Ep 041: Tom Bruce on 27 Years of Disrupting Legal Information

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Disruption is a word that gets thrown around easily these days. But the</span> <a href= "https://www.law.cornell.edu/"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Legal Information Institute</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">at Cornell Law School truly was a disruptor. Founded in 1992 with the mission of making legal information available to everyone without cost, it was literally the first legal site on the Internet. It continues strong today, with readership last year of 32 million individuals in 246 countries and territories.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On this episode of LawNext, we talk with</span> <a href= "https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/faculty/bio.cfm?id=188"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Thomas R. Bruce</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, who is retiring June 30 after 27 years leading the LII. In 1992, Bruce and former Cornell Law Dean</span> <a href= "https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/faculty/bio.cfm?id=42"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Peter W. Martin</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">founded the LII. They codirected it until Martin retired in 2003, after which Bruce continued as sole director. The LII blazed the trail of publishing law online for free, inspiring the creation of some two dozen similar organizations throughout the world, and carrying the banner for the right of citizens to have access to the laws that govern them.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bruce says he is most proud that he was able to break the monopoly on legal information held by commercial publishers. “The time was ripe for change, and we were the first to use the Web to try our hands at it.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Tom started his career as a stage and production manager before joining Cornell Law School as director of educational technologies. The first seeds of the LII were sowed, Bruce</span> <a href= "https://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2017/01/17/25-for-25-long-ago-in-a