Essay Contest Launched by Public.Resource.Org to Promote LAW.GOV

On Oct. 21st, Carl Malamud announced the Law.Gov Report contest with two categories of submissions: written essay or video essay and the winner in each category will receive $5,000 with funding provided by Public.Resource.Org. From the announcement:

The topic is really quite simple: What Does Law.Gov mean? You can write about one of the principles, or all of the principles, or any other take on the topic.

Now where have I heard that question posed before? Oh yeah, here. Well, this solicitation is open to a much wider audience. Hopefully all submissions will be published. Note the liberal licensing requirement for submission acceptance. Submissions are due before Memorial Day (May 31).

The Memorial Day deadline was set so that students can consider making this a class project. We hope that professors in law schools, i-schools, journalism schools, and any other discipline will let their students know about this contest and offer them credit in their classes for preparing a submission.

Law librarians teaching ALR classes may want to follow up on the class project suggestion. I think it's a good vehicle for getting law students to start imagining the future of online legal research. Perhaps one or some of your students will be able to make a downpayment on their law school debt, too. Winners, by the way, will be announced the day after Labor Day at a prize ceremony in Washington, D.C.

Hat tip to Sarah Glassmeyer for calling the contest to my attention last Thursday while we were waiting for a LAW.GOV presentation to start at ORALL's annual meeting because I took the event as a opportunity to escape from my RSS feeds and email in-boxes. Ditto for emailing me the announcement link so I wouldn't have to rely on my always faulty short-term memory. [JH]