Target Audience: Library professionals who manage collections of legal materials and legal research budgets
Learning Outcomes:
1. Participants will gain a greater understanding of the legal, technological, and policy implications of a national repository of public law and the specific steps law libraries can take to advance public law.
2. Participants will learn how Law.gov will foster innovation, competition, and choice in legal research-and how this impacts library collection costs.
American law is in the public domain, but it remains expensive or downright inaccessible to most of the people it governs. Law.Gov is a nationwide movement to make the primary legal materials of the United States readily available to all, and to assist governmental institutions in making these materials available in bulk as distributed, authenticated, well-formatted data. Panelists will discuss the 2010 Law.gov report and findings of the National Inventory of Primary Legal Research in connection with AALL's policy position on open access to legal materials, with a special emphasis on the role of law librarians to make Law.gov a reality. Panelists will also discuss what Law.gov means for law libraries and their budgets, law schools, and legal publishers.