FreeLegalWeb

Marcel Berlins in The Guardian , 3 November:

Last week, an obscure case on a technical legal point exposed an alarming failure to meet the condition that the law must be accessible to all. Moreover, as an angry and worried appeal court judge, Lord Justice Toulson, made clear, the problem was not confined to the narrow area of law in that particular case. It raised a far wider issue. …

To put it bluntly, it was almost impossible to find out exactly what the law said. Lord Justice Toulson pointed out that most of our law today is not contained in acts of parliament but in secondary legislation, regulations and the like. On many subjects the law can’t be found in one place, but in a patchwork. “There is no comprehensive statute law database with hyperlinks which would enable an intelligent person, by using a search engine, to find out all the legislation on a particular topic.”

He went on: “It is profoundly unsatisfactory if the law itself is not practically accessible … even to the courts whose constitutional duty it is to interpret and enforce it.”

What particularly concerns Toulson is that this “lamentable state of affairs” affects many areas of law which have great impact on the ordinary citizen, including sensitive childcare issues and social security benefits. There is a laudable government project to create a single, free, online legislation service which would bring together all the bits and pieces of a particular law. The trouble is that progress has been slow, it’s costing a lot of money and in the meantime new legislation is proliferating at unprecedented speed.

Props to Lord Justice Toulson for highlighting the need for the FreeLegalWeb – “a single, free, online … service which would bring together all the bits and pieces of a particular law”.

[The case in question was R v Chambers [2008] EWCA Crim 2467]

In London on 18 October 24 enthusiastic souls gave up their Saturday to share their ideas on how we might achieve our seemingly impossible task.

My intro attempted to define the project: in essence, better, joined-up, value-added access to the law via a) direct access to the law itself and b) expertly authored commentary; and to identify the main obstacles: which for me boil down to two: addressability of law sources and incentivising and “certifying” sufficiently expert contributions.

John Sheridan of OPSI then described what the government could do to support a project such as ours and the prospective merging of OPSI legislation and the SLD which will rationalise access. Joe Ury pointed to tools that could be applied to gain better access to BAILII resources and also clarified the murky issue of copyright in High Court judgments which stands in the way of fully open access to them.

Several barristers, solicitors and students contributed experiences and ideas, particularly as to incentivising others to contribute authoritative content.

Members of the TSO team contracted to OPSI gave us information on the OPSI programming interface being developed and several others of a technical bent described how lightweight technologies might be applied – in particular, several associated with the mySociety information democracy project who have already done great work with projects related to the cause such as TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow.

In the afternoon four discussion groups considered different aspects of the project in more detail:

John Sheridan led a group that considered the target audience, using as a starting point OPSI research on use of the OPSI legislation site. OPSI has profiled four typical classes of user: lawyers, public sector manager, informed layman and the “anti-user” whose attempt to address their problem via the site is entirely inappropriate.

Jeni Tennison of TSO worked with a group to refine OPSI’s proposed permanent URI scheme for legislation which will allow direct addressing of legislation down to the smallest fragment and which will also enable point-in-time queries.

Francis Davey led a group which came up with an ingenious proposed “eco-system” employing several modules: a Google Knol-type environment for authoring contributions (which would be owned by the author and could be syndicated back onto their own site), an authentication module; a Yahoo answers-type module; a legislation/case annotation module; and an API which would resolve references and provide a rich interface to the wider web. All these modules could be based on existing open source tools and shared legal information resources.

Harry Metcalfe’s group extended this discussion, considering several use case scenarios and how the service might meet their needs: practitioner, law librarian and informed user (all within scope) and ill-informed user (without). For example, the mother of a disabled child who had done some initial research and had sufficient direction to pursue her problem would find value; the ill-informed “pub” question would likely draw a blank. The group also discussed how potential authors might self-certify by subscribing to the rules of the “brand”.

At the closing session we agreed on key next steps. Apart from organisational issues, foremost amongst these is to address the question of funding.

We agreed those interested in getting their hands dirty would meet again mid-January.

[Participants please point out any inaccuracies in the above.]

Thanks to all 24 who participated in Saturday’s FreeLegalWeb BarCamp. I think we made great progress and are fired up to take this further quickly.

Here’s what happens next:

Write-ups. Would all those who presented or led discussions, please prepare a summary. Email me nickholmes [at] infolaw.co.uk or publish on your blog/site and post a link in the comments. I will post a report on a new page, linking to all.

Development groups. Several smaller groups will be formed to develop different aspects of the project. A post about this will follow soon.

Email list. An email list will be set up which will be the main communication channel for development. Details follow.

Next BarCamp. BarCamp FreeLegalWeb2 will be on Saturday 17 January. Details in due course on a new page.

In Who Owns the Law? in the New York Times, Noam Cohen investigates why, though US laws and judicial opinions are public domain, a variety of organisations — from trade groups and legal publishers to the government itself — claim copyright in it by virtue of the “accoutrements” surrounding the public material. “So while the laws and court decisions themselves may be in the public domain, the same is not necessarily true for the organizational system that renders them intelligible or the supporting materials that put them into context.”

The position is similar here. Legislation and judgments are Crown copyright, though OPSI licences their use on a generous open basis via its Click-Use licence. But if a private publisher or the government itself adds some value, whether just presentational, that added value is the copyright of the secondary publisher.

We had that argument over the Statute Law Database where the government’s position was initially that its consolidation and annotation of the legislation was a value-added service. In the end – hurrah – it was nevertheless declared “open”. But don’t expect LexisNexis or Thomson or ICLR or TSO, or even BAILII, to follow suit with respect to their added value.

If the government publish the information in the most open way possible, no-one will have a stranglehold over the law. The government now embraces this argument … and here we are to make the most of it.

David Pearce, creator of the UKPatents wiki, writes on the IPKat:

I am a little sceptical about the possibility in the foreseeable future of a wiki-type ‘free legal web’, as envisaged by Nick Holmes (see the vision here), and also doubt whether there is sufficient impetus for the more fantastic-sounding vision of a Wikipedia of English law, as suggested by Richard Susskind (coincidentally, only a couple of months before the ukpatents wiki was born). After all, for such a resource to be realisable, the professional time of real people would be needed to create and maintain it, and those people really need to be trained lawyers specialist in their field, and not just technicians or students. Where is such a resource to be found?

I should point out that I have not myself suggested the Free Legal Web should be “a Wikipedia” nor that a wiki is necessarily the right platform.

The Free Legal Web will have to have authority and that will only accrue if – as David says – contributors are “trained lawyers, specialist in their field” and if their contributions cannot be hacked around by all and sundry. So, contributions and edits will need to be restricted via user permissions and attributed to their authors, with links to profiles and author websites to affirm their credentials.

Not only will this establish the necessary authority, but also it will encourage contributions. As Francis Davey comments on the IPKat post

A key difficulty with wikis is (inter alia) a lack of individual recognition. One of the drivers for many lawyers to write is just exactly the marketing/reputation that it affords. A wiki ends up submerging the author’s contributions to the extent that it is hard to gain that same reputation. Or at least I think that it is not sufficiently foregrounded.

If FLW articles are attributed to their authors and linked to their websites, contributors will gain the recognition and the Google juice they crave.

And I repeat my premise that we already have a substantial free legal web (no caps): there are already thousands of authoritative, free-access articles written by “trained lawyers, specialist in their field”. Surely we can secure many of those via CC for reuse on the Free Legal Web?