Library Innovation Lab Harvard Law School Library

Overview

The Library Innovation Lab (LIL) at Harvard Law School is a multidisciplinary team of librarians, technologists, lawyers, and designers working to advance open access to legal and scholarly information, preserve digital content, and develop open-source tools for libraries and the public. LIL is housed at the Reginald F. Lewis Law Center at Harvard Law School and is directed within the Law School Library, with faculty direction from Professor Jonathan Zittrain.

History and Founding

LIL emerged from the Harvard Law School Library's long-standing commitment to stewarding legal history and government documents. In 2012, Jonathan Zittrain became the library's faculty director, and the lab took on its current form as an innovation unit. LIL has since launched a series of high-profile projects aimed at expanding access to legal materials and preserving digital information. In 2013 it launched Perma.cc, and subsequent years brought the Caselaw Access Project and, in 2025, a public data vault archiving federal datasets.

Projects and Notable Work

LIL's flagship projects include Perma.cc, a web archiving and citation tool founded in 2013 that helps scholars, courts, journals, and others create permanent records of web sources they cite, combating link rot in legal and academic writing. The Caselaw Access Project provides free public access to over 6.5 million decisions from state and federal courts throughout U.S. history, digitized from 40,000 volumes of case law. H2O is an open-access platform for creating, sharing, and remixing legal course materials. In 2025, LIL launched a Public Data Project and data vault, archiving more than 311,000 datasets from data.gov, federal GitHub repositories, and PubMed to protect public government data from disappearing.

Access and Usage

LIL's tools and outputs are primarily available online and open source. Perma.cc is accessible to libraries, academic journals, courts, and individual users. Case law is freely searchable at case.law. The lab publishes code and documentation on GitHub and maintains an active blog.