Client
Sara S. Frug, Co-Director,
Legal Information Institute,
Cornell Law School
Email: <sara@liicornell.org>
Telephone: 607-255-4370
Student contact
Andrea Yang <yy545@cornell.edu>
Background
The Legal Information Institute operates the single most active web site at Cornell, with approximately 200,000 unique visitors per day and over 150 million page views during the last calendar year. Since 1992, the LII has been a leader in the application of Internet-based technologies to legal data. It was the first legal website, and one of the first 30 websites in the world. We have worked with several successful CS 5150 project teams over the years.
The site is valued both for its technical excellence and for its objectivity. Its non-partisan, informed analyses are frequently quoted in publications ranging from the New York Times and Washington Post to the Picayune (Lousiana) Item and the Cherokee One Feather. A reporter for Pro Publica, formerly with the New York Times and Washington Post, has referred to us as “a vital part of our nation’s civic infrastructure”. Our work has recently appeared in This American Life and on The Late Show With Steven Colbert.
Project Summary
Each year, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) produces a document called "The Constitution of the United States, Analysis and Interpretation". Popularly known as the "Constitution Annotated", or "CONAN", it provides legal analysis and interpretation of the Constitution, and particularly of Constitutional case law as decided by the Supreme Court. It is a very highly regarded source of information about the fundamentals of the American system of government. Like the LII, it is prized for its objectivity. It is one of a very few sources of information about the Constitution that is free of partisan bias, in an era where constitutional interpretation strongly influences legislation having to do with health care, with immigration, and free speech rights.
Two years ago, after two decades of waiting for the government to publish its XML version of the US Constitution Annotated, a CS 5150 team helped LII “Save the Constitution” by working on a conversion from what was then the only available published format: PDF. It was a great success, garnering more than 900,000 visitors in its first year and 1.5 million in calendar year 2019. This September, the government published its own website, solving many of the accessibility and usability issues posed by the PDF-only version.
And yet, much work remains to be done to make this uniquely unbiased commentary usable by the public at large, including the many civics students who could benefit from it. We propose to do the following:
- Shift the data source from PDF to the government website.
- Mine the citations to connect CONAN to the U.S. Supreme Court opinions and case commentaries available on LII and our sister site Oyez.
- Apply summarization techniques to produce a more readable summary of the CONAN text.
- Apply fresh techniques to help avoid “information overload” as we incorporate additional features to the CONAN text.