The Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute has been named the Best Law School Site by legal.online, a national Internet newsletter, in its Best of the Web awards. The Legal Information Institute's World Wide Web site is located at http:// www.law.cornell.edu.

The Legal Information Institute (LII) also was given honorable mentions by legal.online for Best Legal Information Starting Point and Best Legal Research Site, in both the "cases" and "laws" categories.

A panel of legal professionals and Internet experts selected the best web sites in a variety of categories, based on three criteria: design, content and usefulness to lawyers.

"We're pleased by this recognition of the value of our site," said LII co-director Peter Martin, the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law. "We're doubly pleased that the recognition in this survey exists even in competiton with commercial sites."

The panel noted that shortly after the LII web site was established in 1993, it "became the leading Internet site for distribution of U.S. Supreme Court opinions and later added decisions of the N.Y. Court of Appeals. Its hypertext version of the U.S. Code remains its most heavily used feature. LII has continued to blaze the Internet trail with such features as Eye on the Courts, highlighting noteworthy decisions on the Net, and BigEar, monitoring law-related discussion lists for news of new Internet resources."

The LII was established in the spring of 1992, with funding from the Cornell Law School and the National Center for Automated Information Research, as an experiment in electronic publishing and research. A year later, the institute's web page became the first site to offer legal information via the web. In the years since its creation, the institute has developed numerous web sites and electronic bulletins that transmit key information on significant court cases directly to attorneys around the world.

The LII is co-directed by Martin and Thomas R. Bruce, with assistance from Patrice L. Crooks, systems coordinator, and Linda A. Majeroni, administrator.