Peter W. Martin Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law; Codirector, Legal Information Institute Cornell Law School Myron Taylor Hall Ithaca, NY 14853-4901

Biography

Peter W. Martin is the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law at Cornell Law School where he has been a member of the faculty since 1971 and was dean from 1980 to 1988. He is the author of an electronic treatise, Martin on Social Security Law, released on LEXIS in November 1990 and published on CD-ROM by Clark Boardman Callaghan in July, 1994, as "Social Security Plus"; an electronic reference work, Basic Legal Citation (hypertext 1993); and numerous electronic articles on the history and future of legal information technology. The first of these was published on the Internet in January 1994 by GNN Magazine. His 1994 Internet article on "Five Compelling Reasons for Lawyers and Law Firms to Be on the Internet" was widely cited during the period lawyers were first discovering the Net. In revised form it appeared as a cover article for the Sept. 1995 ABA Journal. Martin is the author of numerous print works, as well. His most recent journal articles have dealt with the implications of computer technology for legal research, law libraries, and legal education. He received the 1992 Law Library Journal Article of the Year Award and his Social Security treatise received the 1994 Infobase Industry Award for "Best from the Field of Education."

Professor Martin is a past president of the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction and past chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section of Law and Computers. His electronic treatise work was supported in part by the National Center for Automated Information Research (NCAIR), which awarded him the center's first Dixon Senior Research Fellowship in 1988.

In 1992 with support from NCAIR and others, he (and Thomas R. Bruce) established the Legal Information Institute at Cornell (the LII) which established the first Internet law resource and today operates the most heavily used non-profit comprehensive legal Web site. The LII's eight servers currently respond to well over a million data requests a day, representing at least 40,000 user sessions. When the U.S. Supreme Court releases decisions, summaries linked to the opinions in full text are within minutes dispatched via e-mail to approximately 20,000 initial recipients of the liibulletin (and forwarded to countless more).

The Institute's web site, http://www.law.cornell.edu with its collection of U.S. Supreme Court and New York Court of Appeals decisions, a full, up-to-date version of the U.S. Code, and numerous other key primary law documents has set a standard for the growing number of public bodies (courts, legislatures, administrative agencies) putting "their" law on the Net. It has also organized and integrated the legal materials placed on the Internet by those public bodies and others into a "virtual law library" through a series of state and world law pages, as well as pages that organize the law around issues or topics ranging from bankruptcy to workers' compensation.

Some of Martin's LII projects include --

• creation of several Internet-based law courses offered to students at participating law schools across the United States (1996 – present)
• creation of a CD-ROM collection of several hundred Historic Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court first released in the fall of 1996 to high schools, colleges, libraries and individuals and updated annually
• assistance in the creation of a digital compilation of the legal materials of Zambia and the establishment of a national law Internet server (Jan. – Feb. 1996)
• establishment and ongoing supervising of an e-mail delivered current awareness service offering student written casenotes on important decisions of the NY Court of Appeals that arrive days not months after the opinions are released (1995 – present)
• coordination and publication of the American Legal Ethics Library project which combines commentary prepared by major law firms, pertinent codes, in a single coherent structure enabling research of a single issue of the law governing lawyers across multiple U.S. jurisdictions

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