Annual Reports
Again in Fiscal Year 2023, more than 45 million people visited law.cornell.edu. They engaged in 73 million sessions and viewed 166 million pages of content.
More important than the raw traffic numbers, though, are the stories we hear from folks who use the LII:
Who entrusts us with their readers
We are proud to say that nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, news outlets, and all levels of government continued to extend their vote of confidence in our resources by sending us their readers. In the past year, we received referrals from large government agencies we’d expect like the IRS, VA and HUD, but also smaller ones like the Selective Service Board (pointing visitors to the 1991 Supreme Court case upholding the practice of registering only men for the draft), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (linking to various federal regulations in our CFR), and cio.gov (“a forum for Federal Chief Information Officers” who used our site to point to the US Code’s definition of Chief Data Officers).
At the state level, agencies in Massachusetts, Texas, California, Indiana, and Oklahamoa had the top referring websites, though the city of Charlotte, NC was also high on the list. We also received traffic from respected organizations like the American Bar Association, Pro Publica, and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as popular media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Learning management platforms like Google Classroom, Blackboard, and Brightspace sent us traffic from hundreds of school districts, colleges and universities. Though these sorts of “referral links” make up a very small part of our overall traffic (less than 5% in the aggregate), we are proud of the trust in our work that they represent.
Global reach
Beyond the United States, LII welcomed visitors from across the world in 244 countries and territories. Although the ranking of traffic by country of origin does not change much from one year to the next, it shifted a bit in FY23: China moved back into sixth place behind the US, India, Philippines, Canada and the UK. Nigeria, which in last year’s report had climbed into the #10 slot, moved up to 8th with an impressive 29% increase in visitors. Russia made perhaps the most impressive jump, as 142% more visitors–close to a quarter million–came from there this year, vaulting it into the 10th spot.