Greenleaf, Graham --- "Free access to legal information, LIIs, and the Free Access to Law Movement" [2011] UNSWLRS 40

Last Updated: 17 November 2011

Free access to legal information, LIIs, and the Free Access to Law Movement

Graham Greenleaf, University of New South Wales[1]

Citation

This paper is published as a Chapter in Danner, R and Winterton, J (eds.) The IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management. Aldershot, Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2011. This paper may also be referenced as [2011] UNSWLRS 40.

Abstract

This book chapter describes and analyses the global development of free access to legal information since the mid-1990s, and particularly the group of ‘Legal Information Institutes’ (LIIs) that make up the Free Access to Law Movement.

From the mid-1990s the world-wide-web provided the necessary technical platform to enable free public access to computerised legal information – a low cost distribution mechanism. In many countries the first attempts to exploit the advantages of the web for providing legal information came from the academic sector rather than government, and did so with an explicit ideology of free access provision. The first group of such organisations became known collectively as ‘legal information institutes’ or ‘LIIs’. Two distinguishing characteristic of the ‘LIIs’ are that (i) they publish legal information from more than one source (not just ‘their own’ information), for free access via the Internet, and (ii) they collaborate with each other through membership of the ‘Free Access to Law Movement’.

Most but not all share three other characteristics. They collaborate through data sharing networks or portals, and also technical networks for back-up security purposes. Most are independent of government, though this is diminishing as a distinguishing feature. The majority use one of two open source search engines: the Sino search engine developed by AustLII and the Lucene search engine utilised by LexUM in the development of various LIIs.

Three LIIs played key roles in early developments: the Legal Information Institute (Cornell), AustLII, and LexUM. They each developed from research projects on various aspects of legal automation going back to the 1980s, and were ready to capitalise on the world-wide-web’s sudden emergence into public prominence around 1994. Their roles are explained.

From 2000 AustLII started to use its search engine and other software to assist organisations in other countries, initially limited to those with academic roots, to establish LIIs with similar functionality. AustLII helped to establish between 2000-04 servers and databases for six LIIs (BAILII, PacLII, HKLII, SAFLII, CyLaw and NZLII). It operated the servers for a period on behalf of its local partners, with progressive local take-over of operations. Responsibility for obtaining and developing legal data was usually undertaken by the local partner from the outset. Each of these LIIs is described. Having established CanLII, LexUM used the tools it had developed to create, with local partners, Droit Francophone (2003), JuriBurkina (2003) and JuriNiger (2007).



The Free Access to Law Movement (FALM), established in 2002, is a loose affiliation of 33 legal information institutes as of March 2010. The ‘Law via Internet’ Conferences have since 1997 been the principal means by which this cooperation was established. The Declaration on Free Access to Law (2002) sets out FALM’s aims as ‘the primary role of local initiatives in free access publishing of their own national legal information’ and secondly that ‘All legal information institutes are encouraged to participate in regional or global free access to law networks’.



The development of multi-LII portals since 2002 is described, particularly WorldLII, CommonLII and AsianLII, plus the LawCite citator, operated by AustLII in cooperation with twelve other LIIs. The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), operated by the US Library of Congress, and by LexUM’s development of Droit Francophone, are also described. The number of databases provided by all of the LIIs of the Free Access to Law Movement has been growing rapidly ever since 2002, and amounted to 1190 databases in 2009.



Different models for networking free access LIIs are discussed. The LII networks provided through WorldLII, CommonLII and AsianLII primarily utilise a replication / synchronisation model, and differences within FALM on this strategy, compared with ‘federated searching’, are outlined. Various other policy differences within FALM are also discussed.



The extent to which FALM is global is analysed, including the role that ‘government LIIs’ can play in FALM. It is clear that there is far more free access to law than is provided by the current members of the Free Access to Law Movement. The geographical scope of FALM membership is nevertheless as yet far more limited than the spread of free access to law as an idea and a reality, being concentrated on the Anglophone and Commonwealth countries, some parts of the francophonie, and parts of Asia. This is a challenge for a movement which is potentially global, but also indicates that the Free Access to Law Movement and the development of LIIs may yet be far from reaching its maximum impact. The extent of free access outside FALM is outlined.



Reasons why impediments to full free access to law are decreasing are outlined, particularly in relation to copyright law and access to data. The extent to which FALM members have established standards for citations are discussed.



The most concerted discussion of some of the principles in the Declaration on Free Access to Law, and further development of them, took place at an expert meeting called by the Hague Conference on Private Law in 2008, resulting in 18 draft Principles on desirable conduct of States in relation to free access to legal information. The relationship between LIIs and Internet search engines like Google, and why most LIIs block search engines from indexing their case law, are also discussed.

Before free access or LIIs

Prior to the Internet’s World-Wide-Web there were many online legal information systems, and numerous legal information products distributed on CD-ROM, but there was no significant provision of free access to legal information anywhere in the world. Both government and private sector online legal publishers charged for access. This pre-Internet history from the late 1950s is summarised by Bing (2010) who points out that ‘though lawyers are not known for being technological avant gardists, text retrieval was actually developed by lawyers and for lawyers, due to the need to consult the authentic text for legal interpretation’. The pre-web years, at least up to the rise of CD-ROMs and the PC in the late 1980s, are seen by Bing as the pursuit of a vision of ‘one, integrated, national [legal] information service’ (at least in Europe). It is a vision which he sees as having since receded in some respects, but perhaps being revived other respects by the growth of free access to legal information (Bing, 2010: 44).

From the mid-1990s the web has provided the necessary technical platform to enable free public access to computerised legal information – a low cost distribution mechanism. For publishers it was close to a ‘no cost’ distribution mechanism if they were not required to pay for outgoing bandwidth. The ease of use of graphical browsers from around 1994, and the web’s use of hypertext as its principal access mechanism (at that time) meant that the web provided a simple and relatively consistent means by which legal information could be both provided and accessed, an attractive alternative to the proprietary, expensive and training-intensive search engines on which commercial online services largely relied. The development of free access Internet law services was based on these factors (Greenleaf, 2004).

Legal Information Institutes

In many countries the first attempts to exploit the advantages of the web for providing legal information came from the academic sector rather than government, and did so with an explicit ideology of free access provision.^[2] Within a few years of the formation of first legal information institute in 1992 the first group of such organisations became known collectively as ‘legal information institutes’ or ‘LIIs’. Those expressions became synonymous with free access to legal information, though in fact they have a narrower meaning.

Two distinguishing characteristic of the ‘LIIs’ (in my usage) are that (i) they publish legal information from more than one source (not just ‘their own’ information), for free access via the Internet, and (ii) they collaborate with each other through membership of the ‘Free Access to Law Movement’. Most but not all share three other characteristics. They collaborate through data sharing networks or portals, and also technical networks for back-up security purposes. Most are independent of government, though this is diminishing as a distinguishing feature. The majority use one of two open source search engines (Poulin, Mowbray and Lemyre, 2007): the Sino search engine^[3] developed by AustLII (previously shared with other LIIs, and open source since 2006), and the Lucene search engine^[4] utilised by LexUM in the development of various LIIs.

‘Legal information institute’ (or ‘LII’), as used here, therefore refers to a sub-set of the providers of free access to law, namely those from across the world who have decided to collaborate both politically and technically. Taken together, the LIIs are the most coordinated, and among the largest, providers of free access to legal information, but they are far from alone in providing free access to legal information. This chapter is not about ‘free access to law’ in its entirety, but focuses on a particular grouping of providers of free access to legal information, while discussing the more general context of ‘free access to law’ in which they operate.

As at March 2010 there are 33 members of the Free Access to Law Movement, listed in Appendix 1. Many are discussed at least briefly in this Chapter, but more detailed descriptions are available elsewhere.^[5]

The earliest LIIs

Three LIIs played key roles in early developments: the Legal Information Institute (Cornell), AustLII, and LexUM. They each developed from research projects on various aspects of legal automation going back to the 1980s, and were ready to capitalise on the world-wide-web’s sudden emergence into public prominence around 1994.

The Legal Information Institute^[6] was started at Cornell University Law School in 1992, and developed by 1994 a number of databases primarily of US federal law (particularly the US Code and US Supreme Court decisions). ‘The LII’, as it became known, was the first significant source of free access to law on the Internet, and demonstrated that a free access service could provide both high quality document presentation, and very high rates of access. It also assisted the development of one of the first other LIIs, the Zambian Legal Information Institute (ZamLII)^[7] in 1996. US federal law is still the main focus of the LII (Cornell), with its State coverage being limited to New York State. It has instead concentrated on various innovative projects: ‘Libraries’ of commentary on legal ethics and social security; Wex,^[8] a collaboratively built, free access legal dictionary and encyclopedia^[9] (perhaps the first attempts by a LII to use wiki technology to develop and present content); and a research project concerning electronic rulemaking.^[10]

The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) was started by two Law Schools in Sydney, Australia, in 1995,^[11] based on work as the ‘DataLex Project’ going back a further decade.^[12] It borrowed the ‘LII’ suffix from Cornell, as others have done since. By 1999 it had developed databases from all nine Australian jurisdictions covering key providers of case law, legislation, treaties and some other content. AustLII’s initial significance was that it was the first attempt worldwide to build a comprehensive national free access legal information system rivalling that of commercial publishers in some respects. AustLII currently provides nearly 400 databases of Australian law^[13] including: consolidated legislation from all 9 jurisdictions; annual legislation and bills from some; Point-in-Time legislation from three States;^[14] decisions from over 120 Courts and Tribunals (a third of which are not otherwise available online); all Australian Treaties since 1900;^[15] law reform reports from all jurisdictions;^[16] and over 60 databases of law journals and other legal scholarship in full text.^[17] It is starting to develop subject-oriented ‘libraries’^[18] which automated the aggregation of all legal materials on AustLII into a searchable collection (Greenleaf, 2009).

