It is the historical endeavour that has placed the weight on archives to be more than just that: by introducing the concept of "archival credibility" an archive is under pressure to live up to arbitrary but exacting standards.³ The Archive is constantly involved in a post-modern struggle for meaning: it is constantly forcing the historian to break the issues involved down to their finest detail, the minutiae that underlined the reality of a life, an event, a fact. Meaning is made to shift from the metanarrative to the mundane. Yet in doing this the meaning is still demanded of the historian – they are being forced to distill the most important, most significant issues from the sources: the significant must be raised from the documents in order to give meaning. ⁴ The Legal Information Institute is well involved in both of these sides. It not only posts the judgement in full, for example as in Roe v. Wade, allowing the reader to engage with the document itself, but also draws on contextual issues to give meaning. Posted before the portal (if approaching from the correct jump-page) the reader will find a summary of the information contained on the subject the judgement or legislation best fits into. For example, links to the Roe v. Wade judgement are housed within the "Feminist Jurisprudence" portal. This kind of adaptability means that in theory, the minutiae is present whilst the meaning has been teased slowly from the documents by those gone before the reader. That said, the summaries are often brief and undetailed, more suited to a high school reading level than their apparent clientele of legal professionals and historians. They are also loathed to actually address the reasons for why the specific laws that sit beside it in the next frame are actually there. It is stated quite prominently on their website that they are planning to make the site more user friendly for the lay people but have not yet done so; one wonders how much more simplistic it can get. A site with information on how to better decipher the legal terms included in the documents themselves would likely make for a better use of their time. What does the 14^th Amendment mean to a feminist justice?

Featherstone drew the reader’s attention to the possibilities of hypertext by highlighting how the medium could be used to facilitate associative jumps across different texts in a non-linear fashion. The idea is sound in that the origins of hypertext lie in the associational: the desire to create something bigger and better than the confines of a book. The Legal Information Institute has attempted to use hypertext in this fashion but has come up largely wanting. For example, it does interlink some sources, for example, the acts of congress (US Code) that it holds may have internal links where there is a transcriptual referent to another piece or chapter of the legislation being drafted, however, it often does not manage to create associational links. For example, to randomly select just one piece of possible information: title 38 of US Code, part 1, chapter 1, section 106 (Certain Service Deemed to be Active Service) there are just 7 intra-title links and only 1 inter-title link. Not to mention the fact that such a section has an impact not only on other legislation on a horizontal platform (say, such as other military reform bills) but also on the legislation that has come before: to which no link is enclosed or alluded to. On the historical side, this title could be very beneficial to a military historian (more likely a post-structuralist military historian, but we wont quibble) but is far less helpful without the context of what came before, if anything. Is this a reformation of what was previously held to be active service in the armed forces? Or is it a repetition of the guidelines to reinforce their impact on the other parts of the bill? There is no mention. And unlike their "portals" there is no discussion before the US Code aside from a very general overview of all the pieces telling what they are. There is however, a navigation bar left at the top which looks like:

TITLE 38 > Part 1 > Chapter 1 > Section 106

giving the user the ability to navigate throughout the whole title with relative ease.

The search engine, due to what seems to be a handicapped ability to recognise and properly categorise linked articles of law is largely limited. It also (again) prevents the lay person from properly accessing the materials. When searching for federal law on abortion, for example, when "abortion" is typed into the search engine, it comes up with nothing, as do pregnancy and termination of pregnancy. It is only when the far more legal and political term of "reproductive rights" is entered that the pertinent legislation appears. Even so, when it comes up, the lay person may not know the connection between constitutional amendments 9 and 14 and Roe v. Wade. If that is the case, they may overlook important legislation not realising that there is more to the background than the brief summaries and accesible topics Cornell have created to slide them into. This detracts from their statement on their information page that the site is always improving and anticipates their use "by a large and diverse population of users."⁵ Also, if the reader types in "Roe Wade" they will receive pertinent results. If they should type in the correct legal terminology, "Roe v. Wade" and it will bring back a much larger number of pages. This is due to the fact that the search engine has matched the "v." to all the documents as well. Most large search engines have now excluded the use of pronouns such as "is" or "what". That a legal website has not excluded the "v." verges on the faintly ridiculous.

