The spelling of English is a small bugbear for websites with an international focus – especially for those few sites like LexPublica that need to dance on the point at the intersection of correctness, comprehensibility and the law. While spelling isn’t the biggest issue we’re facing, it is still important for us to choose a consistent and well-considered approach.

An early example of the issue is “licence”. In much of the English-speaking world, licensing is accomplished through a licence. The licence is the document, while license is the activity. In the United States, however, license may also refer to the document.

Choosing to use licence or license is a small point, but attention to detail is significant because we’re building a legal commons and precision in language matters in the law. It matters especially because one of LexPublica’s long-term objectives is the standardization of contracts and contract language.

When we hashed out the issue, the major choices seemed to be: laziness, provincialism, simplicity or commonality.

The lazy approach is to let spelling sort itself out in the future, as it becomes an issue. We didn’t think that this would be a particularly good approach to take – we’ll have enough trouble with doing this sort of thing by accident.

Provincialism would let us stick to the Canadian dialect of English and subject others to our uncomfortable compromise between British and US English. This approach might nettle our friends to the south and induce them to waste time fiddling with the spelling in LexPublica documents.

Simplicity would let us choose the simplest version of any given spelling, dialects be damned.

Finally, commonality would dictate that we choose the variant shared across the greatest number of dialects.

Of all the approaches, commonality seems to give us the best result. So long as the meaning is consistent with the shared spelling, then the common spelling has the best chance of having the right meaning to the most people.

It’s been a surprising amount of work to come to the decision to use “licence” as the noun and “license” as the verb.

Like many rules, this rule has an exception: when “license” appears in the name of a specific document, or when quoting from a document, one should leave the use as is. For example:

The Creative Commons Attribution License is the licence used by LexPublica to license its blog content.

Of course, this is the kind of issue for which style manuals are written. We’ll write more about our plans for a community-developed style manual for contract drafting in another post.

In Light Your Taper, we talked about freely sharing our ideas and plans. Beyond writing publicly about them, there’s another important component to sharing freely: letting others use and build on your work.

Applying these principles to our blog, we’ve chosen to license our writings under the Creative Commons Attribution License. In essence, the licence means anyone can use our blog content for any purpose — commercial or non-commercial — so long as they give us credit.

This choice of a very permissive licence helps us share what LexPublica is working on, as widely as possible. Spreading the word about LexPublica is valuable to us, increasing our visibility and helping us find collaborators. The permissive licensing is also intended to enable others to leverage this content, adapt to their own purposes, and re-publish it.

In a future post, we’ll write about our thinking on the choice of licensing for LexPublica’s free contract templates and free information on how to use those templates. Quick preview: we’re inclined to use the same Creative Commons Attribution License. We’d love to hear from you if you have any views or comments on that.

The free exchange of ideas and information is the lifeblood of healthy societies and vibrant markets. As Jefferson framed it:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

We want to take that principle a step further, and apply it to our new enterprise, LexPublica. We’ll share openly what is often considered confidential: our vision, our ideas, our plans, our thinking on key decisions and our experience. By doing this, we want to engage others in our work, we want others to learn from our experience, and we want to benefit from input and feedback.

Contracts are a routine part of most of our lives.  If we’re running a business, we negotiate contracts regularly.  They affect our pocketbook very directly, and potentially the overall success and value of the business.  If we’re lawyers, we prepare and often negotiate contracts for our clients.

We’re building LexPublica because we think there’s a better way to create contracts for people, businesses and lawyers.  Simple, clear and plain language, for starters.  Developing more standardized contract templates for common agreements.  Making these contract templates available free of charge, for anyone to use.  Building an online community to facilitate collaboration in developing these contract templates.

We’ll have more to say as we get under way.  Tell us what you think.