LexUM^[19] at the University of Montreal commenced in 1993, with a Law Gopher server (then via the Public Law Research Center), and created the first Canadian legal site and the first legal site available in French, as well as carrying out many research and consultancy projects.^[20] During the 1990s it built various Canadian law sites including the Judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada.^[21] In 2000 LexUM built the Canadian Legal Information Institute^[22] (CanLII), which quickly became a very large national LII comprehensively covering Canada’s federal system, matching AustLII in size and usage (Poulin, Savas and Pelletier, 2000). LexUM initially used the Sino search engine, then adopted the open-source Lucene search engine and other development tools. CanLII’s databases now include decisions of Canadian superior courts and a broad range of administrative tribunals (over 150 databases), with historical scope^[23] typically back to around 2000 but sometimes considerably earlier (to 1985 for Supreme Court decisions). It also publishes historical and up-to-date versions of legislation from all 14 Canadian jurisdictions, including doing so using CanLII’s point-in-time legislation system for all jurisdictions^[24]. It has a bilingual (English-French) user interface. CanLII innovations include the Reflex^[25] citator which provides for each decision on CanLII a ‘RefLex record’ listing related decisions, ‘noteups’ (decisions citing the decision), and legislation and decisions cited.

The LII movement expands, 2000-

From 2000 AustLII started to use its search engine (Sino^[26]) and other software to assist organisations in other countries, initially limited to those with academic roots, to establish LIIs with similar functionality. AustLII helped to establish between 2000-04 servers and databases for six LIIs (BAILII,^[27] PacLII,^[28] HKLII,^[29]SAFLII^[30] CyLaw^[31] and NZLII^[32]). It operated the servers from Sydney for a period on behalf of its local partners, with progressive local take-over of operations. All use AustLII’s Sino search engine. Responsibility for obtaining and developing legal data was usually undertaken by the local partner from the outset.

The British & Irish Legal Information Institute^[33] (BAILII), formed in 2000, is based at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London and operated by the BAILII Trust. BAILII includes 80 databases^[34] covering 6 jurisdictions (United Kingdom, England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland and some European court decisions), including case law, legislation and law reform reports from all the jurisdictions it covers. Back capture of cases and law reform documents through its Open Law Project^[35] gives it considerable historical depth.

The Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute^[36] (PacLII), is operated by the University of the South Pacific (USP) School of Law, located in Vanuatu. PacLII was re-developed with AustLII in 2001, from substantial content provided by the School of Law’s site from 1997. PacLII provides 180 databases of the laws of twenty island countries and territories of the Pacific. It is the principal source of case law and legislation for many of these countries, is the most substantial free access to law facility in developing countries, and was the earliest regional system (Hamilton, 2007; Blake, 2002).

The Hong Kong Legal Information Institute^[37] (HKLII) has been operated since 2002 by the University of Hong Kong with 13 databases of the law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) (Greenleaf et al, 2002). It is a bilingual system and has developed its own search engine for the Chinese content (Pun et al, 2004, 2004a). An innovation is its joint operation of the Community Legal Information Centre^[38] (CLIC), a bilingual community legal information web site with extensive links to HKLII. HKLII was the first LII in Asia, very slightly before LawPhil in the Philippines.

The Southern African Legal Information Institute^[39] (SAFLII) publishes over 60 databases of superior court judgments from 16 English-speaking and Portuguese-speaking counties in Southern and Eastern Africa, and four regional tribunals. It is endorsed by the Southern African Judges Commission. It is moving beyond case law to legislation and law reform. It was established in 2003 by the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) Faculty of Law (which had pioneered the Internet provision of South African law during the 1990s) (Montgomery, 2004) and AustLII, but only covered South African law. In 2006 its operations were transferred to the South African Constitutional Court Trust, who gave it a regional orientation and significant resources, and AustLII continued to provided technical support. Since then it has rapidly become a landmark in the transparency of Africa’s legal systems, playing a major role in the whole continent (Anderson, 2007). It is very deliberately fostering the development of new LIIs in countries for which it initially operated the databases, namely Uganda (ULII^[40]) and Malawi (MalawiLII)^[41], which it refers to as ‘devolution’.

The New Zealand Legal Information Institute^[42] (NZLII), based at University of Otago’s Faculty of Law since 2004, now has 40 databases covering almost all significant New Zealand Courts and Tribunals, legislation in all forms, bilateral treaties, law reform reports, and four law journals, and is expanding rapidly. It involved many years’ effort to obtain content for free access (Buckingham, 2005). NZLII and AustLII have agreed to long-term collaborative development of NZLII’s databases (also searchable through AustLII) and joint systems resources.

CyLaw^[43] in Cyprus was established in 2002 by a local lawyer using AustLII's Sino search engine and contains all judgments issued by the Supreme Court of Cyprus since 1997 (in Greek) and other databases. Independently operated from inception, it is now merging with a local University to provide a more comprehensive system, and continues close technical cooperation with AustLII.

All of the systems AustLII has assisted are now operated with independent local control and resources, and this is the major reason for their success. AustLII’s aim of assisting partners to achieve full or partial local take-over as quickly as possible has been effective, but it aims to achieve much more extensive ‘devolution’ of the databases on the AsianLII system (discussed below) to local control than has been achieved so far.

Having established CanLII, LexUM used the tools it had developed to create, with local partners, Droit Francophone (2003), JuriBurkina (2003) and JuriNiger (2007). Droit Francophone is discussed later. JuriBurkina^[44] is (or was^[45]) the judicial information center of Burkina Faso, launched in 2004 and operated by the Burkina Faso Bar Association with LexUM’s assistance, providing over 1,000 decisions to 2007 from eight of the country’s courts and tribunals (Apikul, 2006). JuriNiger^[46] provides nearly 2000 decisions of five courts, but has not been updated since 2007. It was developed by LexUM in conjunction with the Ordre des avocats du Niger, and operated from the LexUM servers.

Cooperation and the Free Access to Law Movement

The Free Access to Law Movement (FALM), established in 2002, is a loose affiliation of 33 legal information institutes as of March 2010. The group of LIIs associated with the LII (Cornell), LexUM and AustLII made the initial attempts to establish collaboration and organisation to further free access to law globally^[47], but FALM has become a broader grouping since then.

The ‘Law via Internet’ Conferences^[48] have been the principal means by which this cooperation was established. The first was hosted by AustLII in 1997, as were the 2^nd (1999), 3^rd (2001) and 5^th (2003). LexUM/CanLII hosted the 4^th (2002), French organisations (as FrLII^[49]) hosted the 6^th (2004), PacLII the 7^th in Vanuatu (2006), LexUM/CanLII the 8^th (2007), the Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell'Informazione Giuridica (ITTIG) in Florence the 9^th (2008), and. SAFLII the 10^th Conference in Durban, 2009. In 2009 AustLII hosted the first regional LII Conference, the AsianLII Conference in Sydney. Many of the conference papers are available online^[50] and comprise a considerable resource on legal information systems.

The Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) meets annually during the Conference, and operates by email between Conferences. The first sustained attempt to build some form of international network took place at Cornell in July 2000,^[51] involving participants from the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and South Africa. The expression ‘WorldLII’ was first used there to describe a collaborative LII portal. The FALM was then formed at the 2002 Conference in Montreal, and adopted the Declaration on Free Access to Law^[52] (see Appendix for text). The Declaration has had some amendments since then. Membership is by invitation, with members nominating new candidates, and consensus required. The membership criteria are not fixed but involve adherence to, and support of, the Declaration and activities similar to (but not necessarily identical with) a LII. At the 2007 meeting initial steps were taken to turn the ‘Movement’ into a more formally constituted ‘Association’ (FALA), but these have not yet proceeded further.

The membership of FALM has expanded beyond the initial members discussed above, and the four portals discussed below, to include other national LIIs from France, Ireland, Kenya, Germany, and The Philippines (in 2006 and 2007), and Juridicas^[53] (UNAM, Autonomous University of Mexico), the Thai Law Reform Commission, Droit.org (France), Jersey Legal Information Board, and Ugandan Legal Information Institute (ULII) (in 2008), and AltLaw (USA), the Kathmandu School of Law (Nepal), and MalawiLII (in 2009). In addition there is now a class which we could loosely describe as members who facilitate the technical development of free access to law, rather than primarily publishing their own databases for free access, including ITTIG (Italy), the Institute of Law and Technology (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain), IIjusticia (Argentina) the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations. The 33 current members are listed in Appendix 1.

The Declaration on Free Access to Law, and FALM’s aims

The principal aim of the FALM, re-affirmed at its 2007 meeting, is the provision of assistance by its members to organisations who wish to provide free access to law in countries where that has not yet occurred. This has been successful, as outlined above. It also provides mutual support to organisations already providing free access to law who wish to join the FALM. The Declaration recognises ‘the primary role of local initiatives in free access publishing of their own national legal information’. A second aim stated in the Declaration is that ‘All legal information institutes are encouraged to participate in regional or global free access to law networks’ (as discussed below). As the Declaration puts it, the aim is ‘To cooperate in order to achieve these goals and, in particular, to assist organisations in developing countries to achieve these goals, recognising the reciprocal advantages that all obtain from access to each other's law.’ The main activities of the FALM, in light of these aims, have been sharing of software, technical expertise and experience on policy questions such as privacy issues.

Development of LII networks and portals 2002-

The Declaration encourages LIIs to ‘participate in regional or global free access to law networks.’ Before 2002 there were some national and regional LIIs, but no multi-LII networks. BAILII and PacLII were multi-country regional systems from inception (and SAFLII became one), but did not involve material from other LIIs.

