JURIST Legal News Site Calling for Donations

JURIST, the legal news and commentary website based out of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, needs money. Your money.

The well-known, pioneering news site explains that it is "anticipating a significant reduction in funding (meaning several tens of thousands of dollars) from our primary benefactors".

It needs funds to:

• Redesign the JURIST.org website
• Fully develop a mobile version of JURIST.org, as well as iPhone and Android apps
• Increase outreach efforts to JURIST's audience
• Develop new programming, including audio and video coverage, seminars and conferences that will directly benefit our community
• Cover costs associated with managing our law student staff, such as development of staff manuals, training materials, and even the occassional pizza
• Establish an emergency reserve to cope with technical crises in a timely fashion
• Add professional staff support for JURIST's Commentary
• Add professional technical support
• Ensure continued funding for JURIST's existing professional staff

JURIST's Publisher and Editor-in-Chief is a Canadian, the Halifax-born Bernard Hibbitts.

Hibbitts is a Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. A Rhodes Scholar, he studied law at Oxford, Dalhousie Law School, the University of Toronto, and finally Harvard Law School (LLM 1988), where he was Associate Editor of the Harvard International Law Journal. He is a former law clerk to Justice Gerald LeDain of the Supreme Court of Canada. He created the site that became JURIST in 1996. Quite the CV.

Earlier Library Boy posts on JURIST include:

• JURIST 10th Anniversary Conference (March 6, 2007): "JURIST, the legal news and commentary website based out of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, is celebrating its 10th anniversary by holding a conference called Law as a Seamless WebSite on March 29th. It is attracting some very high profile panelists, including terrorism suspect defence lawyers, UN war crimes prosecutors, top legal affairs correspondents and many prominent law profs (...)"
• CALL 2009 Conference Plenary With JURIST's Bernard Hibbitts (May 27, 2009): "The 2009 conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries welcomed University of Pittsburgh law professor Bernard Hibbitts as its plenary guest speaker yesterday. The conference, which ended earlier today, took place in Halifax (...) He provided a fascinating overview of JURIST's evolution since 1996 from a simple webpage to a fully staffed, student volunteer-run web news service, with expert editors and outside commentators. But his main focus was about how the legal field is falling short of taking advantage of the promise of new information technologies."
• JURIST Editor-in-Chief Bernard Hibbitts on the Technology of Law (February 11, 2011): "The most recent issue of Law Library Journal has an article by Bernard J. Hibbitts on The Technology of Law (...) The essay is adapted from his plenary address at the 2009 annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries, May 26, 2009, in Halifax, Nova Scotia."