Taking the example of abortion statutes as the litmus test for the website, it has come up sorely lacking. Having already established that the only part of the website that contained pertinent material was the "hot topic" named "Feminist Jurisprudence" looking there virtually nothing is present on abortion. Justice Harry A. Blackmun, the author of the Roe v. Wade decision and also a Nixon appointed conservative supreme court jurist stated at his retirement that gaining reproductive rights remained a landmark in the progress of the emancipation of women in the United States. What is disturbing is the apparent lack of any consideration of this sentiment altogether. Despite a brief overview which too easily spells out the basics of feminist theory and the ideas behind equality, there is no separate category for the important issue of reproductive rights. Held in the frame on the other side from the barely page long context article is a link to the 14^th Amendment (right to due process) and the 19^th amendment (women’s suffrage). There is no mention of the integral part played by the 9^th Amendment in Roe v. Wade decision (non-enumerated rights of citizens). The only link to pertinent legislation is to the Roe v. Wade summary of judgement.

This would be fine if Roe v. Wade was where the reproductive rights debate ends. But as some critical reading would show, that is far from the truth. An example would be the case of Keeler v. Superior Court of Amador County in 1970, which established that a foetus was not a human being until born and thus not afforded the rights therein (sparking the debate on the 14^th amendment rights of the unborn child). This case was one of the critical predecessors to Roe v. Wade, as the judgement made in that case would have been all the more difficult to prove had the Keeler decision not formed the distinction between "human" and "foetus". A more recent but no less integral case was Whitner v. State of South Carolina. Also left out, it was the case that is most threatening to the Roe v. Wade judgement, as isolated a viable foetus' rights from maternal authorised actions that were not strict expressions of her reproductive rights (the case states that that a mother could be prevented from ingesting crack cocaine insofar as it hurt the foetus). Also not finding a place in the "Feminist Jurisprudence" are Planned Parenthood v. Danforth in 1976 which paved the way for Planned Parenthood v. Casey 1992 (also known now as Stenberg v. Carhart 2000). Not even the most basic, the Comstock law of 1873 which first made abortion illegal, can be found on the site. These are critical cases in the passage of reproductive rights in America and yet have been left out of a grouping called "Feminist Jurisprudence".

It also makes no attempt to help the lay reader place these documents in context. What does an amendment which addresses procedural due process have to do with women’s rights? Despite the Abortion Law Homepage website doing a fantastic overview in what would amount to less than an A4 page, the Legal Information Institute has no preface nor context (not even an one line sentence which states "this amendment is integral because of its ‘due process’ section" so people would at least know what part was pertinent).

Again, this would not be a problem if the Legal Information Institute did not explicitly say that their target audience was, in part, made up of lay people and students – people that could not hope to understand these concepts without assistance, or, at the very least, some well written context.

Manovich's "Aggregate Space" law of the World Wide Web seems to be fully expressed in this website, which really is more to its detriment. The allegory that there is not "the internet" as a defined space but rather existing as a series of interlinked computers which give the illusion of totality is a valid one when placed against the Legal Information Institute. As the site consists of large groups one may be tempted to see it as a cohesive, cogently planned archive when for the most part that is not the case. They are Featherstone’s "collection of numerous files... [That] have no overall perspective to unite them." ⁶ Still, the site has at least made the move toward a better view of its files: much like polygonal modelling it has begun to superimpose its legal documents over their background (the "context" paragraphs given at the beginning of a grouping). Still, it has yet to apply to the site as a whole; documents still exist outside of categories into which they may fall, and there is only a very weak attempt to interlink the actual topics that have been created (researchers beware: it’s little more than an index).

It has been suggested that the true handicap of western archiving cultures is in fact the Dewey Decimal System, present in almost all libraries in the western world. The Dewey Decimal System works on a system of categories; books are divided into them according to their subject matter. For example, 340 is law; 348.06 would be legal cases. The Dewey system relies on the ability of the material to be contained within these discrete groups; but it does not always work. As shown by a resource from the Volunteers' Association of Victoria, the resources useful for those looking up volunteering, for example, have to hunt the library from 141 to 808.66 in order to compose a complete overview of the subject they are interested in. This type of classification can be seen at work in the Legal Information Institute’s grouping system, moving specific laws together based on arbitrary categories.

It is a system which ultimately betrays the premise it is working upon. Where hypertext could have been used to create a dynamic environment allowing for different it instead remains reliant on that older form of information storage and retrieval: the library.

