Current
Craig Newton, Co-Director
Craig is a 2007 graduate of Cornell Law School, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the LII Supreme Court Bulletin. He then spent six years at a large law firm in California litigating a broad range of commercial and technical disputes before returning to LII, first as an Associate Director and now as Co-Director. In his current role, Craig keeps one eye on our original content and the other on LII's non-technical operations, such as budgeting, fundraising, etc.
Sara S. Frug, Co-Director
Sara wrangles engineering projects for LII, where she has been working from time immemorial. Although rumors persist of a dot-com stint and a research post at Harvard Business School, she remains skeptical. When she's not looking after the welfare of a few hundred thousand web pages, she focuses on features which elucidate the connections between the law and things in the real world.
Valarie Kimber, Administrative Coordinator
Valarie joined the staff of Cornell Law School in 2008 after more than 12 years as a Customer Service Coordinator at a commercial printing company. Her first job at Cornell was working with law students on Cornell's International Law Journal and the Journal of Law and Public Policy, as well as administering the Continuing Legal Education program. She joined the LII team in 2011.
Valarie oversees the daily administrative responsibilities for the entire LII staff. She is also responsible for tracking revenues and budget, coordinating our extensive student employment program, and maintaining our donor database. She is the initial point of contact for our millions of users and thousands of donors, as well as commercial partners, the Law School, and Cornell University. Valarie coordinates visits from post-doctoral students, technologists, and legal informatics academics from around the world. In 2012, she was responsible for logistics and facilities when we hosted more than 200 attendees from 39 countries for the Law Via the Internet Conference.
Favorite LII feature: Our Wex legal reference.
Sylvia Kwakye, Developer
Sylvia uses data mining and natural language processing to transform dry legal texts into attractive, easy-to read, but accurate reflections of themselves. She also mentors Master of Engineering students on projects in these areas. (The LII works with ten+ M.Eng. students every year on various computer-and-law projects.)
With a BS in Engineering from Swarthmore, Sylvia began working with computers on her first job out of college as a research engineer with the Computational Biology Group at the DuPont Experimental Station in Delaware. “That’s where all the computer science courses I had taken for fun at Swarthmore College came to the rescue,” she says.
While working on her PhD in Biological and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University, Sylvia minored in computer science, where she did a project for the LII, converting the plain text of the U.S. Code to XML for the LII site. Intrigued, she continued working on the project until she completed her PhD.
For her PhD, Sylvia developed a system for rapid detection of pathogens for use in low resource communities, particularly in her native Ghana. She then created a start-up company to make the system commercially viable, but the group ran out of resources. Although the pathogen detection system is worth another startup, we’re happy to have Sylvia back with the LII.
Outside of work, Sylvia writes fantastical tales of the mythical and science fiction type, gardens avidly and likes looking up facts about germs and parasites.
Matt Carey, Developer
Matt is an Austin-based lawyer and software developer whose work at LII has a special focus on updating LII's state regulations collections. He has worked for most of his career in legal publishing, including writing headnotes for California caselaw and developing open source software for legal authority automation. He blogs about legal tech at pythonforlaw.com.
Eric Gullufsen, Developer
Eric Gullufsen is an Ithaca-based programmer. A self-taught technologist, Eric began his coding adventures at college in Northern California, where he earned a B.A. in Mathematics. Eric is adept in many coding environments and has contributed to several large open-source projects (LLVM, FreeBSD). Prior to working for LII, Eric was a senior software developer at the Alaska Department of Education & Early Development. Thus far at LII, his work has focused on Continuous Integration/Testing systems and server-side/backend code.
Vivek Kumar, Developer
Vivek has been very interested in technology from a young age, especially with using it to help people in their daily lives. He has started on this goal after going to Ithaca College to study computer science. During his time at college, Vivek has worked on fun and exciting projects with others, including a mobile app based off the Ithaca’s music festival, Porchfest. Additionally, he has worked as a summer research intern and a teaching assistant. Having graduated with a B.S degree in Computer Science, Vivek is now a developer for the LII team.
Neli Karabelova, Director of Engagement
Neli Karabelova manages communications and engagement for the LII in order to further the Institute’s mission of helping the public find and understand law. Neli handles mass communications, identifying and building personal relationships with supporters and affinity groups, and strengthening the visual identity and overall brand of the LII. Her previous experience includes heading Marketing and Communications for an international law firm, and freelance photography.