The World Legal Information Institute^[54] (WorldLII), launched in 2002, was the first multi-LII site, initially providing search accesses to the databases from AustLII, BAILII, PacLII, HKLII and CanLII, and from South Africa (before SAFLII was formed). The Free Access to Law Movement adopted it as their joint portal in 2002 (Poulin, 2004). It has four main aspects: as a portal making multiple LIIs simultaneously searchable; its own databases; its catalog and web search; and the LawCite citator involving collaboration from all the LIIs involved in WorldLII except CanLII. WorldLII is organized primarily by country, providing from the page for each country in the world as many complementary legal research facilities (databases, catalog, and web-search facilities) as possible.

WorldLII’s networking of multiple LIIs makes it the largest free access legal research facility on the Internet because it makes simultaneously searchable the databases provided by the other collaborating LIIs. By November 2009 this comprised 1190 databases from 165 countries in all continents. Databases from the eleven LIIs that cooperate most closely with AustLII (plus the databases it maintains) are the principal source of the databases searchable via WorldLII, mainly because the use of a common search engine (AustLII’s Sino) by them makes technical cooperation easier to achieve. The databases from 40 countries of the Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) (discussed below) are another significant searchable component. WorldLII also includes over 700,000 US Circuit Court of Appeals cases republished from public US sources, and access to the US Code provided by the LII (Cornell). Databases from Droit Francophone are not at present available (see below), and the availability of updates of CanLII’s databases is unresolved. WorldLII’s own databases are primarily 22 databases of decisions of international Courts and Tribunals in the International Courts and Tribunal Library^[55] (the largest such searchable collection available via the Internet), about 35 Constitutions, and some databases in the Privacy Law Library.^[56] A new element of WorldLII (from 2009) is the creation of ‘virtual databases’ for each country in the world, drawing on the law journal articles, treaties, international court decisions and other globally-relevant content available through WorldLII to create country-specific databases. This means there is now some searchable database content for every country. These virtual databases are ignored in any database counts in this article.

The WorldLII Catalog^[57] is the largest law-specific catalog on the Internet, with links to over 15,000 law-related websites concerning every country, most international institutions, and a subject index. It is one of the few global law catalogs still being maintained (though only minimally at present) in the face of the popularity of search engines. It is biased toward English-language content. The web search facility uses AustLII’s web spider to make searchable the full texts of as many sites as possible in the Catalog (Greenleaf, Chung and Mowbray, 2007), but its scope and interface is at present far inferior to commercial search engines, and it may be discontinued. WorldLII (and CommonLII and AsianLII discussed below) also provide a ‘Law on Google’ facility for each country, which translates a search in WorldLII’s Sino syntax into an effective search over Google, limited to material from the country concerned and limited to legal content. This facility is far more effective, and may be generalized to allow use of search engines other than Google in future.

WorldLII is not yet a global legal information service. It provides a primarily English language interface, and its databases are primarily in English, but with some searchable content in other languages, primarily Chinese, Bahasa Indonesian, and Portuguese. AustLII’s SINO search engine is being developed gradually to make it capable of searching double-byte Asian language encodings.

The collaborating LIIs that provide the databases searchable via WorldLII draw those databases mainly from the Pacific, Asia, Australasia, Africa, the USA and South America. Apart from the UK and Ireland, its European coverage is as yet slight.

LawCite, a free access global citator for cases and other legal materials^[58] is the most recent development related to WorldLII (Mowbray, Chung and Greenleaf, 2008). It is based largely on collaboration between the same group of LIIs. It uses citator software developed by AustLII which uses heuristics to recognise and extract from the content provided by those LIIs and other sources, references to cases from over 15,000 Law Report and journal series. It was released for public access in December 2008, and now provides citation records for just over three million cases and journal articles. The records are updated daily.

The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), ^[59] operated by the US Library of Congress since at least 2001 (Prescott, 2005), is a database primarily of official texts of legislation, but also including treaties and, for some countries, judicial decisions and other complementary legal sources. They are contributed by governmental agencies and international organizations, which provide to GLIN the full texts of their published documents to the database in their original languages. GLIN's member countries are predominantly from Latin America but include quite a few other countries (e.g. Romania, South Korea and Spain). Each document is accompanied by a summary in English and, in many cases in additional languages, plus subject terms selected from the multilingual index to GLIN, prepared by Library of Congress Staff. Over 150,000 items have been contributed. All summaries are available to the public, and public access to full texts is also available for 25 of the 40 jurisdictions covered by GLIN. Searching is the only access mechanism, but allows results to be sorted by relevance, by date or by jurisdiction. The translations of summaries of legislation in English and other languages are probably the main value of GLIN, at least to an English-speaking audience. In 2007 the GLIN databases of abstracts were added to WorldLII’s search scope (and a facility to browse by country or year was added), and GLIN became a FALM member. This gave WorldLII a South and Central American dimension previously lacking, as well as additional legislative databases from other countries in Asia, the Middle-East Europe and West Africa.

A linguistic focus to the creation of a multi-country LII was taken in 2003 by LexUM’s development of Droit Francophone,^[60] the French language legal portal of the Organisation internationale de la francophonie^[61] (OIF). It is described as ‘multi-LII’ because it included JuriBurkina content. Its databases of over 4000 texts included legislation from 21 countries from across the whole francophonie, and case law from 10. A Web-based interface allows for the remote decentralized management of its content by representatives from each of the national structure in charge of access to law, who meet annually sponsored by OIF (Lemyre, 2004; Lemyre, Coulibaly and Viens, 2004). Droit Francophone also provided a catalog of more than 4000 legal websites concerning law of the francophonie, evaluated and commented, and a Web search engine indexing those websites. It is now being reorganized by OIF^[62], and has now been unavailable for over a year, so it may be defunct. If it is revived, it will be valuable.

In 2005 AustLII developed the Commonwealth Legal Information Institute (CommonLII)^[63] covering Commonwealth and Common Law countries. It was in some respects an English-language response to LexUM (‘droit Anglophone’ is its nickname). CommonLII relies principally upon the content of existing LIIs (AustLII, BAILII, CyLaw, PacLII, HKLII, NZLII, SAFLII and ZamLII), but also added over 50 databases from 20 additional countries which do not yet have their own LIIs (mainly in South Asia and the Caribbean). The South Asian databases provide over 250,000 cases. There are major legislation collections from Asia and the Caribbean. CanLII content is not included at present, but the CanLII Board is considering whether it wishes to have it included. Part of CommonLII’s purpose is to encourage new LII development in these countries and regions, and development has started with four leading Indian law schools on a LII for India (with AusAID and other Australian funding).

A major addition to CommonLII in 2008 was the 125,000 cases from the English Reports 1220-1873,^[64] the basis of the common law world-wide. CommonLII is supported by a range of Commonwealth institutions,^[65] including the Commonwealth Law Ministers Meeting, the Commonwealth Secretariat Legal and Constitutional Division, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (Greenleaf, Chung and Mowbray, 2004; Greenleaf, Chung and Mowbray 2010). Financial support for CommonLII has been primarily from Australian sources to date, but the Commonwealth Secretariat is now funding a Commonwealth-wide Criminal Law Library on CommonLII, using virtual database techniques, and a Caribbean law project.

The Asian Legal Information Institute (AsianLII)^[66] developed by AustLII in 2006, drew on CommonLII’s content (for 8 Asian Commonwealth countries), PacLII (for Papua New Guinea), LawPhil (for the Philippines) and HKLII (for Hong Kong), and is therefore a multi-LII network. However, most of its content comprises databases from 17 additional Asian countries which do not yet have local LIIs. AsianLII provides over 200 databases^[67] from 27 of these 28 countries in ASEAN, Myanmar excepted (Afghanistan to Japan; Mongolia to Timor-Leste). It also includes databases from regional organisations such as APEC, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the International Development Law Organisation (IDLO). A principal aim of AsianLII, and the reason it has AusAID funding in relation to ten developing countries, is to assist development of new local LIIs, some of which are likely to emerge from AsianLII’s ‘Country Supporting Institutions’^[68] in these countries. AsianLII is supported by many of the regional law organisations^[69] (including LAWASIA, the Inter-Pacific Bar Association, APEC, ADB and IDLO) (Greenleaf, 2007; Greenleaf, Chung and Mowbray, 2007a), with funding from Australian sources including AusAID.

Extent of coverage of LII portals

The development of CommonLII and AsianLII also significantly expanded the content searchable via WorldLII. Cooperation between the fifteen LIIs and FALM members that collaborate in the provision of WorldLII (see Table following) has resulted in their joint provision of nearly 1,200 databases from 165 countries (as at November 2009), searchable from one location. WorldLII is best seen as the largest portal to this collaborative network, but only one of a number of such portals – regional, linguistic/political, translation-based, and potentially from other perspectives.

The number of databases provided by all of the LIIs of the Free Access to Law Movement has been growing rapidly ever since 2002. WorldLII and the other 15 LIIs that collaborate in its provision held 1190 databases as at the 2009 LII Conference in Durban (see table below). While the databases from many of the countries covered by WorldLII are quite small, they are very substantial from others. From Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, India, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Africa, Ireland, the UK, New Zealand and many Pacific Island countries, what the LIIs offer is very substantial and includes content not available from commercial legal publishers. Furthermore, WordLII, as the global portal of the LIIs, compares well with its two commercial counterparts (the international portals of LexisNexis and Westlaw) in terms of scope of countries covered, though not in depth of coverage for some countries.

