For many years, the Cornell Legal Information Institute (LII) has been a premier source of reference information about laws in the US and elsewhere. One day last year, LII director Tom Bruce and CAUCE president John Levine were talking over breakfast, and noted that there was no authoritative online source of legal information about spam and e-mail, something that the LII and CAUCE are, together, uniquely qualified to create. The Inbox Project is a new section of the LII web site, meeting that need.

We intend for it to be comprehensive, growing to cover not just spam-related state and US law in the United States, but laws in countries around the world, since spam is a global problem. It will be authoritative, researched and written by well-qualified students at the Cornell Law School, with advice from CAUCE. And it will be stable, with an ongoing process to keep it accurate and up to date. The project currently covers US and Canadian law, with case law and laws from other countries added as the students research and analyze them.

This work is funded independently from CAUCE and the LII's regular budget by several generous organizational sponsors. We'll have more to say about them when we formally announce the project next week.

But in the meantime, point your browser at http://www.inboxproject.org where there's already a lot to see.