Archive for 2010
Enabling an informed citizenry
I’ve been following the development of Law.Gov – a proposed distributed repository of all primary legal materials of the United States. How much in line with our thinking is this initiative and what can we learn from it?
Law.gov believes that “the primary legal materials of the United States are the raw materials of our democracy. They should be made more broadly available to enable an informed citizenry.” and that “governmental institutions should make these materials available in bulk as distributed, authenticated, well-formatted data.”
And they’ve won $2 million from Google to help them do it.
Law.gov defines primary legal materials as “documents of primary authority issued by governmental bodies, such as court opinions, statutes, and regulations. They also include the supporting documents and other media issued and maintained by those bodies, such as dockets, hearings, forms, oral arguments, and legislative histories.”
How does this square up to our thinking?
First, of course, we agree that primary legal materials should be more freely available in bulk as distributed, authenticated, well-formatted data!
In the UK we are fortunate that statutes and regulations are now thus freely available from legislation.gov.uk. There is a way to go in bringing it all up to date, but the National Archives (incorporating OPSI) have done a fantastic job delivering this now as open, linked data.
As to court opinions, unfortunately …
There is no definitive view on whether court judgments are Crown copyright. Although OPSI, following advice from the Treasury Solicitor, take the view that copyright in court judgments rests with the Crown, in that judges are officers or servants of the Crown and their judgments are delivered in the course of their duties, this is not a universally held view and it can be argued that judges act independently of the Crown and that copyright in court judgments rest with individual judges. (Bar Council)
Nevertheless, BAILII has done a grand job cajoling the courts and others and building a free access resource which may be lacking in its archives but which is as comprehensive as possible in its ongoing accessions.
But, while the free availability of these primary legal materials may ultimately “enable an informed citizenry”, it is up to third parties to make this happen – to extract value from and add value to the primary data.
As to what Law.gov means to its US audience, there’s a great post by Jason Wilson on his rethinc.k blog, with loads of links to related discussion about the “cool tools” that will be deployed to mine these materials.
But what’s lacking from the discussion is the role of secondary legal materials – the articles, commentary and analysis that make sense of the raw law and that are essential to inform the citizenry.
legislation.gov.uk – not just a pretty face
Since late July we have a shiny new official home of UK legislation at legislation.gov.uk which replaces the two current services at OPSI.gov.uk/legislation and statutelaw.gov.uk. Some functionality currently available on SLD is not yet available on legislation.gov.uk, including full content search, geographical extent and point in time advanced search options. This functionality will be added in a series of releases and once all features of the new service have been implemented the two predecessor sites will be withdrawn. Already OPSI legislation URLs are being redirected to the equivalent legislation.gov.uk resources.
legislation.gov.uk combines and integrates:
- the “as enacted” versions of legislation from OPSI, immediately on enactment
- the revised versions of legislation from the SLD, as and when available, complete with all versioning and annotation information
- the tables of effects data maintained by the SLD, linking past legislative provisions to relevant amending provisions
- the explanatory notes, integrated with the relevant legislative provisions
The interface provides simple and direct browse access to legislation by type, year and number and simple or advanced searches to locate matching legislation. The point-in-time features are not yet fully implemented, but just tag a date on to the end of a URL in the form /yyyy-mm-dd for a point in time view.
Any piece of legislation or legislation fragment can be addressed reliably and simply via the URI scheme and any list of legislation can be delivered as an Atom feed.
The service is delivered by the the National Archives (of which OPSI is part) with John Sheridan, Head of e-Services and Strategy at the helm. John describes the development in an article on VoxPopuLII from the Cornell LII.
We had two objectives with legislation.gov.uk: to deliver a high quality public service for people who need to consult, cite, and use legislation on the Web; and to expose the UK’s Statute Book as data, for people to take, use, and re-use for whatever purpose or application they wish.
There’s more about the technical project and the people behind it from Jeni Tennison, technical lead and main developer (at TSO).
With the new service up and running we can now more reliably and precisely tap into and leverage legislation resources using its API.
Congratulations to John, Jeni and team and thanks and for their support and encouragement for FreeLegalWeb.
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Learning about the law
You may be aware that a couple of weeks ago FindLaw UK launched. FindLaw is a Thomson Reuters Business and we could thus dismiss it out of hand as a cynically commercial site; but it has been competently and professionally put together.
