CURRENT POSITION Founder and CEO, Open Law Library, Washington, DC DEGREE JD, University of Chicago, 2010 FAST FACT Born and raised in Alaska, Greisen has lived in eight states since moving to the lower 48. FOLLOW openlawlib.org; bit.ly/UELMAwhitepaper; bit.ly/TribalLaws-PilotProposal Photo by Keith Roselle

Locating Tribal Law

David Greisen, a self-described library groupie who first hacked on open-source software as a preteen, now works to ensure that laws are easy to find and freely available to all.

Greisen is founder, CEO, and the driving force behind Open Law Library (OLL), a nonprofit open-access publisher helping governments collaborate, draft, and publish consistent laws with legislative history built to withstand nation state–level cyberattacks and comply with the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA), all without going through for-profit publishers.

Tribal law (the legal designation in federal law for an Indigenous sovereign entity in the United States), unlike federal and state law, can be difficult to locate. It is separate from federal Indian law, which involves the relationship between federal, state, and tribal governments. Tribal law is developed for Native nations’ members and territories. For the majority of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States, no law has been published, but those laws that are published are scattered across websites, databases, and print publications. OLL works to make tribal law available with complete respect for and cooperation with various Indigenous nations, using an open-access publishing model to make content freely available, complete with the ability to search across the laws of multiple tribes with a federated search. To date, OLL has helped its partners publish close to 10,000 pages of tribal laws and legal materials in easy-to-access and standardized human- and computer-readable formats.

Greisen is a non-Native who first learned about the needs of tribal lawyers at a barbecue hosted by Lac Courte Oreilles elders. This led him to contact the Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center to learn more. Director Richard Monette was greatly interested in Greisen’s work and introduced Greisen to Bonnie Shucha, director of the University of Wisconsin Law Library, which, as part of its mission, serves Wisconsin nations.

OLL’s next project will center on public libraries with a whole-community approach to improving practical and effective access to the law and justice. “It’s through these collaborations with extraordinary people that our inchoate mission to strengthen the administration of, and access to, justice through better access to the law has crystalized into the focused, driven plan we’re executing today,” Greisen says.