Table of searchable databases in multi-LII systems (as at 19/11/09)

In this Table, the ‘Countries’ column indicates the number of additional countries that a particular LII adds to the total number of countries whose databases are searchable via WorldLII. Of the total of 165 countries, the only databases from about 40 are the Constitution of the country, but even if those are deducted, the LIIs collaborating in WorldLII provide databases from 125 countries AustLII maintains 233 of the non-Australian databases (marked *), on AsianLII, CommonLII and WorldLII, in addition to the 335 on AustLII (at that time).

In the six month since September 2009 (when the above count was made), the total number of databases on the LIIs collaborating in relation to WorldLII has increased by at least 100.

Models for networking free access to law

If a user wants to search legal information from more than one jurisdiction, what are the various ways that such a facility can be provided? At least these models can be used:

● 1. Provide links between each of the sources, leaving the user to search each site (a catalog);

● 2. Send a search to each site, collect multiple sets of search results and merge them (‘federated search’);

● 3. Send a web spider/robot to each site, create a central index of all content (periodically updated) which users can search and obtain a consolidated set of results, but take users back to the original sites to view results (all Internet-wide search engines from Alta Vista onwards, including Google);

● 4. Obtain replication of the content of all sites on a periodic basis, otherwise do the same as an Internet-wide search engine.

● 5. Republish all the content of the sources on a centralised site, so that users only search and go to pages on that site.

The LII networks provided through WorldLII, CommonLII and AsianLII utilise a replication / synchronisation model (Mowbray et al, 2007; or more briefly Greenleaf, Mowbray and Chung, 2007a). A copy of all LII data is held in Sydney by AustLII, replicated daily using rsync.^[70] Searches over the locally stored concordances at AustLII producing rapid search results, and users are then returned to the databases on the originating LII when they choose to access a particular search result. The PacLII mirror at AustLII is the one seen by users outside the Pacific, due to slow access speeds to the Vanuatu server. Some LII content is also mirrored at other LIIs in the network. Because WorldLII, CommonLII and AsianLII all republish and maintain some databases of their own, they are a mixture of models 4 and 5 above.

An issue currently under discussion in FALM and between LIIs is that CanLII prefers a federated search model (with searches sent to cooperating systems) rather than a replication/synchronization model, but AustLII considers that federated search cannot be operated with fast enough access speeds or useful relevance ranking. This is one reason that CanLII has not participated in CommonLII, and its databases are not able to be updated in WorldLII.

Poulin is correct when he says that the main reason for WorldLII’s success is ‘uniformity of technological choices’ (Poulin, 2009: 27), but it is not so much that the LIIs collaborating in CommonLII and WorldLII mainly use AustLII’s SINO search engine themselves (the factor he points to), but rather that they are all comfortable with their data being replicated daily by AustLII, which enables to use SINO to regularly re-create a set of concordances (search indexes) of all participating LII data, located centrally at AustLII, for speed of searching (but not for display to users). As he says, it is a centralized solution (in this sense), and it suits many other LIIs and many users.

However, he argues, ‘[o]thers would prefer a less hierarchical, less centralized approach’. ‘The plan is simple. Participating LIIs would connect by way of standardized APIs, so when a Canadian user using CanLII is interested in South African law, she will find a link to SAFLII of will be able to use SAFLII’s search engine directly from CanLII, and vice-versa’ (Poulin, 2009: 27). Poulin also argues that this is more scalable, as replicating large amounts of data ‘is no small feat’, and there is no need to ‘index a large external LII’. As well, ‘many LIIs have a duty to “control” the data entrusted to them’. Poulin considers this approach would still allow ‘hubs’ like WorldLII to operate, provided that APIs were reasonably standardised. And it would then be easier to have reciprocal relationships between hubs.

Poulin does not address the issue of the speed at which it is possible for such hubs to obtain search results from multiple APIs to LIIs, and to merge the search results returned (or how ranking of merged results is to be achieved). Until these issues are addressed it is not possible to know whether this approach will produce search response times that are acceptable to users. Unless they do, it is much the same as not participating in multi-LII searching.

As yet, there are no known successful examples of federated search systems for providing free access to legal information, at least not of any serious size. The European Commission’s N-Lex^[71], is subtitled ‘a common gateway to national law’. Launched in 2006, it now covers 24 official EU national legislation sites, and aims to include all EU countries. It is developed jointly by the EU publications office and EU governments. It is still labelled ‘experimental’ and ‘a pilot project’. It aims to provide a similar search interface to each of 24 different systems, and assists with the translation of search terms from one language into another. However, it does not allow simultaneous searches of even two systems (so it is not a ‘federated search’ system), let alone 24, and therefore does not provide any capacity for merger of search results. If you want to search European national legislation, 24 searches are required, with 24 sets of results that cannot readily be compared. The European Forum of Official Gazettes covers more countries but has fewer functions ^[72]. A federated search engine of national case law^[73] has been operated by the Network of the Presidents of the European Supreme Courts since April 2007. Although it allows selection of searching over 19 databases from 15 countries^[74] it warns that searches may fail if over more than 5, and tests verify this. European-wide searching would therefore take at least four repetitions. It is also quite slow. It provides a federated search facility, and therefore cannot provide relevance ranking of merged search results. This facility works to some extent, but it is not likely to satisfy the needs of many legal researchers. However, it provides simultaneous translations of search queries into multiple languages, which is most impressive and a valuable model for this project. There are therefore no comprehensive sufficiently effective and efficient portals for European national law, whether one is looking for all sources of law, or only legislation or only case law.

The efforts so far by European governments and institutions, such as the three portals discussed above, do not demonstrate anything like what is possible from the networking of national free access legal information in Europe. In other parts of the world, direct cooperation between States and their institutions has not made any better progress^[75]. The non-government sector, and methods other than federated searching, have a better track record.

How global is the Free Access to Law Movement?

The membership of the Free Access to Law Movement has to date been drawn primarily from LIIs based in academic institutions. However, recent members have included GLIN (US Library of Congress), SAFLII (now based at the South African Constitutional Court, and operated by its Trust), the Kenya Law Reports (a semi-government body) and the Thai Law Reform Commission. The key condition for government-based members in the Declaration (as amended in 2007) is that they ‘Do not impede others from obtaining public legal information from its sources and publishing it’. In other words, a government body cannot be a member if it provides free access to law in a way that monopolises the publication of that information or supports such monopoly publication. The key test is whether republication of government information is allowed. Freedom to republish official sources is at the heart of the Free Access to Law Movement, and essential for the operation of LIIs.

The other criterion for FALM membership is that government services provide something equivalent to data from different sources. Providing the annual Acts of a single jurisdictions via the web, or the decisions of a single court, is not regarded as sufficient, even thought the republication of such content is both valuable free access to law, and its republication the essential building blocks of any LII. There needs to be something more, whether it be the aggregation of the decisions of multiple courts (or legislative sources), or publication of legislation beyond the normal output of the legislative process such as point-in-time legislation or translations into other languages. This is a pragmatic barrier, designed to make FALM membership something of value because of the ‘something more’ that it recognises and encourages.

As described in the next section, there are many European, Asian, South American and other significant government providers of free access to legal information who are not yet members of the FALM, nor have they yet been invited to join. It is not certain that all could do so, as their positions on the question of not impeding republication of government information may vary, and some may also have difficulty in becoming members of a non-government organisation.

Nevertheless, it is clear that there is far more free access to law than is provided by the current members of the Free Access to Law Movement. Also, despite their being some barriers to entry, as yet the Free Access to Law Movement only includes a minority of the organisations who are potentially its members, and whose involvement could make it more significant both politically and technically. The most obvious field for expansion of membership is in those government providers of free access to law from multiple sources who also meet the republication criteria, as discussed above.

Other possible non-government members, not yet invited to join, may come from University-based free access providers of primary materials, from some repositories of legal scholarship (for example, bePress Legal Repository^[76] or the Legal Scholarship Network), and from developers of new collaborative forms of legal scholarship such as Wikipedia (which has extensive law content^[77]) or JurisPedia^[78] if it continues to develop.

The geographical scope of FALM membership is nevertheless as yet far more limited than the spread of free access to law as an idea and a reality, being concentrated on the Anglophone and Commonwealth countries, some parts of the francophonie, and parts of Asia. While Africa is well-covered (from both the anglophone and francophone directions), Latin America, the Middle East, most of Europe and the states of the USA are not yet involved (except indirectly via GLIN). This is a challenge for a movement which is potentially global, but also indicates that the Free Access to Law Movement and the development of LIIs may yet be far from reaching its maximum impact.

One future direction for the LII networks, and the Free Access to Law Movement, is to provide a global alternative to the expanding global reach of the current legal publishing duopoly. AustLII has adopted a policy of ‘making WorldLII global’ and is trying to obtain databases from as many countries as possible, and to sustain them until their operation can be taken over by local LIIs. In helping to provide and sustain better access to law in many countries, the FALM can encourage organisations in those countries to join in a global project that supports economic progress, the rule of law and democracy.

Free access outside the FALM and LIIs

Government providers

The number of courts, tribunals and legislatures providing free access to their own outputs is now legion. Free Internet access to primary legal materials has become the default policy in most countries across the world. This is the reverse of the situation 15 years ago when Cornell Law School started its LII. It is beyond the scope of this article to examine why this has occurred or to provide any details of its features or exceptions.

However, what is of more interest, and still far less common, is the prevalence of multi-sourced free access government-provided national legal information systems, they type that FALM aims to have as its members. They may publish decisions from many courts and tribunals, or many different types of legislation databases (including translations), or they may combine all of these and more into national portals.

Outside the existing FALM membership there are many examples. In Europe they include Legifrance^[79] (France), FINLEX^[80] (Finland), Jersey Legal Information Board^[81] (Jersey), Albanian Official Publications Centre^[82] (Albania) and BelgiumLex^[83]. The many differences in free access national European systems are documented in relation to France (Cottin, 2009), Finland (Hietanen, 2009), Denmark (Koch, 2009) , Italy (Lupo, 2009), Switzerland (Moret, 2009), and Austria (Schefbeck, 2009).

