Who We Are
The Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative offers a broad range of academic expertise in information science, law, and the social sciences, allied with LII's unique experience as the oldest and largest public access provider of legal information on the Internet. A core of principal researchers collaborates with affiliated researchers and research assistants as the needs of particular issues or projects demand.
PRINCIPAL RESEARCHERS
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Co-creator (with Peter Martin) and Director of the Legal Information Institute, Thomas R. Bruce has spent the last decade inventing and managing innovative ways to use the Internet to bring legal information to the public. The first—and still the largest and most accurate—free source of statutory, regulatory, and judicial materials on the World Wide Web, the LII now partners with both academic researchers and law generators around the world. Until the recent emergence of government sites offering federal legal materials, LII was the source used by federal government officials to research federal law; ten years after its founding, it has become a respected and trusted institution and remains the legal resource of choice for many federal employees. Bruce consults widely with federal and state government agencies, and with public and NGO entities in developed and developing countries, on a variety of legal informatics issues.
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Claire Cardie, the Weiss Director of Information Science at Cornell, is an internationally known natural language processing specialist. Professor in the Computing & Information Science Program at Cornell, Cardie's work on intelligent text processing focuses both on building real systems for large-scale natural language processing tasks, and on developing techniques to address underlying theoretical problems in analyzing the structure and meaning of natural language. The latter work includes investigating techniques for machine learning of natural languages.
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Co-author with Peter Strauss (Columbia) and Todd Rakoff (Harvard) of the leading casebook in administrative law, Cynthia R. Farina is Professor of Law at Cornell and a Fellow of the Administrative Law Section of the American Bar Association. A nationally known scholar of the administrative process, Farina has served as reporter on a number of ABA projects. Most recently she spent a year, as one of the Reporters of the ABA European Union Project, intensively studying how the EU is using the Internet to increase transparency of, access to, and participation in the Union's very complex government processes.
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A social scientist with information technology expertise, Erica L. Wagner specializes in the study of how newly introduced information technology is "made to work" within organizations. Assistant Professor of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, Wagner uses qualitative field research techniques to understand the patterns of action, stakeholder behaviors, and systemic interactions that reveal the issues of strategy, negotiation and power present whenever major technological change occurs within an organization. She is particularly interested in how new technology can be accepted within the organization even when it is perceived as problematic, and the role played by the "best practices" concept.