UELMA is the newest acronym gov docs librarians should learn to love. It stands for Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act, and it was passed by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) at their annual meeting in Vail, Colorado, in July 2011. Keith Ann Stiverson, Library Director at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, served as the official observer for the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) at meetings of the NCCUSL drafting committee. I interviewed her for a brief article about UELMA for Chicago-Kent’s student paper, The Commentator. It appeared in the December issue, and is reprinted below with their kind permission. For more, see the description on the NCCUSL website, and this great summary by Barbara Bintliff.

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UELMA: Coming to a State Near You? *
by Kevin McClure, Research Librarian

Keith Ann Stiverson, our Library Director at Chicago-Kent, along with colleagues from the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), has been working hard on the development of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA). UELMA recently won approval from the Uniform Law Commission. I chatted with her to find out why she thinks that’s a good thing.

You’ve been working on something called UELMA. What is it, and why should a law student care?

We should all care, because state governments aren’t doing enough to ensure that the legal materials they’re putting up on the Internet are trustworthy and secure. Like legal research generally, the publication of official, primary source material is moving from print to online. UELMA tells states that if they want to put it online and call it official, then they need to do three things.

First, they need to authenticate it. That means that when you view a document online, you get a seal or some other certification that says it’s the genuine article: then you’ll know it hasn’t been tampered with, it’s accurate, and it’s the authoritative and unaltered version. That’s assurance that you need and that you’re really entitled to if you’re going to court, or citing something in an article or paper.

Second, they need to preserve it. We’ve found again and again that states don’t have preservation standards or policies in place for the legal materials they publish online. Preservation means several things. It means having backups in place so that material is secure from a natural disaster or some other failure, and it means the material needs to be in a usable format, so states will need to have it ready to migrate to new formats from time to time. And one very important piece of the preservation puzzle for legal materials is version control, which means that as materials are amended or superseded, we need to preserve the older versions, because so often, legal research isn’t about finding what the law says now, it’s about finding what the law said at a certain point in the past.

The third requirement is that states need to ensure permanent public access to the material. You can think of this as the open government provision of UELMA. In a democracy, citizens deserve and require access to the documents of our government, and legal material is central to that. UELMA doesn’t prescribe one specific way to do that; it gives states the leeway to set their own requirements, so long as they provide public access that is reasonable and permanent.

But I can look at a statute or a state code online and tell whether it’s on a state government website. Isn’t that authentic enough?

It might be good enough for most purposes, most of the time. But what we in AALL have been emphasizing for years is that when it comes to primary legal resources, any form of publication that leaves their authority open to doubt is a failure. We surveyed all fifty states and found all sorts of troubling practices – states where it was hard to tell whether the online version was official or not, states where it appeared that the online wasn’t “as official” as the print, just about everything you can imagine except what we need, which is the same level of certainty online that we’ve had with print. These are the laws we live by. Being “good enough most of the time” doesn’t cut it.

So we have a uniform law, but it isn’t actually a real law anywhere yet?

Right. We worked with the Uniform Law Commission to draft language that was flexible enough to be workable anywhere. Now we’re taking UELMA to eight key states** where we think we have the best chance to get it passed, to create some momentum.

Is Illinois on that list?

No, it’s not! These issues just aren’t on anyone’s radar yet in Springfield. But with a few key victories elsewhere, we hope to blaze a trail that will begin to develop some common practices nationwide and encourage other states to get onboard.

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* I tried so hard to think of a better title. Nothing.
** The eight states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Tennessee, (Oxford comma!) and Wisconsin.

As the Statistical Abstract of the United States fades into history, government information librarians are still coming to grips with the loss of our favorite statistical resource. The Free Government Information blog has been covering the library community’s voice-over narration of this sad saga throughout the year.

Christopher Smith, Pipeline Editor of Oil and Gas Journal, provided a different perspective in a November column: that of a data contributor, who clearly relished his role in adding to the treasure trove of data that went into the Statistical Abstract. His column is reprinted in full here, with the kind permission of the publisher.

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Information Cancelled
11/28/2011
By Christopher E. Smith
Pipeline Editor

One of the small but satisfying administrative tasks I’ve had as pipeline editor at Oil & Gas Journal is providing the US Department of Commerce with data for its annual Statistical Abstract of the United States. It felt good to be part of an organization trusted enough to provide this information and also to know that at least one small piece of OGJ’s annual Pipeline Economics report would be available to the larger world.

