The flurry of decisions two weeks ago by the U.S. Supreme Court sent cyberspace surfers flocking in record numbers to the Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute (LII) website, where official, unedited electronic versions of the Supreme Court's decisions are posted within seconds of being handed down.
"Downloads have been averaging about 100,000 files per week since February," said Peter Martin, co-director of the institute and the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law. "But the week the decisions came down, which included the ruling on decency on the Internet, hits to our site increased to 377,591."
Martin said 30,000 downloads were recorded within six hours of the ruling on the Communications Decency Act. He added that the increased activity demonstrates the need for such a service and the level of interest in the court's rulings.
A handful of media outlets such as CNN Interactive and MSNBC downloaded the court's rulings from LII to use on their websites. While CNN and MSNBC did not link to LII, which most certainly would have increased the number of hits to the Cornell site, the outlets did credit LII as the source of information. In its June 26 decision, the court declared unconstitutional the Federal law making it illegal to send or display "indecent" material on the Internet. Also that day, the court ruled that states may ban the practice of doctor-assisted suicides.
Cornell is one of only two universities in the country (the other is Case Western Reserve) to receive U.S. Supreme Court rulings directly from the court's electronic transmission service and the only not-for-profit site to offer an HTML version of the decisions with hyperlinks to related materials.
Court rulings can be found at http://www.law.cornell.edu.supct