Perhaps the most outstanding example of free access to European law, EUR-Lex,^[84] comes from a regional organisation, the European Union. The history of the first 25 years leading to EurLex has been documented comprehensively (European Commission (Ed), 2006; Berger, 2009).

In South America, InfoLeg^[85] (Argentina) is one of many examples, of which those in Brasil, Mexico and Uruguay are documented by Galindo (2008) and in other countries by Gregorio (2008). In Africa the outstanding example of a successful comprehensive semi-government national free access system is Kenya Law Reports^[86] Some of the issues in Africa are discussed in Paliwala (2009) and Badeva-Bright (2009).

Examples in Asia include Vietnam’s multi-lingual legislation system^[87], the Korean Legislation Research Institute^[88] (legal translations) and Mongolia’s Legal Unified Information System.^[89] All countries in Asia publish legislation via the Internet for free access, with the exceptions of Myanmar and North Vietnam, at least in the national language, and very often with significant bodies of legislative translations into English (Greenleaf, 2009).

LawNet Sri Lanka^[90] is a cautionary tale: one year ago it was the most impressive comprehensive government LII in Asia (with World Bank funding), but it has now been off the Internet for over a year since the outsourcing company hosting the databases went under in the Global Financial Crisis. The databases on CommonLII extracted from LawNet – but unfortunately not up to date – are now the only free access means of accessing that data.

Impediments to full free access to law are decreasing

Most countries do not claim copyright in any form of primary legal materials (or other government-produced materials), sometimes including translations. They have generally adopted the option in the Berne Convention that allows no copyright in such materials. For example, the most common copyright position in European states^[91], shared by 32/37 States and territories surveyed^[92], is that there is no copyright in any texts of a legislative, judicial or administrative nature. In at least 21 of those States the position for free access is even better as it is explicitly stated that there is no copyright in any official translations of those exempted materials, so any official English language version may also be republished^[93]. In the other eleven, official translations may come within the exempt materials, but this is a question of statutory interpretation. Also, only five of the 37 jurisdictions surveyed do assert some form of government copyright in such official materials (the UK, Ireland, Gibraltar, France and Malta), but the first four do allow their legislation and case law to be reproduced in free access LIIs, so the copyright situation is no impediment in fact. The situation is little different in Asia (Greenleaf, Chung and Mowbray 2007a), with assertions of state copyright in only a couple of the 28 jurisdictions surveyed.

There are few other practical impediments to free access to the major sources of legislation and case law data from most countries, including to ‘full free access’ in the sense of the right and ability to reproduce national laws. Almost all countries publish now their legislation on the Internet for free access, so there are good prospects of obtaining access to that data. There are free access legislation databases for all EU countries^[94] with the exceptions of Bulgaria and Cyprus (being remedied), and most other European countries. Where Courts and Tribunals publish case law, it is almost usually anonymised in countries influenced by European privacy laws, and often available in identified form in common law countries, due to a different tradition in relation to open justice. But in both cases the data is increasingly likely to be available via the Internet from official sources, and are likely to be few impediments to publication. These official websites rarely use the Robot Exclusion Protocol to exclude others from copying data from their sites, except in non-US common law countries where case data is identified but data protection approaches along European lines apply. In these countries, legal publishers (commercial or free access) can usually get permission for republication even if others cannot.

Free access to translations

Even collections of translations of legislation into other languages, an expensive business, is increasingly becoming free access from government sources. In Europe there are government-provided (though not necessarily ‘official’) databases of English translations of collections of significant legislation from at least twelve more countries^[95] Austria, Armenia, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Estonia, Finland, France, Lithuania, Malta, Montenegro, Sweden, and Switzerland. In most other countries where there is no official database of English translations, there will be numerous English translations of sets of legislation, or individual Acts, on the websites of many government agencies. In Asia the position is much the same, with large government-supported free-access collections of English legislation translations from Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam and Laos^[96]. The hegemony of English is such that there are few if any large-scale examples of free-access translations of legislation into languages other than English for primarily foreign consumption^[97].

Policy tensions in free access to law

There are some disagreements between those who advocate free access to law about what is the best strategy for long-term success. Different preferences in models of LII networking, between a replication / synchronisation model and a federated search model, have already been discussed.

Most FALM members would be likely to reject Jon Bing’s argument 2003 in favour of state-run legal information services that only provide a limited amount of free access (Bing, 2003). I have described it as a ‘statist model’ and likely to fail because it is based around monopolies over legal information (Greenleaf, 2004). However, Bing (2009: 51) has now moved away from this vision, and has ‘upgraded’ it by accepting that there needs to be multiple systems (ie competition) within a country. LIIs have not abandoned Bing’s vision of comprehensive national legal information services, only that they should be either commercial or state monopolies. Bing also sees a need for free access international services like WorldLII (or commercial services like CaseLex) to provide comparative international law services. Most thoughtful commentators would probably now accept that what can be provided by commercial publishers, non-monopolistic government providers, independent LIIs, and Internet-wide search engines like Google, can be complementary, but how this will work is likely to be play out differently in every country. The differences will be the subject of long and complex stories.

Tom Bruce of the LII (Cornell) has also been pessimistic about the long-term role of LIIs in providing free access to law, arguing for a radically decentralised model where the courts and legislatures will publish everything themselves, for free, and according to standards (Bruce, 2000, 2000a). This argument fails to show that third party republication is doomed, or unnecessary, only that publication at source is good (Greenleaf, 2004a). As yet, the future of LIIs may not be certain, but has not been disproved either.

Another difference of opinion, although not as well articulated, is over the value to the diffusion of free access to law of creating regional or linguistic multi-country LIIs where they may not be direct local participation from all of the countries covered, or at least not initially. Must all initiatives be ‘bottom up’ to be valuable, or can ‘top down’ initiatives sometimes result in engaging local participation, with the eventual result of decentralization and new LIIs? Or might this stultify local initiatives? AustLII’s approach, particularly with AsianLII, has been an explicitly ‘top down’ approach (it included databases from 27 of 28 countries and territories from inception), but with an equally explicit goal of engaging ‘bottom up’ local LII development. Both approaches are agreed on the value of maximum decentralisation to local LIIs: it is a question of how many ways you can get there.

Citations, standards and ‘reliability’

Although it has not been a matter of the formal development of a standard, there is widespread common usage of the same type of ‘LII citation’ of the format ‘[<year of publication>] <designator> <sequential number>’. The ‘designator’ is an abbreviation for name of the court or tribunal (either designated by it, or applied by the LII with its agreement^[98]), and the sequential number is that of the decisions available for publication from the court for that year. So ‘ [1998] HCA 1’ was the first decision of the High Court of Australia for 1998 released for publication (and in fact the first decision published using this system). This method of neutral citations for decisions published on LIIs is used by AustLII, BAILII, PacLII, SAFLII, and NZLII, and for the case databases originating on CommonLII, AsianLII and WorldLII. In all Australian, English, and Singaporean Courts, and New Zealand’s Supreme Court, this method of citation has been adopted officially by the courts, and the expression ‘Court-designated citations’ is probably best used to describe these citations (see also references to ‘neutral citation’ in Wikipedia ‘case citations’^[99]). These LIIs have also unilaterally applied these citations to the decisions they publish, as publishers usually do, and in some cases have retro-fitted them to collections of old cases (in which case the ‘year’ is the year in which a court made a decision). CanLII has developed its own slightly different system of neutral citations.^[100]

There has been some pooling of parallel citation tables so as to facilitate development of automated hypertext linking between LIIs, but this has not advanced far. For many LIIs it has now been overtaken by AustLII’s development of LawCite and their use of it to enhance their own data. CanLII has also made considerable progress in enhancing its own data through development of its RefLex system to recognise and utilise parallel citations^[101], though it is unlike LawCite in that it involves considerable editorial input.

The draft Hague Principles – upgrading the Declaration?

The Declaration on Free Access to Law has remained largely unchanged for almost a decade. The most concerted discussion of some of its principles, and further development of them, took place at an expert meeting called by the Hague Conference on Private Law in 2008, resulting in 18 draft Principles on desirable conduct of States in relation to free access to legal information (see Appendix 3). The Draft Principles are still being considered by the Hague Conference and as yet have no official status. They generally encourage State Parties to act to make their legal materials available for free access but of the highest quality.

The draft Principles include the following key principles that States are encouraged to adopt:

• Ensuring free access - the one proposed obligation
• Ensuring that their ‘main’ legal materials are ‘available for free access in electronic form by any persons’ (including overseas). This includes whatever legal materials the State has from time-to-time.
• Republication - States are encouraged to allow and facilitate others reproducing and re-using their legal materials, and to remove any impediments to such publication.
• Integrity and authoritativeness - encouraged to make available authoritative electronic versions of their legal materials.
• To do whatever they can to ensure those who re-republish or re-use the authoritative legal materials can do so with the highest integrity possible and clear indications of their origins and integrity.
• To remove obstacles to recognition of these materials in their courts.

State Parties are also encouraged

• to preserve their legal materials, in order to make them available as necessary;
• to provide historical legal materials;
• to adopt neutral methods of citation of their legal materials - medium-neutral, provider-neutral and internationally consistent;
• where possible, to provide translations in other languages, and to allow them to be reproduced by other parties;
• to develop multi-lingual access capacities and to co-operate in doing so;
• to make any knowledge-based systems available for free public access and re-use;
• to use open standards for primary materials; and
• to provide metadata with primary materials.

The original draft omitted that the right to republish needs to respect local privacy laws, but this was addressed in subsequent amendments.