A case could be made that before the website can change, the original mode for the classification of data has to undergo a paradigm shift. Western websites don’t seem to be able to make the transition to the dynamic use of hypertext very easily and the reader may wonder if it is because the mindset with which it is being approached is fundamentally affected. Much in the same way as the researcher of the history of sexuality is almost inorexably bound to the bias of a post-Freudian framework, perhaps it is a flaw which cannot be escaped by the Legal Information Institute because at this point in its development, its creators have yet to evolve.

It is here that we might examine the difference that a different system of classification may have on the formation of a website. Spotlaw is an Indian legal website, one considered to be the first dynamic legal website ever created. Indian libraries for the most part do not use the Dewey Decimal System: they use S. R. Ranganathan's system of Facet Analysis, more generally known as "Colon Classification" as it uses a series of punctuation marks to denote categories which a book or item could be placed within. It uses 5 main groups (facets):

1. Personality (the primary facet, the most prominent attribute)
2. Matter
3. Energy
4. Space
5. Time

It adds them to facets common to all classes (form; language) then uses numbers and letters to note the facets and punctuation marks to indicate the type and nature of the facts (there can be up to 40 symbols involved). The librarian then combines all of the available terms that are appropriate in describing the information at hand. Amy Glassel wrote a comparative analysis between the Yahoo search engine and Colon Classification saw the possiblities of the system. She described the problem with Colon classification as the books, despite their fluid classification system, in the end, still have to be placed on a particular shelf. "One important advantage that virtual collections such as Yahoo! have over the print environment, in terms of notation schemes and their citation order (the order in which the facets are put together), is that the order of the facets in a string doesn't have to be set in stone. An electronic resource isn't limited to a single physical location."⁷ For more information, click here.

Spotlaw adapted Raganathan's system into dynamic reading search software that operated from its search engine. Instead of using the words within the document (within the piece of legislation or judgement in a court case) to isolate meaning, the software was programmed to interlink using the actual law, creating the illusion that it understood the issues behind the law. This meant that far more meaningful associations were made and while it generally meant that a person received fewer hits on a search it made for a far superior group of materials. It also created a dropdown menu with the user’s previous search history as well as information (if there was any) pertinent to the case at hand: the judge’s name, the subjects it related to, other statutes it related to and other legislation it related to. It may not have had the pre-digested context but by creating such an intricate web of information it provided a certain haptically shaped context all of its own.

Unfortunately, in recent times, the site has been making more of an effort to become more open to the international market and has begun taking on ideas from other legal informatics websites, and seems to be losing some of its cultural distinctiveness. That said, it was always coming, with other parts of the website almost completely mirroring the Legal Information Institute's problems. LawInc's Constitutionl Law site is not dynamic at all: there is no interlinking between amendments (ie where some may have been interrelated) or between amendments and the actual constitution. This mirrors the problems that can be found in the constitutional law part of the Legal Information Institute.

There is something to be said for websites such as the Legal Information Institute: fast, reliable and easy access to documents that have shaped American society: be they constitutional amendments or trial transcripts, a case can be made for their impact even if just on an isolated level. However, the Institute needs to decide what it wants to be, because it is falling down fast. Find Law has a broader base of laws and no pre-digested overly simplistic contexts to patronise its readers. Archives such as the Abortion Law Homepage are not only better resourced but also better equipped to deal with individual issues and also manage a broad clientele in an intelligent fashion. The Legal Information Institute has an easy interface in theory and all of the tools at its disposal to become a valuable archive but it must decide to whom it wishes to cater before it loses its entire base.

1. Derrida, as quoted by Michael Lynch "Archives in Formation: privileged spaces, popular archives and paper trails," History of the Human Sciences; Vol. 12, No. 2, 1999, p. 67.
2. Mike Featherstone "Archiving Cultures," British Journal of Sociology; Vol. 51, No. 1, 2000, p.174.
3. ibid., 169.
4. Ibid., 169.
5. http://www.law.cornell.edu/lii
6. Ibid., 174.
7. Amy Glassel, "Was Ranganathan a Yahoo?" End User's Archive; March 1998; http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/addserv/toolkit/enduser/archive/1998/euc-9803.html .

Lev Manovich, "Digital Delirium," Digital Delirium, Arthur and MariLouise Kroker eds. St. Martins Press, NY, 1997.

Thomas Osborne, "The Ordinariness of the Archive," History of the Human Sciences; Vol. 12, No. 2, 1999, p. 51 - 64.