Anatomy of Traffic Spike (Marital Strife Edition)

In our last newsletter, we told the story of a traffic spike to 18 USC §2074 caused by a particularly curious hurricane map.  Response to that story was such that we’ve made “Anatomy of a Traffic Spike” a regular feature in our quasi-regular newsletters!  

This edition takes us about as far away from the US Code as you can get on our website–to the (largely) student-authored original content found in our Wex collection.  News stories like this one in early October told of a North Carolina man who was awarded $750,000 when he successfully sued his ex-wife’s lover for alienation of affections.  

When we looked at how our (very short) Wex article “Alienation of Affections” was performing during that time, we saw something we don’t see very often: the “?” symbol.  An infinite number of people viewed that article compared to the same week in 2018.  

A page that literally no one was interested in 12 months ago became our single most popular Wex page on October 2nd and 3rd, with close to 11,000 views.   In fact, it was the second most popular page on the entire website for those two days, behind only 52 USC §30121 (“Contributions and donations by foreign nationals”- must be a reason that was trending, too…).

The direct links like the one in the CNN story we’ve linked to above certainly helped, but (as usual) a lot of the traffic came straight from people using their favorite search engine to learn about something new to them.  

As usual, that leads us back to talking about the technology that goes into everything we do.  Because our web pages load fast, feature clean markup, and are widely linked to from all around the internet, search engines tend to recognize our work as top-quality and to suggest our pages over other available resources.  That means folks looking for, say, a working definition of “alienation of affections” wind up getting our straightforward Wex entry and not a page offered by someone with an axe to grind, and agenda to advance, or a product or service to sell.  

Between our primary resources like the US Code or CFR and our original content like Wex and the Supreme Court Bulletin Previews, we do our best to cover the field and ensure that when the public comes to our website to learn about the law, we’ll have it there no matter what topic has captured the limelight.  And, when that happens, you’ll read it about here.  

Supreme Court Audio in the News

Among the many headlines we saw about the Supreme Court during the first month of its new term were a few that particularly resonated with us.  Over at The Oyez Project, we work with our friends at Justia to make all of the Court’s audio available to the public alongside a synchronized transcript that identifies who is speaking, whether it’s the litigants or the justices.  

In October, two of the justices made the news specifically because of what they said during oral argument, and Oyez has it all.   In Ramos v. Louisiana, the Court was considering Louisiana’s use of non-unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials.  In a move most law professors would envy, Justice Kavanaugh set up a hypothetical and then asked a blunt question that caught the press’s attention.  Want to hear it? Do this:

1. Click here for the Ramos case page:  https://www.oyez.org/cases/2019/18-5924
2. Click the black text next to the speaker symbol under the case title to hear the audio and see the transcript.
3. Using the slider under the transcript, move to the 53:20 mark.
4. (Make sure your sound is turned on, or just read along to the highlighted transcript!)

The next time the Court was in the news for what was said, it was Justice Sotomayor earning the dubious distinction of being the first to break the Court’s new “two-minute rule.”  Here’s the link to the case page for Kansas v. Garcia:  https://www.oyez.org/cases/2019/17-834.

Once again, click the black text under the case name in the upper left of the page.  Then move the slider to 28:33. But keep listening, she gets back to her question in no time!

We think the audio we make available at Oyez offers the public a unique glimpse at how the Supreme Court operates.  Paired with our Bulletin Previews, these services allow court-watchers, students, and the general public a chance to understand what goes on at the Supreme Court and why it matters.    

And We Mean Everyone

“Free legal information for everyone” means for *everyone*, regardless of disability. In our newsletter last spring, we mentioned that we were embarking on a full accessibility remediation of the LII web site. We’re happy to report that we’ve made a great deal of progress, and in the process put building blocks into place that will make it easier for us to deliver new features more quickly in the future. 

What does this mean for the website? Here are a few examples: 

• The structure of the text is more apparent: we’ve darkened the links and added underlining where links combine with surrounding plain text.  We’ve tuned the contrast to make it easier to read text on darker backgrounds. We’ve added structured headings to make it faster to scan section by section. 

• The information is more usable: Sometimes government documents use pictures to represent data – and even print them sideways! We’ve been “unscrambling” these “eggs”, converting the pictures back into data (and printing them right-side up!).

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• We’ve updated a lot of our content in the process: As we’ve gone through the site, we’ve noticed that some of our outdated content was still accessible on the website. We’ve updated what we could and redirected the rest to more current resources.

Accessibility improvements make the web better for everyone – people with disabilities, web crawlers, novice users, and everyone else – we hope you’ll let us know if there’s anything we can do to help make the website more accessible for you.