JURIST

JURIST is a non-profit online legal news usefulness run by law student volunteers from 29 law schools in a US, the UK, the Netherlands, Kenya, Mauritius, India, Australia in addition to New Zealand. It features continuously updated US together with international legal news based on primary mention documents and contextualized by informed commentary shown by law professors, policymakers, lawyers and law students. An internet-based example of service learning, JURIST helps its law student staffers ongoing opportunities to broaden their awareness of current legal events and develops their research and writing skills in a 21st-century technological environment while they serve the public as apprentice journalists. JURIST is owned and operated by JURIST Legal News and Research Services, Inc., a 501c3 educational company based at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law led by Executive Director Megan McKee in conjunction with a Board of Directors chaired by Professor Bernard Hibbitts, who is also JURIST’s Publisher & Editor-in-Chief.

History

University of Pittsburgh law professor Bernard Hibbitts created the website that would become JURIST in 1996 as a part-time personal project extending his academic interest in the evolving relationship between law and technology. The utility was originally called Law Professors on the Web, with the score JURIST being officially adopted in 1997. Initially intentional as a non-commercial clearinghouse of academic papers and teaching resources that had lately been posted online by Hibbitts and other innovating law professors, it was the first open hub for legal scholarship and law teaching materials on the internet. In 2001 the New York Times called JURIST “the wonderful legal education mega-site.” To keep on its globalin the days of gradual dialup speeds, JURIST operated a UK mirror site at the University of Cambridge and an Australian mirror at Australian National University.

In 1998 JURIST - still just Hibbitts and a couple of law student assistants who happened to hold technical skills - began pivoting toto pressing public demand for authoritative and timely information on the legal aspects of rapidly-developing current issues. JURIST delivered extended research and organized academic commentary on the Clinton impeachment crisis, the Kosovo War, the 2000 US presidential election recount and terrorism law and policy in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. By 2003 JURIST had been reconceptualized as a new mark of news service fusing academic research and legal journalism and ceased functioning as a scholarly archive, leaving that mission to SSRN, Bepress and other up-and-coming commercial repositories. Hibbitts and his assistants recruited a staff of some 25 law students from the University of Pittsburgh to begin reporting and documenting national and international news in real-time, supplemented by the known contributions of professional academic commentators. In 2008 JURIST incorporated as a Pennsylvania non-profit and subsequently obtained an IRS determination to be a charitable agency as defined in section 501c3 of the US Internal Revenue Code. Hibbitts became Chairman of JURIST’s Board of Directors and formally assumed the role of JURIST’s Publisher & Editor-in-Chief.