The FALM needs to reconsider its Declaration in light of the principles sketched above. It is beyond the scope of this paper to give them the consideration they deserve.

Funding free access to law

The main constraining factor of the non-government LIIs is funding: free to use, but not free to build. Every LII looks after the funding of its own system. The models on which LIIs are funded vary a great deal. AustLII has the most complex ‘multi-contributor’ model, with over 270 institutional contributors, plus individual contributors (mainly lawyers) (Greenleaf, 2009). AustLII sees this diversity of funding sources as one of its principal assets, despite the cost of maintaining it, because it provides something close to a guarantee against a ‘single point of failure’ in sustainability of funding. No single type of funding source can affect more than about 10% of AustLII’s funding stream.

BAILII is similar in having multiple contributors, though fewer than AustLII. The LII (Cornell) annually solicits funds from the public. Most LIIs have had a considerable deal of academic funding and academic institutional support (including HKLII, PacLII, AustLII, LawPhil and BAILII). CanLII is funded primarily by the Canadian legal profession: every Canadian lawyer provides over C$20 per year via their professional associations. Other LIIs have not been able to replicate this, and most would like to. But it does have its down-sides such as the fact that CanLII does not include treaties, law reform reports or law journals, in part at least because these types of legal information are not valued as much by the legal profession as are cases and legislation..

International aid and development agencies have made significant contributions to the development costs of PacLII, SAFLII, Droit Francophone, AsianLII and WorldLII. Strategic alliances with some legal publishers have helped AustLII. A small LII like CyLaw is a personal project. NZLII still lives on ‘the smell of an oily rag’ (a NZ expression) and help from other LIIs, while it searches for longer-term funds, as does CommonLII. Kenya Law Reports is trying to move from a model combining government funding with subscription income to one which does without subscriptions for its online resources.

There is no single source likely to fund global free access to law long-term, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It has been done with ever-widening scope for over a decade. There is not one formula, but as with many other aspects of open content, there are many non-business models by which numerous stakeholders can be engaged.

There are as yet few government-based FALM members, but government-based ‘LIIs’ face different funding challenges. GLIN is unusual in having obtained sustained government funding. While there are many individual courts and legislatures who publish their own output for free access (often from their own budgets), there are relatively few governments who fund multi-sourced free access national legal information systems (the usage of ‘LII’ in this article), and they are mainly from Europe and some in Latin America (examples are given above).

In many developing countries, there are no funds available for development of online legislation or case law unless it is provided by international aid agencies such as the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, CIDA or AusAID. In recent years the World Bank has funded major free access systems in Sri Lanka (the cautionary tale mentioned above) and Mongolia. The sustainability of these free access facilities, particularly in terms of updating data, often becomes problematic once the initial aid funding ceases. Where this happens, engagement with the FALM members, and the assistance they can provide, may be valuable. In the past, aid and development agencies have often invested considerable funds into national legal information systems, without requiring that free-access systems be developed, and sometimes requiring to the contrary that they adopt ‘pay for use’ models in the hope they will become self-funding. Such strategies sometimes fail, such as when PacLII was called in to ‘bail out’ a failed project given to the commercial sector in Papua New Guinea. In a few other instance (eg CariLaw) a service may succeed in attracting enough users to keep going. In both cases the result is that relatively few users get to use services that public funds have helped to build. The FALM and its members need to help convince aid and development agencies that free access models can be more sustainable, and socially beneficial, in developing countries than closed ‘pay for use’ models.

The models on which sustainable free access to law can be based are as year little studied, though there are some initial essays (Lemyre, 2009; Greenleaf, 2009). A study conducted by LexUM with a focus on Western African countries aims to develop a methodology to assess some aspects of the impact of free access to law developments (Mokanov, 2009). More work is needed, including in comparing the different models adopted to date.

Internet search engines, ‘open content’ and LIIs

The policy of LIIs stated in the Declaration concerning republication of government information does not mean that a LII must declare its content to be ‘open content’ (available for re-use by anyone), but only that it must not hinder others from obtaining the data from its official sources and republishing it. In some countries where doctrines of Crown Copyright still apply (for example, Australia), a LII is not at liberty to permit users to reproduce its data for all purposes. LawPhil is the only LII to provide all its data via a Creative Commons licence at this point. CanLII has quite liberal Terms of Use^[102] for re-use of data on the CanLII site, possible because of Canada’s Reproduction of Federal Law Order.^[103] For some LIIs, the question of re-use is further complicated by privacy and strategic issues. Each LII has different views about the need to protect its own databases, often for privacy reasons with case law (Pelletier, 2007) (this varies between jurisdictions), but more generally to avoid its often-considerable investment of public monies in collecting data from disparate sources and adding value to it.

The search engines, and networks, of the LIIs still matter in a post-Google world. General Internet search engines such as Google do not provide what the LII networks (or individual LIIs) provide. One reason is that many LIIs use the Robots Exclusion Standard^[104] (see also The Web Robots Pages^[105]) to exclude spiders/robots from at least their case law (variously on privacy policy grounds, as required by data sources, and as required by privacy laws). They include CanLII, BAILII, AustLII, NZLII, HKLII and the networked LIIs. SAFLII allows web spider access to some cases, because of a policy choice valuing dissemination above privacy in the African context, and LawPhil provides ‘open content’ under a Creative Commons licence. Some LIIs exclude robots from all data (on strategic and technical grounds). See the robots.txt file at the root of any LII,^[106] plus its privacy policy, for individual LII details. Networking LIIs can also add many forms of organisation of the data shared between LIIs that general search engines don’t yet provide, such as restricting the scope of searches to legislation from many jurisdictions. The long-term relationship between search engines and LIIs is still developing, with unresolved questions such as the effect of search engines on the sustainability of LII value-adding to raw legal data, from which search engines profit. At this point, ‘free access’ does not necessarily mean ‘free to be found through any search engine’.

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Greenleaf, G, Chung, P and Mowbray, A. (2005) ‘Responding to the fragmentation of international law – WorldLII's International Courts & Tribunals Project’ Canadian Law Library Review, 2005, Vol. 30 (1), 13- 21

Greenleaf, G, Chung, P and Mowbray, A. (2007) ‘Emerging global networks for free access to law: WorldLII’s strategies 2002-2005’ (2007) 4:4 SCRIPT-ed 319 at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/jilt/2004_2/greenleafmowbrayandchung/ (visited 1 March 2010)

Greenleaf, G, Chung, P and Mowbray, A. (2007a) ‘Challenges in improving access to Asian laws: the Asian Legal Information Institute (Asian LII)’ [2007] UNSWLRS 42 (on bepress), in Proceedings of the 4th Asian Law Institute Conference, Jakarta, May 2007 at http://law.bepress.com/unswwps/flrps/art42/ (visited 1 March 2010)

Greenleaf, G, Chung, P and Mowbray, A. (2010) 'Building a commons for the common law - The Commonwealth Legal Information Institute (CommonLII) after four years progress' Commonwealth Law Bulletin Vol. 36, No. 1, March 2010, 127–134

Greenleaf G, Mowbray, A and Chung, P. (2007) ‘Building a commons for the common law – The Commonwealth Legal Information Institute (CommonLII) after two years progress’ Proc. Meeting of Senior Officials of Commonwealth Law Ministries, Marlborough House, London, October 2007 at http://www2.austlii.edu.au/~graham/publications/2007/CommonLII_SOM.pdf (visited 1 March 2010)

Greenleaf G, Mowbray, A and Chung, P. (2007a) ‘Networking LIIs: how free access to law fits together’ Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, March/April 2007

Greenleaf, G. Mowbray, A, King, G and van Dijk P, ‘Public access to law via internet: the Australasian Legal Information Institute’, Journal of Law & Information Science, 1995, Vol 6, Issue 1

Greenleaf, G. Mowbray, A, and van Dijk P, ‘Representing and using legal knowledge in integrated decision support systems - DataLex WorkStations’, Artificial Intelligence and Law, (1995) vol 3, nos 1-2, pp 97-124

Greenleaf G, Chung P, Mowbray A, Chow, K P, and Pun K H 'The Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII): Its role in free access to global law via the Internet' (2002) Vol 32 Pt 2 Hong Kong Law Journal 401-427 Sweet and Maxwell Asia (available via SSRN)

Gregario, C ‘Access to Judicial Information via the Internet in Latin America: A Discussion of the Experiences, Trends and Difficulties’ in Peruginelli and Ragona (Eds), 2009

Hietanen, A ‘Free Access to Legislation in Finland: Principles, Practices and Prospects’ in in Peruginelli and Ragona (Eds), 2009

Mowbray, G. Greenleaf, P. Chung and A. Austin (2007) ‘Improving stability and performance of an international network of free access legal information systems’, Journal of Information Law & Technology (JILT), 2007

Hamilton L (2007) ‘A presentation on PacLII’ (PPTs) 8^th Law via Internet Conference, Montreal, 2007

Koch, N ‘Free access to Legislation in Denmark: Advantages in Inter-institutional Cooperation’ in Peruginelli and Ragona (Eds), 2009

Lemyre, P ‘The Evolving Ecology of the Legal Information Market’ in Peruginelli and Ragona (Eds), 2009

Lemyre, P (2004) ‘Droit francophone : de catalogue à portail’, 6^th Law via Internet Conference, Paris, 2004, on FrLII website http://www.frlii.org/article.php3?id_article=168 (not accessible 1 March 2010)

Lemyre, P, Coulibaly, B and Viens, F. (2004) ‘Free access to law in the French-speaking world: A renewed strategy’, 2004 UTS Law Review 5

Lupo, C ‘Free Access to Legislation in Italy: The Role of Standards for the Integration of Information Systems’ in Peruginelli and Ragona (Eds), 2009

