LESSONS FROM THE WEB

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In this monthly column, law professors comment on the many academic opportunities and challenges presented by Web technology.

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The Evolution of PortiaLaw

Paula A. Monopoli, Visiting Scholar, University of Maryland School of Law
Editor's Note: As of September 2002, PortiaLaw is no longer in service.

I grew up in a quintessential New England town with a village green and a musty old public library. I spent hours in that library reading every book in a series called "Little Maids of . . .", "Little Maid of Old Connecticut", "Little Maid of Old Massachusetts," and so on, until there were no more left to read. I loved browsing through the shelves and coming upon something interesting and unexpected. In college, I browsed the eerie stacks of Sterling Library. There was no feeling like coming upon a fragile, old history book and cracking it open, thinking that it might have been fifty years since some other undergraduate (male of course) had opened its pages.

My browsing habits found a new venue when I came upon the Internet. This new technology allowed me to sit at my desk and jump from interesting website to interesting website, through the wonder of hyperlinks. As a woman law professor, I searched for interesting sites about the early years of women in law schools and in the profession. I came upon source after source - from bibliographies about early women at Stanford's Women's Legal History Biography Project site to information about the oldest women lawyers organization in the country at the National Association of Women Lawyers homepage.

While browsing the Web didn't have the same tactile satisfaction as picking up dusty old books and skimming their yellowed pages, it had the benefit of being able to engage in the activity without ever leaving my desk. As a mother of triplets, and later a fourth child, the Internet let me pursue my research and my curiosity with maximum efficiency. I did much of the foundational research for several law review articles and a book on the American probate courts on the Internet - accessing court and agency files and other original sources that would have taken far more time to find with more traditional research methods. Empirical data that would otherwise be difficult to unearth was readily found on a variety of sites.

I shared discoveries like Wills on the Web with my Wills & Trusts classes. I downloaded and added the original text of Benjamin Franklin's will to my course materials. The sharp words that Franklin include limiting the inheritance of his Tory son gave my students a new understanding of his humanity as they studied the litigation over the trust Franklin established for the City of Boston. Outside class, I shared an American Bar Association site offering insights into gender bias in law schools with the many women law students who came to my office searching for answers about their disparate treatment in law school. The information from that site helped them feel that they were not alone in their experiences. I gave these same students the web addresses of groups like the ABA's Commission on Women in the Profession and the National Conference of Women's Bar Associations so they would be aware of the existing networks of women lawyers as they entered the profession.

As I repeated the same information to one student after another, I began to realize the efficiency and utility of a single site that brought all these other sites together. Thus, the idea for PortiaLaw was born. The site's name was a reference to the common practice of characterizing women lawyers at the turn of the last century as "Portias," a Shakespearean allusion lost on one present-day law student who thought it referred to Portia de Rossi, an actress on "Ally McBeal," David E. Kelley's wildly popular television show about Boston lawyers.

However, PortiaLaw's implementation had to wait. While finishing the book on the American probate courts for Northeastern University Press this past year, I had the time to register the domain name with Network Solutions , purchase a pre-fabricated webdesign from ImageCafe, and sign-up for their WebsiteManager service which allows me to edit my site without learning programming languages like HTML.

It took me about a month to build the site, adding hyperlinks to every page I thought would be useful as part of a portal to websites of interest to women lawyers and law students. I submitted the site to several of the big search engines. However, I also took a more direct approach to increasing awareness by announcing the site on ListServs of interest to women lawyers and law students and asking the sites that I listed to add reciprocal links to PortiaLaw. JURIST was kind enough to run an announcement of the site's launch and groups like the National Conference of Women's Bar Associations agreed to run an announcement in their newsletter.

The site now has pages on Legal News, Books of Interest to Women Lawyers, Law Students, Women's Bar Associations, and a page on Family & Work issues which includes sites like the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau homepage. The front page of PortiaLaw runs announcements of upcoming conferences of interest to women lawyers as well as an AP News feed for up-to-the minute headline news for visitors. In addition to being a single source for all the resources available to them, PortiaLaw will eventually allow women lawyers and legal academics to exchange ideas through forums on topics that are important to women in legal practice and academia. The ultimate goal is to create a virtual community of women lawyers on-line.

The ease with which I was able to build PortiaLaw has lead me to plan on-line sites for the courses that I will be teaching this year at the University of Maryland School of Law. I also felt comfortable enough with the Internet to become the Editor of JURIST's Property/Wills & Trusts Guide. PortiaLaw has given me a footprint in cyberspace and the brave new world for legal academia, with its dramatic technological changes, that will exist for the remainder of my professional life. The Internet is a new tool for an ancient human activity - the acquisition of information, its transformation and synthesis into knowledge and its subsequent dissemination to others.

The American Bar Association report "Elusive Equality: The Experiences of Women in Legal Education" documented the bias that continues to permeate the experience of women in academia - both as law students and law faculty. A number of gender bias committees around the country have confirmed our experience that women lawyers in practice still face significant barriers. We've come a long way since the first women lawyers in the America legal profession were referred to as "Portias." However, there is still much work to be done in order for women to become fully integrated into the legal profession. I hope that PortiaLaw will contribute in some small way to that historic process as it continues into the twenty-first century.

© 2000 by Prof. Paula A. Monopoli. All rights reserved.
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 The views expressed in this column are solely those of its author, and do not reflect those of JURIST, its Advisory Board, its staff or its host institutions.
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