Spotlight on Wikilaw

There is a new legal wikipedia called Wikilaw.  The site was established by two New York law school graduates "with the hope that legal information could be created collaboratively and freely shared among lawyers and other interested individuals."  The site features collaborative spaces for treatises, a law dictionary, sample motions from the states, a law review, and probably the most interesting concept, Democracy 2.0.  Conceptually, this section would offer the ability for anyone to help design law as if it was being rewritten from the ground up.  Some of the ultimate content may mirror existing law, such as homicide statutes and other criminal laws.  But there is always room for imagination.  Even voter initiatives in states such as California are drafted by "experts."  Conceivably, law drafted collectively may not match law designed through the political process involving special interests.

The site is located at http://www.wiki-law.org.  There is no advertising on the site.

Here is more information on the site from one of the founders:

Wikilaw's goal is to build the largest open-content legal resource in the world. Wikilaw hopes to tap into the knowledge of the roughly 1,000,000 lawyers in the United States to build one of the largest libraries or legal information in the world.  The Wiki is published under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), which means that all the information found on the site can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikilaw article used.

Wikilaw has several different areas where collaborative development can occur:

(1) Wiki-Treatises: Wiki-Treatises are collaborative documents created by the Wikilaw community on various different aspects of the law.

(2) Wiki-Law-Review: allows anyone to post a "thesis" for an article, which is freely editable by other users. Alternatively, anyone can post a completed law review article and have other users contribute and edit the article, subject to the GFDL license.

(3) Wiki-Law-Dictionary: seeks to collaboratively produce a comprehensive law dictionary that is easily searchable and free.

(4) Wiki-Legislate: is an experiment that hypothesizes that a wide range of individuals, not just politicians and special interest groups, can contribute to the creation of our nation's laws.  When Wiki-Legislate was launched, it began in a vacuum with no laws. From scratch, the Wikilaw community can construct laws that it feels should be imposed on society.  Initially, Wiki-Legistlate started with no laws.  It assumed that no laws existed in the world.  All laws listed in this section are the collaborative effort of the Wikilaw community.  Wiki-Legislate is an aggregator of viewpoints, which allows users to get together and decide what law should be imposed on society.  Wiki-Legislate hopes to become a filter to accurately gauge social norms, and transform those norms into
law.

(5) Wiki-Motions: seeks to provide give practitioners a resource to help them drafting memos in support of their motions.

The larger the community grows, the more useful this resource will be.