Mokanov, I ‘After 15 Years, Is Free Access to Law Here to Stay?’ in Peruginelli and Ragona (Eds), 2009

Montgomery, J. (2004) ‘Free access to primary legal documents in Southern Africa’ 15(1) Organisation of SA Law Libraries (OSALL) Newsletter, Nov 2004 (available via OSALL Archive)

Moret, M ‘Free Access to Legal Information in Switzerland’ in Peruginelli and Ragona (Eds), 2009

Mowbray, A, Greenleaf, G, Chung, P and Austin, A. (2007) ‘Improving stability and performance of an international network of free access legal information systems’, Journal of Information Law & Technology (JILT), 2007

Mowbray, A, Chung, P and Greenleaf, G. (2007) ‘Free-access case law enhancements for Australian law’ in G Peruginelli and M Ragano (Eds) Free Access, Quality of Information, Effectiveness of Rights (Proc. IX International Conference 'Law via the Internet'), European Press Academic Publishing, Florence, Italy, 2009, pgs 285-300

Paliwala, A. (Ed) A History of Legal Informatics, Zaragoza: Presnsas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2010

Paliwala, A ‘Free Access to Law in Afica: Issues for Network Society’ in Peruginelli and Ragona (Eds), 2009

Pelletier, F. (2007) ‘L'accès aux jugements / Access to Judgments’ [PPT] 8^th Law via Internet Conference, Montreal, 2007

Peruginelli, G and Ragona, M Law via the Internet: Free Access, Quality of Information, Effectiveness of Rights (Proc. IX International Conference 'Law via the Internet'), European Press Academic Publishing, Florence, 2009

Prescott, D. (2005) ‘The UN and the Global Legal Information Network’, (2005) 4 UN Chronicle Online Edition at http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2005/issue4/0405p57.html (visited 1 March 2010)

Pun K H, Ip G, Chong C F, Chan V, Chow K P, Hui L, Tsang W W, Chan H W (2004) ‘Processing Legal Documents in the Chinese-Speaking World: the Experience of HKLII’ Proc 3^rd Law via Internet Conference, AustLII 2003

Pun K H, Chan E, Chow K P, Chong C F, Ma J, Hui L, Tsang W W, Chan H W, (2004a) ‘Cross-referencing for bilingual electronic legal documents in HKLII’, 6^th Law via Internet Conference, Paris, 2004

Poulin, D. (2001) ‘CanLII – How the Bar and Academia can make free access to the Law a reality’, Proc. 3^rd Law via the Internet 2001, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, 2001

Poulin, D (2004) ‘Open access to law in developing countries’ First Monday vol. 9, no 12, 6 December 2004

Poulin, D, Mowbray A and Lemyre P (2007) ‘Free access to law and open source software’ in Handbook of Research on Open Source Software Hershey and New York: Information Science Reference 2007

Poulin, D, Salvas, B and Pelletier, F, ‘La diffusion du droit canadien sur Internet’, 102 R. du N. 189, 2000

Schefbeck, G ‘Free Access to Legal and Legislative Information: The Austrian Approach’ in Peruginelli and Ragona (Eds), 2009

Appendix 1: Members of the Free Access to Law Movement

1. AltLaw – Columbia Law School, USA
2. AsianLII – Asian Legal Information Institute, AustLII, UTS/UNSW, Australia
3. AustLII – Australasian Legal Information Institute, UTS/UNSW, Australia
4. BAILII – British and Irish Legal Information Institute, BAILII Trust, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, UK
5. CanLII – Canadian Legal Information Institute, Canadian Law Societies / LexUM, Canada
6. Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations, UK
7. CommonLII – Commonwealth Legal Information Institute, AustLII, UTS/UNSW, Australia
8. CyLaw, Cyprus
9. Droit francophone
10. Droit.org – Institut Francais d’information Juridique, France
11. GLIN – Global Legal Information Network, Law Library of Congress, USA
12. HKLII – Hong Kong Legal Information Institute, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR
13. IRLII – Irish Legal Information Initiative, University College Cork, Ireland
14. Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas UNAM (IIJ-UNAM), Mexico
15. Institute of Law and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
16. IIjusticia, Argentina
17. ITTIG – Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques, Italy
18. Jersey Legal Information Board, Jersey
19. JuriBurkina, Burkina Faso
20. JuriNiger, Niger
21. Juristisches Internetprojekt Saarbrücken, University of Saarbrucken, Germany
22. Kathmandu School of Law, Nepal
23. KenyaLaw – Kenya Law Reports, Kenya
24. LawPhil, Arellano School of Law, Philippine
25. LII (Cornell) – Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, USA
26. LexUM – Law Faculty, University of Montreal, Canada
27. MalawiLII – Malawi Legal Information Institute, Malawi
28. NZLII – New Zealand Legal Information Institute, University of Otago, New Zealand
29. PacLII – Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute, School of Law, University of the South Pacific, Vanuatu
30. SAFLII – Southern African Legal Information Institute, Constitutional Court Trust, South Africa
31. TLRC – Thai Law Reform Commission, Office of the Council of State, Thailand
32. ULII – Ugandan Legal Information Institute, Uganda
33. WorldLII – World Legal Information Institute, AustLII, UTS/UNSW, Australia

Appendix 2: Declaration on Free Access to Law

This declaration was made by legal information institutes meeting in Montreal in 2002, as amended at meetings in Sydney (2003), Paris (2004) and Montreal (2007).

Legal information institutes of the world, meeting in Montreal, declare that:

• Public legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity. Maximising access to this information promotes justice and the rule of law;
• Public legal information is digital common property and should be accessible to all on a non-profit basis and free of charge;
• Organisations such as legal information institutes have the right to publish public legal information and the government bodies that create or control that information should provide access to it so that it can be published by other parties.

Public legal information means legal information produced by public bodies that have a duty to produce law and make it public. It includes primary sources of law, such as legislation, case law and treaties, as well as various secondary (interpretative) public sources, such as reports on preparatory work and law reform, and resulting from boards of inquiry. It also includes legal documents created as a result of public funding.

Publicly funded secondary (interpretative) legal materials should be accessible for free but permission to republish is not always appropriate or possible. In particular free access to legal scholarship may be provided by legal scholarship repositories, legal information institutes or other means.

Legal information institutes:

• Publish via the internet public legal information originating from more than one public body;
• Provide free and anonymous public access to that information;
• Do not impede others from obtaining public legal information from its sources and publishing it; and
• Support the objectives set out in this Declaration.

All legal information institutes are encouraged to participate in regional or global free access to law networks.

Therefore, the legal information institutes agree:

• To promote and support free access to public legal information throughout the world, principally via the Internet;
• To recognise the primary role of local initiatives in free access publishing of their own national legal information;
• To cooperate in order to achieve these goals and, in particular, to assist organisations in developing countries to achieve these goals, recognising the reciprocal advantages that all obtain from access to each other's law;
• To help each other and to support, within their means, other organisations that share these goals with respect to:
  1. Promotion, to governments and other organisations, of public policy conducive to the accessibility of public legal information;
  2. Technical assistance, advice and training;
  3. Development of open technical standards;
  4. Academic exchange of research results.
• To meet at least annually, and to invite other organisations who are legal information institutes to subscribe to this declaration and join those meetings, according to procedures to be established by the parties to this Declaration;
• To provide to the end users of public legal information clear information concerning any conditions of re-use of that information, where this is feasible.

Appendix 3: The ‘Hague Conference’ Draft Principles on desirable conduct of States in relation to free access to legal information (2008)

[These 18 principles were developed by a group of experts on legal information systems, and on conflict of laws, who met on 19-21 October 2008 at the invitation of the Permanent Bureau of the Hague Conference on Private International Law as part of its feasibility study on a Future Instrument concerning “access to foreign law”. A main purpose of the discussion was to assess how free access to law websites could be used by Courts in obtaining reliable versions of foreign laws These draft principles have no official status as yet.]

Free access

1. State Parties shall ensure that their primary legal materials, in particular legislation, court and administrative tribunal decisions and international agreements, are available for free access in an electronic form by any persons, including those in foreign jurisdictions.

Reproducing and re-use

2. State Parties are encouraged to permit and facilitate the reproduction and re-use of those legal materials by other bodies, in particular for the purpose of securing free public access to the materials, and to remove any impediments to such reproduction and re-use.

Open formats, metadata and knowledge-based systems

3. State Parties are encouraged to make their legal materials available in open and re-usable formats and with such metadata as available.
4. States Parties are encouraged to cooperate in the development of common standards for metadata applicable to legal materials, particularly those intended to enable and encourage interchange.
5. Where State Parties provide knowledge-based systems assisting in the application or interpretation of their legal materials, they are encouraged to make such systems available for free public access, reproducing and re-use.

Integrity and authoritativeness

6. State Parties are encouraged to make available authoritative versions of their legal materials provided in electronic form.
7. State Parties are encouraged to ensure that, when authoritative legal materials are reproduced or re-used by other bodies, they are of the highest integrity and carry clear indications of their origins and integrity (authoritativeness).
8. State Parties are encouraged to remove obstacles to the admissibility of these materials in their courts.

Protection of personal data

9. Online publication of court and administrative tribunal decisions and related material should be in accordance with protection of personal data laws of the State of origin. Where applicable, anonymization of the text of such decisions and related material should be undertaken by the competent authority making the decision, unless provided otherwise by the law of its State.

Historical materials

10. State Parties are encouraged to provide historical legal materials.

Preservation

11. State Parties are encouraged to ensure long time preservation and accessibility of their legal materials as made available under paragraphs 1 and 10 above.