FindLaw professes to help “consumers” understand the law:
Looking for legal information? In legal trouble? Learn About the Law is your starting place for help understanding the law. An online resource for up-to-date legal information about common topics such as will preparation, divorce and “no win, no fee”; and specific legal issues related to child custody and redundancy.
However, most of their articles are straight copies from direct.gov or other public sector websites, giving fairly basic advice on “life events”. And while there’s some value in the selection and presentation of these articles, they don’t go very far in helping one understand the law.
The FindLaw “Solicitor” blog is competently written legal news and the forum elicits sensible answers from the FindLaw team.
But ultimately FindLaw UK is designed to churn out “good” content which will be well regarded by Google, attracting punters who won’t find answers on the site but many of whom will ultimately use the Contact Law (or other) service on the site thus earning FindLaw commissions.
I’m uninspired but I think we can learn something from what they present to their particular market niche. What do you think?
A Criminal Law channel
A warm welcome to Andrew Keogh who has kick-started the Criminal Law channel here.
Andrew is a solicitor specialising in criminal law. He is the author of a number of leading texts and is part of the Blackstone’s Criminal Practice editorial team. Andrew also publishes CrimeLine Updater, a free weekly criminal law update. For more see the CrimeLine site.
Andrew is contributing to FreeLegalWeb original case notes and articles. He has also offered the content of the extensive CrimeLine Wiki that developed on his site. Direct public access to that has now been withdrawn but we’re hoping to find appropriate ways to plunder its resources.
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Thanks to our Housing Law contributors
I’d like to extend publicly a long overdue thanks to the contributors who have helped establish the initial authored Housing Law content on FreeLegalWeb:
- To the pseudonymous Nearly Legal for helping develop the authoring system and to him and his team for providing a steady stream of case notes and articles selected from Nearly Legal. The authoring team are NL himself, Chief, Dave, David Smith, J and Francis Davey. Francis was also a key player in the gestation of FreeLegalWeb.
- To William Flack for his help developing FreeLegalWeb and for providing a number of introductory guides – which he is now developing on his Social Welfare Law Wiki.
- To Tessa Shepperson for providing a selection of excellent articles, case notes and reviews from her Landlord-Law Blog.
- To Stephen Moore of CaseCheck for generously making available for our publication the entire CaseCheck case summaries archive (only the property and landlord and tenant categories are currently used).
- To Jamal Demachkie for providing materials from the Housing Law website.
We are also establishing a channel from the PainSmith Landlord and Tenant Blog (thanks to David Smith).
Housing Law is the focus of our Pilot site, but we welcome contributions from across all areas of law. If you write about the law, please share your expertise on FreeLegalWeb.
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Feedback
Since launch we’ve received a number of feedback emails – thanks.
But to ensure your feedback is effectively distributed, please do post your comments to this blog. We also have a Google Group for announcements and discussion. And if you’d like to post to the blog, just ask to register.
We’ve now provisionally scheduled a meeting for Wednesday 6 October to obtain feedback and help progress the project further. Please note this date for your diary and we’ll post more details later.
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First review
Thanks to David Whelan for his – the first – review of FreeLegalWeb on his Finding Legal Information blog (Canada). We’ll think of a suitable prize in due course, David!
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Off the starting blocks
At long last we have a public Beta service here at FreeLegalWeb dot org. Please do investigate and give us your feedback. Do so by commenting on this blog or Contact us directly if you’d like to post to the blog.
We’ve only just made a start, providing core functionality for browsing and searching resources and delivering authored content focused on Housing Law. There’s much we left undone and lots more functionality we plan to add. But we need your help. See the Participate page for ways you can get involved.
Thanks to Harry and the team at The Dextrous Web and to Robert at UniRom Systems for their development expertise, to the initial housing law contributors and to OPSI for our seed funding.
Paying to understand the law
Well worth a read on Richard Letter’s The Life of Books: The 21st Century Law Library Conundrum: Free Law and Paying to Understand It:
The digital revolution, that once upon a time promised free access to legal materials, will deliver on that promise; it’s just that the free materials it will deliver, even if it comprises the sum total of all primary law in the the country at every level and jurisdiction, will amount to only a minor portion of the materials that lawyers need in order to practice law, and the public needs in order to understand it.
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