The final satisfaction each year would come when a copy of the finished book arrived in the mail. Aside from information on the characteristics of petroleum pipelines, each new edition contained data regarding national health expenditures, criminal victimizations and victimization rates, employer costs per hour worked for state and local governments, and on and on, with categories added and deleted each year to stay current.

The Commerce Department, however, has already published the Abstract’s 2012 edition. A green, bookmark-shaped note accompanied it. The note read: “Due to the proposed elimination of the Statistical Abstract program from the President’s FY 2012 budget, we worked on an expedited production schedule to bring you the 2012 edition 3 months ahead of schedule. There are currently no plans to continue the program, either in print or on-line. Thank you for your support in the production of the Statistical Abstract through the years. Your assistance has been most valuable to us. The Statistical Abstract Staff.”

Some bad news

As someone who has worked gathering, analyzing, and publishing information for my entire professional life—and enjoys these acts on a leisure basis as well—I took the Abstract’s cancellation as very bad news; the more so when I noted that this was its 131st edition. The industrial revolution hadn’t even occurred the first time the Statistical Abstract was published, and now, it would not be published any more.

To be sure, OGJ will continue publishing the data both its readers and the industry at large find so valuable. Presumably the other organizations that submitted data to the Abstract will continue to do so as well. But what gave the Abstract its unique value was its compiling of a vast array of data in one place.

The 2012 edition features more than 1,400 tables and graphs covering nearly every educational, judicial, meteorological, governmental, business, cultural, agricultural, and medical characteristic of the US. And just in case the reader can’t find what he or she is looking for in its pages, the Abstract also features a guide to other statistical information both in print and on the internet.

On a positive note, Adobe Acrobat versions of all 131 editions can be found at www.census.gov/compendia/statab, as well as spreadsheet files for each table. But from this point forward the document will remain static, purely historical.

Cuts necessary

Cuts to the US government’s budget are necessary. Much has been made from both ends of the political spectrum regarding the need to prioritize these cuts. Conversations attempting to reach agreement on these priorities have repeatedly broken down into rancor and gridlock.

Evidently, however, both the left and the right agreed that the Abstract program was ripe for the cutting. The cut might have been expedient. It might have been easy. That either or both of these were the case is telling.

The government of a free country that would readily reduce its people’s access to information leaves itself susceptible to doubt regarding how much information it really wants the people to have. That most of the population seems more interested in sound bites and muck-raking than actual information might have helped cutting the Abstract go unnoticed. But it also increases the importance of making information readily available to those who would seek it out.

Apparently this job now lies entirely in the private sector.

Abstract:

In a September 27, 2011, letter, the Honorable Chris Van Hollen requested an estimate of the portion of the federal deficit that is due to the current underutilization of capital and labor resources in the economy. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that if those resources were not underutilized—that is, if the economy was operating at its potential level—the projected federal deficit under current law in fiscal year 2012 would be about a third lower, or roughly $630 billion instead of the $973 billion projected in CBO’s most recent baseline. That deficit would be equal to about 4.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), compared with the 6.2 percent deficit projected for 2012 in CBO’s baseline. If the economy was operating at its potential, the deficit would be lower because incomes and, therefore, revenues would be higher, while the rate of unemployment and, therefore, outlays for certain government programs would be lower.

From the Summary:

Congressional interest in patent reform has increased as the patent system becomes more significant to U.S. industry. Patent ownership is perceived as an incentive to the technological advancement that leads to economic growth. Yet, this augmented attention to patents has been accompanied by persistent concerns about the fairness and effectiveness of the current system.

Some observers are nonetheless concerned that certain of these provisions would weaken patent rights, thereby diminishing incentives for innovation. Other experts believe that changes of this magnitude, occurring at the same time, do not present the most prudent course for the patent system. Patent reform therefore confronts Congress with difficult legal, practical, and policy issues, but also with apparent possibilities for altering and possibly improving the legal regime that has long been recognized as an engine of innovation within the U.S. economy.

See the full report here.

A new Senate bill to improve public access to congressionally mandated reports would, according to OpenTheGovernment.Org, “make it easier for the public to find information about how well federal agencies are (or are not) fulfilling their respective missions – from ensuring the safety of our drugs and food supply, to protecting the environment, and monitoring the soundness of our financial institutions – and to use the information to hold officials accountable for their actions.”