Citations

12. State Parties are encouraged to adopt neutral methods of citation of their legal materials, including methods that are medium-neutral, provider-neutral and internationally consistent.

Translations

13. State Parties are encouraged, where possible, to provide translations of their legislation and other materials, in other languages.
14. Where State Parties do provide such translations, they are encouraged to allow them to be reproduced or re-used by other parties, particularly for free public access.
15. State Parties are encouraged to develop multi-lingual access capacities and to co-operate in the development of such capacities.

Support and co-operation

16. State Parties and re-publishers of their legal materials are encouraged to make those legal materials more accessible through various means of interoperability and networking.
17. State Parties are encouraged to assist in sustaining those organisations that fulfil the above objectives and to assist other State Parties in fulfilling their obligations.
18. State Parties are encouraged to co-operate in fulfilling these obligations.

^[1] Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales and Co-Director, Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII), email graham@austlii.edu.au. Histories keep on growing. An earlier version of this Chapter (to April 2009) was published as ‘The Global Development of Free Access to Legal Information’ in Paliwala (2010). Some parts of this Chapter were previously published on the GlobaLex website in Greenleaf (2008). Helpful comments have been received from Abdul Paliwala, Andrew Mowbray, Philip Chung, Pierre-Paul Lemyre, Joe Ury, Kerry Anderson, Kevin Pun, Martin Backes and Jill Matthews (who also assisted with editing), but responsibility for content remains with the author.

^[2] For a summation of these ideals, see Poulin (2004); an early statement is in Greenleaf et al (1995).

^[3] AustLII, Sino Free Text Search Engine AustLII Web Page

http://www.austlii.edu.au/techlib/software/sino/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[4] ‘Apache Lucene – Overview’ http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[5] Part II: A-Z of legal information institutes’ in Greenleaf (2008)

^[6] http://topics.law.cornell.edu/wex (visited 1 March 2010)

^[7] http://www.zamlii.ac.zm/ (not available 1 March 2010) – appears to be defunct.

^[8] http://topics.law.cornell.edu/wex (visited 1 March 2010)

^[9] http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/ (visited 1 March 2010); Wex is developed in part from the LII (Cornell)’s previous ‘Law About ...’ series.

^[10] http://ceri.law.cornell.edu/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[11] http://www.austlii.edu.au/ (visited 1 March 2010); University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and University of New South Wales (UNSW)

^[12] Summarised in Greenleaf, Mowbray, and van Dijk (2005); and see AustLII Publications (1995-) with links to over 50 publications since 1992 including DataLex Project publications.

^[13] http://www.austlii.edu.au/databases.html (visited 1 March 2010)

^[14] http://portsea.austlii.edu.au/pit/ (visited 1 March 2010); New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia

^[15] http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[16] http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/lawreform/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[17] http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[18] For example, the Taxation Law Library

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/tax/

^[19] http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/index_fr.php?lang=en (visited 1 March 2010)

^[20] See http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/publication.epl?lang=en for extensive LexUM publications.

^[21] http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/index.html; for others see

http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/partners.epl?lang=en

^[22] http://www.canlii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[23] http://www.canlii.org/en/databases.html (visited 1 March 2010)

^[24] See http://www.canlii.org/en/blog/index.php?/archives/44-Legislation-From-the-Northern-Territories.html (visited 1 March 2010)

^[25] http://www.canlii.org/en/info/reflex.html (visited 1 March 2010)

^[26] http://www.austlii.edu.au/techlib/software/sino/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[27] http://www.bailii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[28] http://www.paclii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[29] http://www.hklii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[30] http://www.saflii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[31] http://www.cylaw.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[32] http://www.nzlii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[33] http://www.bailii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[34] http://www.bailii.org/databases.html (visited 1 March 2010)

^[35] http://www.bailii.org/openlaw/introduction.html (visited 1 March 2010)

^[36] http://www.paclii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[37] http://www.hklii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[38] http://www.hkclic.org/en/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[39] http://www.saflii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[40] http://www.ulii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[41] http://www.malawilii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[42] http://www.nzlii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[43] http://www.cylaw.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[44] http://www.juriburkina.org/juriburkina/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[45] As at 18 March 2009 the site was not accessible, the address giving a 404 error. It had not been updated since 2007, and may now be defunct.

^[46] http://juriniger.lexum.umontreal.ca/juriniger/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[47] For details of the initial steps, see Greenleaf, Chung and Mowbray (2007).

^[48] http://www.austlii.edu.au/austlii/conference/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[49] http://www.frlii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[50] They are variously in an AustLII database (1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005)

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/CompLRes/, on the FrLII website (2004) http://www.frlii.org/, or on LexUM (2002, 2008)

^[51] LII Workshop on Emerging Global Public Legal Information Standards hosted by the LII (Cornell)

^[52] http://www.worldlii.org/worldlii/declaration/, also called the ‘Montreal Declaration’

^[53] http://www.juridicas.unam.mx/infjur/leg/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[54] http://www.worldlii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[55] http://www.worldlii.org/int/cases/ (visited 1 March 2010) See discussion Greenleaf, Chung and Mowbray (2005).

^[56] http://www.worldlii.org/int/special/privacy/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[57] http://www.worldlii.org/catalog/270.html (visited 1 March 2010)

^[58] http://www.worldlii.org/LawCite/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[59] http://www.glin.gov/search.action (visited 1 March 2010)

^[60] http://droit.francophonie.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[61] http://www.francophonie.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[62] As at 15 April 2009 the site is not accessible, and a notice on the site states ‘Dear Internet, The International Organization of la Francophonie is doing maintenance work on its portal Droit Francophone. For this reason, the site will be unavailable during this period of work, but our teams are working for a rapid return to normal operation. We thank in advance for your understanding and your loyalty’ (Translation from French by Google).

^[63] http://www.commonlii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[64] http://www.commonlii.org/int/cases/EngR/

^[65] http://www.commonlii.org/commonlii/sponsors/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[66] http://www.asianlii.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[67] http://www.asianlii.org/databases.html (visited 1 March 2010)

^[68] http://www.asianlii.org/asianlii/sponsors/#country_supporting_institutions (visited 1 March 2010)

^[69] http://www.asianlii.org/asianlii/sponsors/#rsi (visited 1 March 2010)

^[70] http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[71] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/pays.html?lang=en&info_lang=en

^[72] http://circa.europa.eu/irc/opoce/ojf/info/data/prod/html/index.htm - links to legislative databases in 29 European states but no common search interface, translations or merged search results.

^[73] <http://www.reseau-presidents.eu/>

^[74] Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Germany, Estonia, Finland, France, Croatia, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and United Kingdom. Liechenstein, unlisted, is covered.

^[75] GLIN, discussed earlier, is a partial exception but it does not provide full text searching.

^[76] http://law.bepress.com/repository/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[77] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law (visited 1 March 2010)

^[78] http://www.jurispedia.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[79] http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[80] http://www.finlex.fi/en/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[81] http://www.jerseylaw.je/Home/WhatsNew/default.aspx (visited 1 March 2010)

^[82] http://www.legjislacionishqiptar.gov.al/ (not available 1 March 2010)

^[83] http://www.belgiumlex.be/V2/belgiumlex/website/en/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[84] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[85] http://infoleg.mecon.gov.ar/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[86] http://www.kenyalaw.org/update/index.php (visited 1 March 2010)

^[87] http://vbqppl.moj.gov.vn/vbpq/en/pages/vbpq.aspx

^[88] http://elaw.klri.re.kr/indexE.jsp

^[89] http://www.legalinfo.mn/pages/1/page72.php?vmenuclick=72 (visited 1 March 2010)

^[90] http://www.lawnet.lk/ (not available 1 March 2010)

^[91] Survey of the copyright laws of 37 European states (including all major states) for the purpose of this article, April 2010. The copyright position in the other European states has not yet been determined.

^[92] The 21 states in the next footnote, plus Austria; Belgium; Denmark; Finland; Germany; Greece; Hungary; Italy; Netherlands; Poland; and Turkey.

^[93] Albania; Belarus; Bulgaria; Croatia; Czech Republic; Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania; Liechtenstein; Luxembourg; Norway; Portugal; Romania; Russian Federation; Serbia; Slovak Republic; Slovenia; Spain; Sweden; Switzerland; and Ukraine.

^[94] European Forum of Official Gazettes ‘Comparative table 3: Online access to legislation’

^[95] Websites are respectively: RIS - Austrian Laws in English; Armenian National Assembly; Belarus National Legal Internet Portal; Laws of Bosnia/Herzegovina, Estonia Law in Estonian and English; Translation of Finnish Acts and Decrees; Legifrance Codes and Texts (in English); Siemas of the Republic of Lithuania; Maltese Legislation; Selected Laws of Montenegro; Swedish Legislation in Translation; Swiss Classified Compilation of Federal Legislation

^[96] All of these can be found on AsianLII <http://www.asianlii.org>

^[97] This excludes bilingual legislative jurisdictions, where translations are primarily for domestic reasons, such as in Hong Kong, Macau or Canada.

^[98] For an AustLII example, see http://www.austlii.edu.au/techlib/standards/designators.html (visited 1 March 2010)

^[99] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_citation (visited 1 March 2010)

^[100] http://www.canlii.org/en/info/canliicite.html (visited 1 March 2010)

^[101] http://www.canlii.org/en/info/reflex.html (visited 1 March 2010)

^[102] http://www.canlii.org/en/info/faq.html#5.2 (visited 1 March 2010)

^[103] http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/laws/regu/si-97-5/latest/si-97-5.html (visited 1 March 2010)

^[104] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt (visited 1 March 2010)

^[105] http://www.robotstxt.org/ (visited 1 March 2010)

^[106] http://www.austlii.edu.au/robots.txt (visited 1 March 2010)