My apologies to Seth Tupper: I didn’t catch his August 9 report on the difficulty of accessing South Dakota’s laws until my local paper ran it in today’s edition.
Tupper’s report finds our Legislative website, particularly the Legislative Research Council’s online listing of state laws, misleading:
“South Dakota’s website for codified laws is a legal ghetto,” said Waldo Jaquith, an advocate of open legal data. “It’s where the state puts information that is out of date and not accurate and expects citizens to rely on it” [Seth Tupper, “Public Misled by State’s Online Laws,” Rapid City Journal, 2015.08.09].
Who you calling ghetto, pal? I visit that LRC ghetto almost every day, and I know my way around.
But that’s the problem: if you’re not already deeply familiar with South Dakota law, Legislative history, and case law, you may have a hard time making sense of the statutes, constitutional provisions, and administrative rules. Accessing case law can be a pain without online access: the state Supreme Court has twenty years of opinions online, but the only place one can access our circuit court’s case documents is at locked terminals at our county courthouse… and even there, public users are required to search by case number instead of more accessible terms like names of parties and attorneys or even subject.
Jaquith quite sensibly recommends that the state annotate its law listings with links to definitions, related statutes, and relevant case law. However, technology and politics may hamper such an effort:
Jaquith said the staffs of government departments like South Dakota’s Legislative Research Council often lack the technical training and time to improve the online code.
Politics can also stand in the way. In socially conservative South Dakota, writing an advisory note on a same-sex marriage law could be a political minefield for a bureaucrat who’d rather not attract the attention [Tupper 2015.08.09].
Overcoming the tech issue is trivial: there are hundreds of DSU graduates and many more Web wizards out here who know how to code hyperlinks. Overcoming the bureaucratic fear of drawing political fire may be harder, but it shouldn’t be a major problem if the Legislative Research Council cooperates with the Attorney General’s office to develop a uniform set of annotations and offer objective lists of relevant case material and simple notations indicating provisions (like our unconstitutional term limits and gay-marriage ban) that have been overturned by the courts.
Even with its limitations, South Dakota’s Legislative website offers a lot useful information. It’s simple, text-based format may look outdated to Web impresarios, but those simple text pages load fast, and their current unannotated format leaves no doubt that we’re reading the law exactly as the Legislature wrote it and as it reads in the books right now.
If the Legislative Research Council needs motivation to improve the law listings with definitions and legal context, perhaps they should consider the stats: Tupper reports that 117,628 users accessed the LRC website in the last twelve months. In the same period, between Dakota Free Press and Madville Times, my blogging has drawn over 300,000 returning visits, over 900,000 unique visits, and over 1.7 million views. Whichever metric best compares, it appears more people are getting their information about South Dakota law and politics from my blog than from the Legislative Research Council… which ought to terrify legislators into appropriating funds to upgrade their website with the greatest invention of the last 100 years: hyperlinks!
There could be a copyright and contractual problem also. Check this case in Georgia.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2015/08/04/georgia-seeks-to-block-web-publication-of-laws.htm
It would seem that the state could contract with a private company to compile the annotated laws while retaining the copyright and then allow public access to the end result. This will probably be fought by those who don’t want their annotations known to the general public.
I have noticed some updates over the years. However the basic code is still pretty much the same.
Maybe its time to have some of those DSU students rebuild whole thing?
Cory, your last hyperlink was the best. And, holy moly! This blog gets a lot of attention! Congratulations on work well done.
Deb, I love that you click my links. Paul Otlet is my hero. Where would bloggers be without him?
MC, we don’t need to get too fancy. I wouldn’t want a rebuild from scratch. I surely don’t want to change the URL structure: the last time the LRC did a major overhaul (changing from legis.state.sd.us to legis.sd.gov), they broke years of blog links to statutes and past legislation that I still haven’t completely tracked down and fixed.
The additional information called for in Tupper’s article doesn’t require rebuilding the system. It requires annotating existing pages. Start by turning the references at the bottom of each statute into active hyperlinks to the session laws that created and changed each statute. For those rare instances where a law is on the books but defunct by court ruling (really, how many are there?), add a note to that page and a link to the governing court case, and perhaps create an index page that lists all such laws. The circuit court case database already exists; we just need BIT to flip the switches and allow us to access it from our home devices instead of restricting access to courthouse terminals. (BIT could also give us access to the search capability that the Clerks of Courts have.) DSU tech grads plus some USD law school interns would be able to do much of this work; I just don’t want them to work too hard reinventing a new interface.
Interesting Georgia case, WR! I can’t buy the notion that the state can claim copyright on statutory annotations. L’êtat, c’est moi! C’est nous! If the state holds a copyright, it belongs to all of us; we all have the right to copy and share the law and the state’s explanations of that law.
Maybe not a full rebuilding from the ground up. More of a major ‘tune-up.’ Add hyper-links, improve usability, make it easier for the general public to use. most folks don’t frequent the site too often.
When looking at an administrative rule you clearly see which codified law backs its up; it would be nice if codified laws linked to administrative rule…
Election law is a prime example of where this would be helpful..
annotating pages-each state code, federal code ect. already has annotated pages that bring the researcher up to date-for a very sizeable monthly fee. that’s what lawyers do. pay monthly fees, 24-7/365. it is not all that easy to get accurate up to date law. very complex system. hey, what isn’t? a University law library usually has everything you need. well, maybe not all SD universities. active lawyers can tell you what is/is not available on line.
was seth’s article naive, is the RCJ editorial board up the something? making the law more accessible to the public is a huge policy change for the nation, the world perhaps. its like saying, make the tax code more understandable. make brain surgery diys. idealistic goals maybe, and the economics of getting good legal advice sucks, but the 1% don’t mind that barrier to the rest of us.
Making the law more accessible is important. Laws, especially federal code, can be hard to read. But I always want free public access to the original text of the law, not just someone’s summary or explanation. The primary source is vital, and we all own it.
the difficulty is the law evolves daily w/ precedent, new statutes, rules , regs, and local ordinances.
annotating this change is vital as a lawyer quoting out of date law loses or malpractices. an expensive system of remaining current requires constant oversight by active lawyers, daily, of massive amounts of complex info. with quite sophisticated jargon.
no one has yet figured out how to make this accessible for free to the masses as individuals step on land mines and suddenly need a lawyer. as far as i know these days.