With co-sponsors Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Susan Collins (R-ME), Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) introduced the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act (S. 1411) on July 25. The American Library Association (ALA), American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), and a host of academic and open government organizations are already on record in support of the companion bill in the House, which Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced in May.

Significantly, both the House and Senate versions of the bill tab the Government Printing Office (GPO) to take on the central role of providing transparency by creating a website “that allows the public to obtain electronic copies of all congressionally mandated reports in one place,” a role to which the agency is well suited as it continues the development of its Federal Digital System (FDsys), which provides permanent public access to a wealth of federal government information from all three branches of government.

FDsys is a critical part of the latest evolutionary steps in the provision of government information by GPO and its library partners in the Federal Depository Library Program, which predated the Internet by nearly a century and helped establish the presumption of transparency that later generations of digital library geeks and open government advocates would build on. As the embodiment of all we’ve learned so far about how to provide permanent public access, free of charge, to authentic government information online, GPO’s FDsys is the logical permanent host for this and any other federal government transparency project.

“Using FDsys, our employees have the experience and expertise to carry out this legislation,” said Public Printer Bill Boarman in expressing GPO’s support for the bills on congressionally mandated reports.

This recognition of GPO’s status as the model of how to provide transparency makes it all the more puzzling that the House voted to choke off its own information supply, along with that of the rest of the Nation, by zeroing out FDsys funding and slashing GPO’s budget by 20 percent when it passed H.R. 2551, the House Legislative Branch appropriations bill, on July 22.

That vote doesn’t square with the transparency message of the Congressionally Mandated Reports Act any better than it does with the House majority’s pledge to “fight to ensure transparency and accountability in Congress and throughout government.”

As OMB Watch points out, the report on the appropriations bill even “directs the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to study ‘the feasibility of Executive Branch printing being performed by the General Services Administration, the transfer of the Superintendent of Documents program to the Library of Congress, and the privatization of the GPO.’”

That’s an odd reward for the agency that has been so far ahead of the curve in the development of online public access to the workings of government that its example helped spearhead the movement toward a uniform law on the authentication of online legal materials at the state level.

More recently, we’re seeing buregeoning interest in how to assure transparency for the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, dubbed the “super committee,” which was created by the debt ceiling bill and tasked with the heavy lifting in crafting a deficit reduction plan to submit to Congress for an up-or-down vote by the end of the year. Sunlight Foundation has called for transparency assurances, such as fundraising disclosures, live and archived webcasts of committee meetings, and public availability of recommendations from other congressional committees, all from the committee’s website.

A super committee website makes sense, but because transparency means permanent public access, there’s a role for GPO here, too. Long after the 112th Congress has adjourned and much of its online face has been wiped away, the work of this committee will still factor heavily in discussions of the Nation’s long-term fiscal course. GPO owns the state of the online transparency art, and should be part of the plan to make this committee’s work accessible now and into the future. By the same measure, we all have a stake in a sound and virbrant future for GPO.

“The outlook for the federal budget over the next decade continues to be bright. Assuming that current tax and spending policies are maintained, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that mounting federal revenues will continue to outstrip spending and produce growing budget surpluses for the next 10 years. The update of CBO’s budget outlook that this chapter describes continues a trend, since 1997, of steady and sometimes dramatic improvement, reflecting the continuing impact of strong economic growth over the past few years…

– (Emphases added)

– Congressional Budget Office, January 2001

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned in a new report that if Congress is slow to pass an increase in the federal debt limit, the delay “could have serious negative consequences for the Treasury market and increase borrowing costs.”

Because of the growing size of the federal debt, any extraordinary actions Treasury might take to keep the debt under its limit will buy Congress less time to debate a debt limit increase than they have in the past, the report said.

Disruptions to the regular schedule of Treasury securities auctions that occur when the federal debt approaches its limit create market uncertainties that can force higher borrowing costs for the Treasury to finance the debt, GAO said. The report examined data from five recent debt limit events and found that Treasury’s borrowing costs increased in three of them, most recently in the period from August 2009 to February 2010, when Treasury paid an estimated $78 million in additional borrowing costs on 3-month Treasury bills.

While debates on the debt limit “may raise awareness about the federal government’s current debt trajectory and may also provide Congress with an opportunity to debate the fiscal policy decisions driving that trajectory,” the report said the ability to influence those policy decisions by holding the line on the debt limit is weak because the debt limit is only a limit on government’s ability to pay debts already incurred, not a limit on new obligations.

Instead, GAO said, “Congress should consider ways to better link decisions about the debt limit with decisions about spending and revenue.”

