JURIS - IITF to meet with Data Users

[James Love <love@essential.org>]

>From TAP-INFO internet distribution list

Taxpayer Assets Project
Crown Jewels Campaign - JURIS
October 29, 1993

-    IITF Government Information Working Group Agrees to Host
     Meeting on Future of JURIS

-    Clinton Administration agrees to meet to with data users and
     value added publishers to discuss concerns about future of
     JURIS, and alternative methods of providing public access to
     federal legal information

-    Data users to present IITF with specific proposals for
     broadening public access to wide range of legal documents,
     including federal caselaw, statues, regulations, executive
     branch published and unpublished administrative law, foreign
     treaties, and other legal documents (items in JURIS
     database)

-    The issue of a new DOJ procurement for legal services will
     be discussed, as will the problem of West Publishing control
     of official judicial citations and page numbers


     On Thursday the Clinton Administration Information
Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) agreed to schedule a meeting
with data users and value added legal publishers who are
concerned about the future of the Department of Justice JURIS
program.  The meeting will be chaired by Bruce McConnell, who is
Chief of Information Policy at the Office and Management and
Budget (OMB), and who is chair of the IITF interagency Government
Information Working Group.

     The purpose of the meeting will to discuss the public
interest in preserving the JURIS database, which is the nation's
most important database of federal legal information, as well as
the need to provide public access to the JURIS data, and to solve
anticompetitive problems concerning West's claim of copyright on
the page numbers of published judicial opinions.

     One issue that will be explored concerns DOJ's current plans
for a new procurement of online searching services.  DOJ plans to
write a procurement that only LEXIS and WESTLAW can respond to. 
We will ask that the DOJ procurement be more competitive, and
that it be designed to bring in at least one new player, who will
make the data available both to DOJ and to public.

          James Love (love@essential.org; 215/658-0880)
          Taxpayer Assets Project
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