Any law librarian who works with the public or teaches no- or low-cost legal research, or any attorney or law student using free resources to conduct research understands the wide gap in usability between fee-paid databases and most free, open-access legal resources. Focusing on statutory code research, Professor Darvil’s article, Increasing Access to Justice by Improving Usability of Statutory Code Websites, examines the need not just for access to statutory codes, but providing the information in a way that allows the user to find the law they need. Through the lens of website usability standards, Professor Darvil assesses state code websites and provides recommendations for how those websites can improve usability. Many states have created “Access to Justice” initiatives and commissions aiming to improve citizen access and experience with the legal system. Professor Darvil’s recommendations provide excellent guidance for those interested in improving the research experience and access to the law for everyone, including those without access to fee-based databases such as Lexis or Westlaw.
Inevitably, my legal research students are, at some point in the semester, treated to my soapbox speech about how equitable access to the legal system rests on the ability of any citizen, regardless of means, to access the law they are obligated to live under. If states care about access to justice issues, logically they must care about how they provide access to the law. Professor Darvil’s article provides an excellent discussion of the access to justice issues endemic in a legal system in which, particularly on the civil side, many litigants are self-represented and how those litigants are impacted, frequently negatively, by their inability to find the law.
The unique value of Professor Darvil’s article, however, is her assessment of the usability of state statutory websites and recommendations for improvement. Her evaluation of the state websites uses a standards-based approach. Nearly half the states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act (UELMA), which seems a reasonable place to look for applicable standards. Unfortunately, as Professor Darvil notes, UELMA doesn’t address the usability of electronic legal materials. Lacking usability standards in UELMA, Professor Darvil turns instead to standards developed in the disciplines of human computer interaction (HCI) and user experience (UX). Experts in these fields explore how easily people can navigate a particular website interface and find what they are looking for. There are several sets of standards for assessing website usability and Professor Darvil uses the following standards from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Search Guidelines:
- Ensuring usable search results
- Designing search engines to search entire site or clearly communicate what part of the site is searched
- Making upper and lowercase search terms equivalent
- Designing search around user’s terms
Navigation Guidelines:
- Providing navigational options
- Differentiating and grouping navigation elements
- Offering a clickable list of contents
- Providing feedback on user’s location
(P. 133.)
Professor Darvil evaluates the statutory code websites of all 50 states and the District of Columbia hrough an exploration of the features available and some relatively simple searches for state laws and comparing the results to a 50-state survey. She then explains the results using multiple illustrative screenshots from a variety of state websites as well as appendices outlining the results for each guideline above in every jurisdiction.
Finally, Professor Darvil ends with recommendations for states seeking to improve their statutory code websites. These recommendations range from fairly basic to more complex. Suggestions for improving navigation include recommendations such as providing a table of contents, clickable search trails, and navigational buttons. Suggestions for improving searching are more complex and include items such as using a controlled vocabulary, providing context surrounding the search terms by indicating where the researcher is in the code, relevancy rankings, and instructions on how to best search. Professor Darvil points out that many of these recommendations are familiar to librarians and suggests that states should use librarians to help implement many of these suggestions.
This article provides a logical and thorough assessment of state statutory code websites, explains why usability matters for access to justice, and suggests ways that governments can improve usability. As she concludes, “Governments that are based on the rule of law have special duties to their citizens: transparency, accountability, and reasonable access to their laws. […] When state governments do so, they promote access to justice and the rule of law.” (P. 153.)