“The United States is unusual among the countries we reviewed in using the authorization of additional borrowing authority as an occasion to draw attention to past fiscal policy decisions,” the report said. The reported cited two examples of countries that employ “fiscal rules” that force debt limits to be examined in tandem with new spending decisions.

“Switzerland has adopted a constitutional ‘debt brake’ that places a limit on expenditures that is equal to the expected revenue for the year adjusted to reflect the country’s place in the current business cycle. Differences between estimated and actual numbers are recorded in a separate account that must by law be reduced if it reaches a certain level. Germany has adopted a ‘golden rule’ limiting net borrowing to the amount of investment spending. Germany also approved a constitutional amendment in 2009 requiring that structural deficits not exceed 0.35 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—or very close to balance.”

Other countries establish “debt targets” intended to direct lawmakers toward sound fiscal policy decisions:

“These can be either statutory requirements or political commitments by the current government. For example, in part to keep debt at a sustainable level, Sweden targets a net surplus of 1 percent of GDP over the course of the business cycle. In New Zealand, the government is required to maintain debt at a ‘prudent level’ and set specific short-term and long-term targets for meeting this goal. If the government deviates from these targets, the Minister of Finance must explain the approach the government intends to take to return to prudent levels.”

. . .

“Specific fiscal rules and targets used in other countries may not be appropriate for the United States given differences in the national economies and political institutions. Nevertheless, some of the fiscal rules and targets that we reviewed shared some common features that distinguish them from the US debt limit and offer insights for increasing attention to or control over fiscal policy decisions that lead to an increase in debt. These rules and targets

(1) measure debt in relation to the overall size of the economy (e.g., debt-to-GDP ratio),

(2) take into consideration whether the economy is in a period of expansion or contraction,

(3) provide a near-term or medium-term debt target, as opposed to a ceiling, for policymakers to work toward.”

The Pentagon’s enforcement of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) came at a cost of over $193 million over a six year period from Fiscal Years 2004 through 2009, according to a Government Accountability Office calculation. Most of that cost – over $185 million – covered recruitment and training of replacements for the 3,664 servicemembers discharged under DADT over that period.

GAO calculated that 1,442 (39 percent) of those servicemembers discharged under DADT over that period held “critical occupations” – positions which either received a bonus under a Defense Department retention incentive program or were listed on service-specific critical occupations lists – while 23 discharged servicemembers (less than one percent) held skills in an important foreign language. These numbers were probably an underestimation because the Navy and Air Force could not provide complete occupational data for all the years studied, GAO said.

The new calculations updated a 2005 study which found that the Pentagon was not collecting enough data to inform an accurate estimate of DADT enforcement costs.

The Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010 passed the Senate on December 18 and was signed by President Obama on December 22, less than a month after a working group established by Defense Secretary Robert Gates released its report finding that repeal posed only a low risk to service readiness. A Congressional Research Service summary of the new law said repeal will take effect 60 days after “the President, Secretary, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) certify to the congressional defense committees that they have considered the report and proposed plan of action (pdf, 1.91mb), that DOD has prepared the necessary policies and regulations to exercise the discretion provided by such repeal, and that implementation of such policies and regulations is consistent with the standards of military readiness and effectiveness, unit cohesion, and military recruiting and retention.”

Secretary Gates outlined the repeal process at a January 6 news conference. The Defense Department maintains a web page on DADT and its repeal.

Until the repeal process is complete, the Pentagon continues to enforce DADT under relaxed procedures announced in March 2010, by which, Secretary Gates said, the Pentagon sought to bring “a greater measure of common sense and common decency” to enforcement of the law.

An amicus brief (pdf, 2.14mb) submitted to the Chicago Election Board on December 18 said former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel satisfies the residency requirement to run for mayor, and “the voters of Chicago are therefore entitled to determine through the electoral process whether they want Mr. Emanuel to serve as their mayor.”

The brief, signed by 48 leading Chicago legal experts including Abner Mikva, former federal judge and White House Counsel to President Clinton, compared Emanuel’s residency status to that of Abraham Lincoln, who leased his Springfield home when he left for the White House in 1861. “Our sixteenth president did not lose his legal tie to Illinois by that act, and Mr. Emanuel did not lose his Chicago residency by leasing his house on a short-term basis while he served President Obama in Washington,” the brief said.

