I got three videos through email that make a strong stong point about the international bottom up movement of online information activism that is occuring right now. They’re embedded and linked below, so be sure to check them out.

The videos give a brief history of the Legal Information Institute, which has come to be part of the name of a great variety of organizatins around the world that have one set of goals in common. They’re working for public access to legal information.

All around the world, without centralized planning, institutes have sprung up in response to a pressing need: non-lawyers have a real use for legal information, but can’t get it. In countries across several continents, new initiatives online are successfully giving the general public information that they wouldn’t have been able to search before, information that used to be controlled exclusively by the legal information publishing businesses. As businesses, they have a mandate to make profitable decisions, and not necessarily to serve the greater needs of a society. As a result, the public gets locked out of the very laws that control their lives, unable to understand and analyze the legislation or case history that forms the legal structures under which their actions are evaluated by the government.

Not anymore, though. A new transnational initiative has sprung up around the world, responding to the needs of the public information consumer, who may occasionally need real, substantive legal information. While this might sound like some sort of abstract concept, access to information, and especially legal information, are a fundamental source of our ability to be agents as humans. Our framework under which we function as humans involves our day to day knowledge of physics, social interactions, and the like, and the knowledge is necessary for us to move around in a physical world, have friends and business relationships, etc. The traditional world of legal information, however, has failed on even this basic level to provide the public information necessary to allow the public to develop to their full potential as substantively relevant agents in the legal world.

The Legal Information Institutes springing up in the US, Canada, and throughout the rest of the world, are filling the void of public legal information, and also discovering that despite a lack of substantive information, there is a real need for legal substance. Some sites have enormous traffic stats, seeing millions of hits a week. Some see much less. The sites’ developers claim, however that site traffic is an almost irrelevant way of measuring public legal information’s impact. Something fundamental changes when legal information is offered online.

People become agents in a legal or legislative or judicial realm where they before would have only been relevant through hired services. They can see the reach of the established law in their countries stretching into their lives, and evaluate it on their own, looking up history or international comparisons rather than relying on talk show hysteria to guide them.

And they’re only just starting their work.

When the legal information world has collected a body of law and made it public, online, in a truly comprehensive fashion, then a real fundamental shift will have occurred, where the normative binding structures with which we weave our societies together are posted for all to see, without a fee, when legislative debates link to laws passed, and on to agency rules promulgated and enforcement action, then the most basic needs for civic information will be filled, and people, as citizens online, will have the very first thing they need to interact effectively with their government and the rest of their society.

This legal information revolution, as seen in the popular growth of the legal information institute, has a parallel in the recent struggle to release and publish legislative information, legal information’s more participatory, electorally relevant older cousin. I’m proud to be working at the Sunlight Foundation on the problems of public access to legislative information, and to have filled in another piece in the larger context in which we operate, whereby people operating largely independently recognize opportunities to improve the world and are empowered by digital technology to do so.