Nichole McCarthy, Original Content Collections Manager
Nichole views access to information as a form of advocacy when it prepares individuals and groups to make informed decisions. She has demonstrated her passion for information services through more than 7 years of human services advocacy experience - serving both non-profit agencies and the State of New York. Trained as a librarian, she has worked in public, academic, and specialized libraries and previously supported the Law Library of Congress as a Metadata Intern. She has also worked as a librarian at a law firm and as a volunteer archivist for KRIA: The Icelandic Constitution Archives, where she archived over 1,000 webpages. In addition to her M.S. in Library and Information Science, Nichole has a B.A. in Women’s Studies and a M.S. in Criminal Justice Administration.
Emeritus
Thomas R. Bruce, Co-Founder and Director Emeritus
Tom, along with Peter Martin, founded the LII in 1992. He has been its sole director since 2004. Tom wrote much of the original software used at the LII, and in 1993 wrote Cello, the first Web browser for Microsoft Windows. LII engineers -- no fools, these guys -- know better than to let him write code any more, but occasionally he slips some in when they're not looking. Usually, a server dies about ten minutes later.
Tom has worked on legal information projects on four continents, including projects in Sweden, South Africa, Japan, Spain, Italy, Vietnam, Zambia, Sierra Leone, and Australia, most recently as a consultant for the Open Society Institute. He has been a fellow of the Center for Online Dispute Resolution at the University of Massachusetts, and a Senior International Fellow at the University of Melbourne Law School. In 2009, the ABA Journal named him a “Legal Rebel”, one of 50 innovators doing the most to remake the legal profession in the United States.
Tom has a couple of degrees from Yale in subjects that have absolutely nothing to do with law or computers. He once covered the field at Harvard Stadium with a six-foot layer of smoke, and has worked as a stage- and production manager for opera companies in (among other places) Houston, Chicago, Miami, Columbus, and Omaha, where an elephant wreaked havoc during a production of Aida (he is still remembered in Omaha as a stage-management god). He also worked for the American Repertory Theater, the New World Festival of the Arts, and as the Director of Special Technical Projects for Spoleto Festival USA; for Eastern Airlines and IBM trade shows. He's also earned his living as a rock roadie and jazz-tour lighting designer, a commercial-refrigeration installer, and as a writer of things best forgotten. His work was once hailed as “an act of artistic vandalism” by Opera News.
For fun, he buys and sells antique tools, and builds furniture for friends and, infrequently, in unlikely places.
Tom's LinkedIn profile is here.
Mohammad AL Asswad, Ontologist
Mohammad graduated with a PhD in semantic technologies from Brunel University, London, UK in 2011. He moved to the USA and started working as a research engineer at Cornell LII in 2012. He was responsible for creating software applications that help LII visitors to read and understand legal text more easily using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantic technologies. During his tenure at the LII, Mohammad supervised master of engineering students who worked on LII projects such as definition extraction and document classification. Mohammad now manages the ontology program at the Research Department within Citi Group in NYC where he creates ontologies and semantic applications that help clients and investment analysts find important investment and financial information.
Brian Laurence Hughes, Web Developer
Brian Hughes got his B.A. in linguistics at Harvard. For 18 years Brian worked in university library systems. He began as evening circulation/reference at Northeastern Law School and ended as evening circulation/reference at International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He moved to computer support and then computer programming, both at the Harvard Law School. While at HLS, Brian was the PHP programmer for Terry Martin & Tom Bruce’s Leda project.
Brian became a programmer for the LII in September 2000. He mostly works with PHP, Python, Subversion and MySQL, and has hand a hand in LII’s donation systems, the Supreme Court project (the script that constructs the LII Bulletin was written by him), among others.
Brian lives in Andover, Massachusetts and works from his home. His wife Cathy Conroy works at Harvard Law School. Among Brian’s interests are classical music, languages, science (particularly physics) and nature (particularly trees).
Peter W. Martin, Co-Founder and Director Emeritus
Peter discovered computers while serving as dean of the Cornell Law School during the 1980s. (He prepared the school's budget and wrote a book chapter on an Apple II Plus, installed the first LAN on campus.) Later he designed, wrote, and constructed the first comprehensive legal reference prepared specifically for electronic delivery - Martin on Social Security. With Tom Bruce, Peter founded the LII in 1992, developed its disk-based publications (on Folio Views), and hand-coded the U.S. Constitution in html during a blizzard in 1993. Many other digital adventures followed including the preparation and teaching of online courses to students at over a dozen law schools between 1996 and 2007 and in 1998 assisting with the birth of the first LII in Africa, the Zambia Legal Information Institute.
Prof. Martin took emeritus status in 2009 but to continues to be involved in individual LII projects (including the regular updating of his Basic Legal Citation) and to write on legal informatics topics. He blogs at: //citeblog.access-to-law.com