In the brief, the group highlighted two reasons for concluding that Emanuel did not abandon his Chicago residency when he left in 2009 to serve as chief of staff in the Obama White House.

“First, Illinois law provides that once residency is established, it may be vitiated only by evidence of affirmative acts manifesting the individual’s intent to abandon his Illinois residency. The individual’s intent is determinative. Here, there can be no doubt that Mr. Emanuel intended to maintain his Chicago residency, not abandon it. Illinois precedents make clear that Mr. Emanuel’s rental of his house provides no basis for failing to give legal effect to his clear intent to maintain his residency.

“Second, Mr. Emanuel’s Chicago residency was preserved by the statute providing that ‘[n]o elector…shall be deemed to have lost his or her residence in any precinct or election district in this state by reason of his or her absence on business of the United States, or of this State.’ 10 ILCS 5/3-2(a). Mr. Emanuel was away from Illinois serving as President Obama’s chief of staff in Washington, D.C. He fits squarely within the terms of this statute and, because Illinois courts routinely look to decisions regarding voting residency in construing candidate residency requirements, the statute leaves no doubt that the residency objections should be rejected.”

The three commissioners on the Board of Election are expected to rule on whether Emanuel meets the residency standard on December 23.

The working group established by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to assess the impact of the repeal of the Pentagon’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) policy concluded that repeal poses only a low risk to overall military effectiveness. The working group’s final report (pdf, 8.64mb), issued November 30, said that while DADT repeal “will likely, in the short term, bring about some limited and isolated disruption to unit cohesion and retention, we do not believe this disruption will be widespread or long-lasting, and can be adequately addressed” by the recommendations set out in the report. “Longer term, with a continued and sustained commitment to core values of leadership, professionalism, and respect for all, we are convinced that the US military can adjust and accommodate this change, just as it has others in history,” the report said.

“The results of the survey are best represented by the answers to three questions:
~ When asked about how having a Service member in their immediate unit who said he or she is gay would affect the unit’s ability to ‘work together to get the job done,’ 70% of Service members predicted it would have a positive, mixed, or no effect.
~ When asked ‘in your career, have you ever worked in a unit with a co-worker that you believed to be homosexual,’ 69% of Service members reported that they had.
~ When asked about the actual experience of serving in a unit with a co-worker who they believed was gay or lesbian, 92% stated that the unit’s ‘ability to work together’ was ‘very good,’ ‘good’” or ‘neither good nor poor.’”

The report recommended that “Service members who have been previously separated under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell be permitted to apply for reentry into the military, pursuant to the same criteria as others who seek reentry.” The working group also called for a review one year after any repeal of DADT “to monitor the implementation of repeal and to determine the adequacy of the recommended actions that are adopted.”

Secretary Gates commissioned the working group in February, 2010 after President Obama pledged in his State of the Union message (pdf, 172kb) to “work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.”

In testimony (pdf, 208kb) before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 2, Gates said the issue facing the Pentagon was “not whether the military prepares to make this change, but how we best prepare for it. We received our orders from the Commander in Chief and we are moving out accordingly. However, we can also take this process only so far, as the ultimate decision rests with you, the Congress.” The mandate of the working group, Gates said, would be “to thoroughly, objectively, and methodically examine all aspects of this question and produce its finding and recommendations in the form of an implementation plan by the end of this calendar year.”

Apparently anticipating criticism that the working group had treated the desirability of repeal as a given, the final report clarified that its mandate was not to recommend for or against repeal.

“(O)ur mandate was to assess the impact of repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and how best to implement repeal should it occur; we were not asked to determine whether the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law and policy should be repealed. However, our engagement of the force was wide-ranging enough that we did answer the question of whether the US military can implement repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. To be clear, the Service member survey did not ask the broad question whether Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell should be repealed. This would, in effect, have been a referendum, and it is not the Department of Defense’s practice to make military policy decisions by a referendum of Service members. But, among the 103 questions in the Service member survey and the 44 questions in the spouse survey were numerous opportunities to express, in one way or another, support for or opposition to repeal of the current policy. Among the 72,000 online inbox submissions were numerous expressions both for and against the current policy. If the impact of repeal was predominately negative, that would have revealed itself in the course of our review.” (Emphases in original.)

The report includes an appendix with complete survey results, and a separately published Support Plan for Implementation (pdf, 1.91mb) provides training support “to ensure that any post-repeal transition occurs with maximum efficiency and minimum disruption to a force engaged in combat operations and other demanding military activities around the globe.”