Access to law
Open case law is here at last
My piece about new Case Law service from the The National Archives.
Online Courts and the Future of Justice
In the last issue of Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, I reviewed Richard Susskind’s Online Courts and the Future of Justice: Four years on and Professor Richard Susskind has written the same book he wrote last time, so he says. He jests, yet again. The message and the underlying arguments remain constant; the same analogies are […]
Open law: digital common property
Open law is the idea that public legal information should be freely available to everyone to access, use and republish. The current position in the UK differs completely as between legislation and case law. In the July issue of the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers I consider the state of open law in the UK. As […]
Good law – a good start
Richard Heaton, First Parliamentary Counsel at the Cabinet Office, gave an important speech at IALS in October which has only recently been published on the GOV.UK interwebs. In Making the law easier for users: the role of statutes he reviews past attempts to codify the common law and explains how legislation.gov.uk hopes to mesh with […]
Lord Neuberger on access to judgments
On 20 November Lord Neuberger, President of the Supreme Court, delivered the First Annual BAILII Lecture, entitled No Judgment – No Justice (PDF) in which he dealt with three important aspects of improving access to justice through improved access to judgments: their clarity, free dissemination and enhancement. His intro para is worth quoting here in […]
Judgment day for BAILII
First published by the Society for Computers and Law October 2011 A recent Guardian editorial criticised the status quo in relation to the publication of court judgments and called for more open access. In so doing BAILII came across as the villain of the piece rather than the saviour of free law which most lawyers […]
BAILII: Is free law enough?
It is ironic that BAILII, which came into being to free the law, has been called out recently for restricting access to the law. A Guardian editorial in September criticised the status quo in relation to the publication of court judgments and called for more open access. In so doing BAILII came across as the […]
Accessible law
First published on VoxPopuLII, February 2011. Also published in Justice Wide Open Working Papers, May 2012. Professor Richard Leiter, on his blog, The Life of Books, poses 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 […]
The legal web – a worthy mess
Jason Wilson is a law publisher with great insights. He has a nice clean minimalist blog with great pics accompanying each post. More importantly, he’s interested in the kind of questions I’m also trying to answer, such as: Can we crowdsource reliable analytical legal content? I have given considerable thought to this problem (and I […]
FreeLegalWeb
In case you haven’t heard via other channels, the FreeLegalWeb beta service is now live.
FreeLegalWeb dreaming on
First published in Computers and Law, February 2010. What follows is an account of the development of FreeLegalWeb – a collaborative project designed to join up and make sense of publicly accessible law and authored commentary, and to encourage ongoing contribution and participation, for the benefit of lawyers, advisers and the public at large. Many […]
Free Legal Web Barcamp
The Free Legal Web Barcamp is taking place on Saturday 18 October at the RSA in London. We already have a good number of people participating, but more is better. If you’d like to have your say as to how the Free Legal Web might be developed, please do sign up. If you’re not able […]
The Free Legal Web
The Free Legal Web is an initiative designed to deliver a web service that joins up UK law and legal commentary and analysis on the web and provides a useful service to both lawyers and the community at large. Read the Manifesto.
