Australasian Law Reform
Agencies Conference (ALRAC)
Access to
Justice : Rhetoric or Reality Wellington, New Zealand , 13 -
16 April
2004
WorldLII’s Law Reform Project
- Improving
access to law reform on the Internet
Graham Greenleaf and Philip Chung (Co-Directors,
AustLII
& WorldLII)
and Donna Buckingham (Co-Director, NZLII)
<
graham@austlii.edu.au><
philip@austlii.edu.au>
<donna.buckingham@stonebow.otago.ac.nz>
Introduction
This brief paper is intended as an introduction for
law
reform agencies to the free access, non-profit Legal Information
Institutes
(LIIs) across the world who are interested to publish law reform
reports, and to
the World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII), which provides a
central
search facility for law reform reports on the various LIIs, and an
extensive
Catalog /Websearch of law reform websites from around the world. Taken
together,
these facilities make up WorldLII’s Law Reform Project.
The paper concludes with an invitation to all law
reform
agencies attending the ALRAC Conference to consider having discussions
with the
most appropriate LII in their region about republishing their law
reform
reports and discussion papers via that LII. This would make them
searchable
not only on that LII but also as part of WorldLII’s Law Reform
Project.
What are legal information institutes (LIIs)?
Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) have developed
since
1994 in various countries around the world, as free-access, non-profit,
Internet
providers of public legal information. They are usually but not
invariably
University-based.
The following LIIs jointly provide the content of
the World
Legal Information Institute (WorldLII) <http://www.worldlii.org/>:
- Australasian
Legal Information Institute (AustLII) <http://www.austlii.edu.au/>
- British
& Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII)
<http://www.bailii.org/>
- Canadian
Legal Information Institute (CanLII) <http://www.canlii.org/>
- Hong
Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII) <http://www.hklii.org/>
- Pacific
Island Legal Information Institute (PacLII)
<http://www.paclii.org/>
- Southern
African Legal Information Institute (SAFLII)
<http://www.saflii.org/>
- The
Legal Information Institute (Cornell) <http://www.law.cornell.edu/
> (US
federal law)
- Droit
Francophone < http://portail.droit.francophonie.org/
> (17 francophone countries, mainly in West Africa to date)
They will shortly be joined by the New Zealand
Legal
Information Institute (NZLII), which is currently in the process of
formation.
AustLII provides the technical operation and
coordination
of WorldLII .
WorldLII’s Law Reform Project
To search over the reports of all law reform bodies
available through WorldLII, a user can go from the front page of
WorldLII to
the ‘Law Reform Project’ page shown below. (An alternative method
is to choose ‘All Law Reform Databases’ from WorldLII’s full
search menu).
As can be seen, the full text of the Reports (and
in many
cases, Discussion Papers) of the law reform agencies of Australia, Hong
Kong,
Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa and the United Kingdom can
be
searched simultaneously from this page. This is not possible anywhere
else on
the Internet. The databases come from AustLII, BAILII, HKLII and
SAFLII,
illustrating how WorldLII is able to integrate the contents of its
collaborating
LIIs so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Law Reform Project page on WorldLII
The coverage of the databases is often extensive,
but varies
because some databases are still being built. It is as follows:
- Australian
Law Reform Commission (AustLII) : 1975-
- Hong
Kong Law Reform Commission (HKLII): 2000-
- Irish
Law Reform Commission (BAILII): 1976-
- New
Zealand Law Commission (AustLII): 1996-
- Scottish
Law Commission (BAILII): 1989-
- South
African Law Commission (SAFLII): 1996-
- The
Law Commission (BAILII): 1996-
As a result, the full text of hundreds of law
reform
Reports and Discussion Papers may be searched, either simultaneously
over all
law reform bodies or individually for each law reform body.
Law reform materials on LIIs can receive very
substantial
quanties of accesses. For example, for calendar year 2003 the
Australian Law
Reform Commission’s reports on AustLII received over 800,000
‘hits’ from AustLII and WorldLII users. The hit rate is probably
considerably higher, in fact, because we can only measure those hits
that come
to AustLII itself, and not where a page is accessed from a copy cached
by an
ISP.
An example search for ‘unjust* enrichment’ (with
truncation so as to also find ‘unjustified enrichment’) gives the
results page shown below. The 58 law reform documents found are sorted
into
likely order of relevance, and in this case the seven most relevant
documents originate from six different law reform bodies.
