Over at LawMeme, a blawg out of Yale’s law school, James Grimmelman is running a series on how to read a legal brief. The articles (Part I, Part II, more to come…) are geared to tech-heads, but the dissection of a brief — in this case, Lawrence Lessig‘s argument [pdf] in Eldred vs Ashcroft, a case challenging the 1198 Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, scheduled to be argued before the US Supreme Court on October 9 — is being brilliantly handled, and is accessible to almost anyone who has ever wondered about the meaning and purpose of legal arcana.
Once you’ve gotten a taste for the way the document is structured, head over to the site put together by the “good guys” in this case, and read through some of the amicus briefs (documents submitted by “friends of the court” — but if you’ve read the LawMeme article, you knew that!) I can’t stress enough the importance of this case to the future of the internet, research, education and to the future of ideas in this country. Lessig and his co-counsels are making no money on this case, and the expenses are being underwritten by a number of groups, but most importantly through the public’s donations. You can contribute via PayPal to free.mickey@foobox.com.
