 after a career as a professional stage manager. During his time at LII, he wrote the first web browser for Windows (Cello) in 1993, launched important free legal information initiatives on four continents, and served as LII’s sole director from 2005 – 2019.

Peter W. Martin

Peter co-founded the LII in 1992 after completing two successful terms as the Alan R. Tessler Dean of Cornell Law School. While Co-Director from 1992 – 2003, Peter also assisted with the launch of the first LII in Africa, the Zambia Legal Information Institute.

Brian Laurence Hughes

Brian was the first employee Peter & Tom hired, way back in 2000. Coming from a long career in university library systems, Brian applied his passion and skill for programming to pretty much every aspect of LII’s operations until his retirement in 2017.

History

Begun in 1992 shortly before the launch of the world wide web, LII was not just the first legal website – it was also the first website in a professional domain. Our co-founders each had deep connections to Cornell’s agricultural extension, and those ties reflect in several important ways:

  • Our deep respect for, and desire to serve, Cornell’s land grant mission;
  • Our expansive view of the audience for legal information;
  • Our orientation toward practical applications of research;
  • Our commitment to open access and distrust of commercial incentives in legal publishing; and
  • Our dedication to achieving financial sustainability independent of direct university funding.
  • Some key moments in LII’s history include:
    1993: LII’s Tom Bruce creates Cello, the first web browser for IBM-compatible computers.
    1994: LII hosts its first hypertext workshop.
    1995: LII launches a full collection of opinions of the New York Court of Appeals.
    1996: LII begins the LII Bulletin, originally focusing on the New York Court of Appeals.
    1997: LII’s Peter Martin teaches the first online distance-learning course in legal education.
    1998: LII attends the first Law Via the Internet conference (LVI), a practice that continues to this day.
    1999: LII creates a series of “explainers,” which later serve as the kernel for Wex.
    2000: LII has the only real-time copy of Bush v. Gore online and sees 5,000 website hits per minute for fourteen hours.
    2001: LII publishes the first XML version of the US Code.
    2002: LII signs the Declaration on Free Access to Law at the fourth LVI conference.
    2003: Peter Martin retires from LII co-directorship, Tom Bruce becomes sole director.
    2004: LII Bulletin switches focus from New York Court of Appeals to US Supreme Court.
    2005: LII Bulletin Previews address the entire SCOTUS docket for the first time, and continue to do so to this day.
    2006: The Swedish International Development Agency engages LII Director Tom Bruce as a consultant on a project to strengthen legal education in Vietnam.
    2007: The Federal Lawyer Magazine, the official publication of the Federal Bar Association begins re-publishing LII’s Supreme Court Bulletin Previews.
    2008: The IRS uses LII’s version of the tax code (Title 26 of the US Code) for its official electronic publications and its website.
    2009: The American Bar Association names LII Director Tom Bruce in its inaugural list of American “Legal Rebels”.
    2010: The Hague Conference on Private International Law engages Tom Bruce and Martin as invited experts for its work on cross-border legal questions.
    2011: LII launches its CFR.
    2012: In honor of its 20th anniversary, LII hosts the LVI conference in Ithaca.
    2013: LII publishes a legislative data model it created for the Library of Conference.
    2014: LII’s MEng student teams wins award for its CFRP definitions prototype in contest sponsored by Google.
    2015: LII adds definitions, links to legislation, and links to legal scholarship to statutes and regulations pages.
    2016: LII adopts the Oyez Project from its founder Jerry Goldman, the Women and Justice database from the Avon Center, RIO from Peter Martin, and Docket Wrench from the Sunlight Foundation.
    2017: A flurry of executive orders issued by a new presidential administration send more than a half million users to law.cornell.edu in two days.
    2018: LII launches the first XML version of the US Constitution Annotated.
    2019: LII welcomes its first traffic from Antartica on March 7, making it a truly global source of free online legal information.
    2020: LII employs 122 Cornell students, mostly during the first “pandemic summer”.
    2021: Annual traffic to law.cornell.edu tops 40 million unique visitors for the first time.
    2022: Usage of the fledgling state regulations collection doubles from the previous year.
    2023: As one of the few free online access points for historical Supreme Court opinions, law.cornell.edu receives almost one million page visits to Roe v. Wade as it is overturned.
    2024: And we’re just getting started…