Provincial , State and Territory law reform
agencies, and
law reform agencies in special subject areas, are not yet included on
any of the
LIIs. It is the intention of WorldLII’s Law Reform Project that they
will
be included if and when they become available via the appropriate
regional or
national LII (or on WorldLII itself if no other LII is appropriate).
AustLII,
for example, intends to approach Australian State and Territory law
reform
agencies during 2004 to discuss with them whether they would be willing
to
republish via AustLII.
The Law Reform Catalog/Websearch pages
In additional to the law reform databases on the
LIIs,
WorldLII’s Law Reform Project also includes the WorldLII Catalog
>> Law Reform pages, an extensive catalog (or index) of websites
from
around the world dealing with law reform. The first page is shown below.
Front page of WorldLII >> Categories
>>
Law Reform
The Hong Kong LRC assists AustLII to maintain the
content of
these pages, so its logo is shown. Indexing assistance from other law
reform
bodies is also welcome. A lot of work remains to be done on subject
indexing,
but HKLRC has a substantial print index.
This catalog links to the websites of all law
reform
agencies represented at this Conference that have websites (we could
not find
them for the law reform bodies for Lesotho , Namibia , Cook Island,
Samoa,
Kiribati or Bangladesh – apologies for any inadvertent omissions). The
law reform agencies from 48 countries and 10 multi-national bodies are
included.
Each page then provides detailed links for each
country or
subject, for example for Canada:
Extract from the Law Reform >> Canada
page in
the Catalog
As well as simply linking to the website of each
law
reform agency, WorldLII’s Catalog is used to send a web spider to each
web site so that we can make searchable the ful text of each page of
the website
that the spider is capable of indexing. As shown in the example above,
the
search can then be limited merely to the ‘Law Reform’ part of all
the websites in the Catalog.
As the search results on the next page illustrate,
such a
websearch finds some law reform reports not previously found by the
search
over WorldLII databases, on the first page in this case from the
British
Columbia Law Institute, and from the UK Lord Chancellor’s
Department.
The option ‘Repeat search over ... Google’ will
translate the search into Google’s search syntax (but not for
truncation),
and limit it to law-related content on Google (but not necessarily to
law
reform). This is part of WorldLII’s aim to provide the most
comprehensive
legal search facility possible from the one location.
An invitation to law reform agencies
We would like to conclude by encouraging all law
reform
agencies attending the ALRAC Conference whose Reports are not yet
published or
republished on a Legal Information Institute to consider having
discussions
about this with the LII most appropriate to their jurisdiction (or
directly on
WorldLII if no other appropriate LII yet exists).
Such publication will make a law reform agency’s
publications far more widely accessible to both national and
international
audiences:
- as
part of the general searches of the host LII;
- as
a special ‘Law Reform’ search option on the host LII;
- as
part of WorldLII’s Law Reform Project, with other law reform agencies
of
the world; and
- as
part of the over 400 databases searched with a full search of
WorldLII.
Contacts at LIIs for law
reform agencies
- AustLII
– Australia – Professor Graham Greenleaf, Co-Director
<graham@austlii.edu.au>
- BAILII
– UK and Ireland – Mr Joe Ury, Co-Director
<Joe.Ury@sas.ac.uk>
- CanLII
– Canada – Professor Daniel Poulin, Director, LexUM
<daniel.poulin@umontreal.ca>
- Droit
Francophone, - francophone countries- Professor Daniel Poulin,
Director, LexUM
<daniel.poulin@umontreal.ca>
- HKLII
– Hong Kong and China – Professor Kevin Pun, Co-Director
<pun@csis.hku.hk>
- LII
(Cornell) – US Federal law – Mr Tom Bruce, Co-Director
<trb2@cornell.edu>
- PacLII
– Pacific Island countries – Ms Robynne Blake, Manager
<blake_r@VANUATU.USP.AC.FJ>
- NZLII
– New Zealand – Ms Donna Buckingham, Co-Director
<donna.buckingham@stonebow.otago.ac.nz>
- SAFLII
– Africa – Professor Iain Currie, Director
<currieib@law.wits.ac.za>
- WorldLII
- any other countries - Professor Graham Greenleaf, Co-Director
<graham@austlii.edu.au>
Extract from results for ‘unjust*
enrichment’ WorldLII Websearch limited to law reform