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2.3. Intellectual indexes (directories) for law

Good intellectual indexes for law are hard to find, even when they do exist. This part examines these problems.

2.3.1. Multi-country law indices

While there are many multi-country intellectual indices to law on the Internet, none are even remotely comprehensive, and many are US-oriented with a slight international gloss.

Many of the most valuable genuinely multi-county indices are included in the list of over 25 indices accessible at World Law Links - World:Indices 27http://www.austlii.edu.au/links/World/Indices_(Multi-national_Law_Indexes)/ in the index within which the DIAL Index resides. These valuable indices include Adminet World Law (France); Electronic Reference Desk (Emory Law School); FindLaw: Foreign & International Resources; Foreign and International Law in The World Wide Web Virtual Library - Law (Indiana University School of Law ); Guide to Law Online:Nations of the World - by country (Law Library, US Congress); Juridex - source and subject indexes (Québec); Jurweb - Legal information by country/continent (University of Bayreuth); Laws of other nations (The U.S. House of Representatives Internet Law Library) ; Legal Resources in Europe (Saarbrücken Internet Project); The World Law Guide (Netherlands); and the Yahoo! Law Indices.

Extract from World Law Links World:Indices at http://www.austlii.edu.au/links/World/Indices_(Multi-national_Law_Indexes)/

Many of these indices cannot be searched[28], but can only be browsed for entries according to the indexing hierarchies used in the index, so it is difficult to find legislation by searching for `legislation or act or statute or code' or some such. There are almost no sub-indices of `world wide legislation' in these indices either[29], so it is generally necessary to browse the page for each country in which you are interested, to see if legislation is included.

As a test of coverage of legislation in these indices, four countries were chosen which were know to have extensive legislation collections on the Internet (Kazakhstan, Turkey, New Zealand, and Norway), and two where it was not known that there was any substantial legislation (Malaysia and Greece). Four of the more extensive world-wide law indices were then chosen (Emory Law School Electronic Reference Desk; Guide to Law Online, Library of Congress; FindLaw; and Jürweb). In addition, the `Government:Countries' pages in Yahoo![30]http://www.yahoo.com/Government/Countries/], the Internet's largest general-purpose Internet index were also checked, on the basis that its sheer size might give it more coverage than law-specific indices.

A check of the five indices for legislation from the six countries produced the following results:

Emory

Congress
Jürweb
FindLaw**
Yahoo!
Turkey
N
Y
Y
N
N
Kazakhstan
N
N
N
N
N
New Zealand
N
N
N
N
N
Norway
N
N
Y
N
N
Greece
(none known)
N
N
N
N
N
Malaysia
(none known)
N
N
N
N*
Y
Table: Inclusion of legislation links in selected world-wide law indices

** Use of FindLaw's `LawRunner' search associated with a country's page may well find legislation for that country, and did so in relation to Turkey when tested. However, this is a result of a full text search, not an intellectual index.
* FindLaw contained a link to a general Malaysian law site which did contain legislation, but the FindLaw entry did not state this.

The general conclusion that may be drawn from inspecting these indices, supported by the ad hoc test reported above, is that existing multi-country intellectual legal indexes do not provide links to more than a small percentage of the available legal resources on the web. Nor does a general Internet index like Yahoo!

There is one index which is an exception to this general lack of coverage of legislation. The only one of these indices which provides any convenient means of finding legislation around the world is the World Law Guide (Netherlands), which has a `Legislation' page[31]http://www.lexadin.nl/wlg/legis/nofr/legis.htm] which provides links to legislation from over 50 countries, although quite a few of these only listed individual labour law Acts from the ILO's legislation site, and a few contained only broken links. Its individual country pages often contain links to what seems to be a random selection of individual Acts, as well as to the major collections. It is not searchable. Nevertheless, it is a very good index, and contained links to four useful collections which were not at that stage included in the DIAL Index[32].

2.3.2. National law indices

Some very good indices do exist for particular countries (eg Canada, the USA, Germany and Australia), but there are few of them. They are often difficult to find from the multi-country indices. It is therefore difficult to find a good place to start!

2.3.3. Subject indices

There are few subject-oriented multi-country law indices, although there are quite a few for the United States only (or the USA with a slight international gloss). Three of the more substantial ones, although they are almost entirely American in focus, are: The conclusion that can be drawn from inspecting these indices is there are no multi-subject multi-country law indices of substance on the Internet. There is therefore no `logical starting point' for a subject oriented law search on the Internet if you wish to obtain a genuinely international range of resources.

There is, however, one exception to this conclusion. The Hieros Gamos II subject index[36]http://www.hg.org/hg2.html] covers about 200 subject areas, and provides substantial indexes for most of them (very large ones for some subjects). The coverage is genuinely international, although there is inevitably strong US coverage due to the amount of US material on the web. The entries cannot be searched effectively (searches cannot be limited to single entries), and do not have any multiple entry classificatory structure, so finding material is not always easy, but it is a very substantial subject index. There is only a very limited amount of indexing of legislation under these subject headings, but there is some. The Hieros Gamos subject indexes do not therefore provide the facilities proposed for the legislation-oriented subject indexing in Project DIAL, but they are a valuable complementary resource.

Some valuable multi-country law indexes for specific subjects do exist on web sites specialising in a particular legal subject. The problem for the researcher is how to find such specialised subject indices without knowing the address of the site on which they are located to start with. This is why there is a need for at least a multi-subject international law index which will at least take you to any good indices that already exist on the subject - a law `meta-index'.

2.3.4. General Internet indexes

The coverage of world-wide legal materials in general-purpose Internet indexes such as Yahoo! (the largest general-purpose index) is relatively slight, though often helpful, as an inspection of the Yahoo! Government:Countries pages[37] http://www.yahoo.com/Government/Countries/] or Yahoo! Law Index - By Subject pages[38]http://www.yahoo.com/Government/Law/] will show. This was illustrated above in relation to finding legislation in Yahoo!.

2.3.5. Intellectual indexes are inherently hard to maintain

As the quantity of legal material on the Internet grows, the sites that contain significant legal information grow so numerous, and some of sites are so large, that it is difficult to maintain intellectual indexes, at least with any depth of indexing of each site. The best that can be hoped for is that sites with significant legal materials are identified in the index, even though there is no detailed description of their content (the link is only to the `front door' of the site). For example, it soon becomes impossible to include in an intellectual index the content of each piece of legislation, each case, or each journal article included on a large site. To index large sites in any depth is expensive, as an individual indexer will add no more than a few entries per hour to a hypertext index, and that is assuming that there is almost no searching involved in finding what to add. The problem is compounded by the web, where content tends to change after it has been indexed (as legislation does), and often to move to other locations. Intellectual indexes are therefore inherently shallow, and expensive to develop and maintain. The challenge is to find what level of depth in Internet indexing is both maintainable and useful.

These limitations of intellectual indexes lead inevitably to a consideration of whether automated indexing, and the use of `full text' search engines that can search every word on a web site, are a better alternative than intellectual indexing. This is a debate that recurs with every new form of information retrieval and development in search and retrieval techniques, both generally and specifically in relation to law[39]. The World-Wide-Web, with content that requires indexing being distributed across the world, and new developments in retrieval techniques such as relevance ranking, give the debate a very different context.

2.3.6. Conclusions about existing intellectual indices of law

We may draw the following conclusions about intellectual indexes of law on the web:

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