Our Work

Our work brings legal domain expertise together with emerging technologies to enhance and explain the law for the public. We identify, extract, annotate, index, and present features latent in the raw data provided by government publishers. We also create original content meant to explain and clarify the law, like Wex, our Supreme Court Bulletin Previews, and the case summaries in our Women & Justice Collection.

The output of all that expertise is the content found in the various collections available for free on this website. This page organizes that work into both the various projects we undertake and the collections of content we publish.

PROJECTS (8)
COLLECTIONS (12)

Projects

LII’s small staff is able to have big impacts through its work with others around the world–ranging from students to other experts in a variety of fields. Each project contributes something unique to our mission.

CS5150 software engineering practicum projects

LII often serves as a “client” for undergraduate computer science students in Cornell’s CS5150 engineering practicum course.

Masters of Engineering projects

Our technologists mentor and advise Cornell information science students pursuing their Masters degrees by giving them complex real-world challenges that lead to new features on the LII website.

Wex Definitions

Under LII’s supervision, Cornell Law students research and draft the content of our free Wex online legal reference collection.

Supreme Court Bulletin

Our Supreme Court Bulletin project has two distinct but complementary components: (1) Previews of each case to be argued before the United States Supreme Court, drafted by teams of Cornell Law students, and (2) the publication and dissemination of the decision in each case on the day it is published.

Women & Justice

Originally an online database of case summaries reflecting gender issues from around the globe, our Women & Justice project has grown into a larger and more impactful effort.

FAI

LII is a formal advisor to the National Science Foundation-funded project FAI: Using AI to Increase Fairness by Improving Access to Justice.

JOAL

LII hosts the Journal of Open Access to Law, an open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal of international scope.

Oyez

LII is co-owner of the Oyez Project, an online repository for Supreme Court audio and other information about America’s highest court.

Collections

Much of the end result of our work appears at law.cornell.edu in collections that generally fall into one of two categories.The first is collections of feature-enriched “primary law” content, meaning it is law created by the government, and LII is merely a re-publisher of that content. The second is collections of original content, where LII’s staff, students, and other experts have created materials that help explain, organize, or otherwise illuminate the law.

U.S. Constitution and CRS U.S. Constitution Annotated

Read the US Constitution, either unadorned or with annotations provided by the Congressional Research Service.

U.S. Code

This is the law of the United States, organized into 54 titles by the Office of Law Revision Counsel in the US Congress.

CFR

The Code of Federal Regulations constitutes the output of the many US executive agencies.

State Regs

We participate in a coalition that obtains the regulations of all 50 states (plus Washington DC) from a commercial source and then makes them available with enhanced features and functionality to the public.

Wex

Wex is our collection of explanatory materials about legal terms, concepts, particularly noteworthy laws and judicial decisions, etc.

Supreme Court Opinions

We have a large collection of historical decisions of the US Supreme Court, as well as every decision over the last several decades.

Supreme Court Bulletin Previews

Since 2004, LII’s student workforce has created Previews for every case argued before the US Supreme Court.

Federal Rules

These are the collections of various rules governing the conduct of cases in the US federal court system.

Women & Justice Collection

Since 2016, LII has maintained this international collection of legal materials relevant to gender justice issues.

RIO

“Read It Online” is an experimental service that allows users to get hyperlinks to various free and paid resources to judicial opinions by entering only the formal case citation.

Introduction to Basic Legal Citation

Originally authored and still maintained by LII co-founder Professor Peter Martin, this is a free alternative to the infamous “Blue book” for legal citation.

Uniform Commercial Code

We republish the UCC with permission.