One year ago today, I posted Law is Free, as an attempt to explain some of the underlying reasons for using broad publish/subscribe technology to put more legal information out there for free.

In the year since I wrote this story, I've grown more comfortable with the technology, and have added several new pages to the WV Supreme Court's offering of online information, each with its own RSS feed:
 Recent Opinions
 Civil Topics
 Criminal Topics
 Family Topics.
On the larger scale, we've seen wonderful growth in the quality, scope and timeliness of free legal content on the Web. During the past year, blawgs by law professors, legal scholars, journalists, appellate practitioners, law librarians, legal pundits, paralegals, law firms, international lawyers, trademark lawyers, law students, and law clerks have come online. (To read them all, check out Denise Howell's blawgroll--she coined the term "blawg", after all, and Ernie's Law Blawgs Outline.) Lawyers who can write code, or poetry, or design pages, or tell good stories, are all fastening quickly to the growing rubric of customized, smart and lively knowledge exchange. Outlanders no longer, blawgers have even been recognized by the American Bar Association.

Given all this, I have little doubt that more lawyers and legal professionals will continue the trend toward participation. And being a loquacious bunch, it's likely that our talking will have a beneficial side product: a deeper and more freely available body of knowledge about the law and its effects on our lives. That, I insist, is a good thing.

3:24:20 PM