Legal information in the digital age – on the blawg since 2004
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2004.
The SSCSC website was relaunched 23 June. Using the site you can find out how to appeal and download the necessary forms; check up on recent cases and other developments; search for decisions; and consult basic cases and directions on practice and procedure.
Social Security and Child Support Commissioners
The site uses a template which has been applied on a number of other tribunal websites:
Other national Social Security Commissioner websites are:
Further to the last post, according to the DCA:
our replacement [editorial] system went live … last week and we are busy converting in excess of 27,000 documents to XML format. We are also working with a supplier [TSO] to develop the enquiry service database that we expect to be able to pilot, within the Government Secure Intranet domain, sometime in late December or early January. If the pilot scheme reaches a successful conclusion then, it is planned to provide access to the general public by late Spring of next year.
Recent reports emanating from a KableNET.com news story suggest that “the Department for Constitutional Affairs is planning a new online database of UK primary and secondary legislation”. Informed observers will know that the Statute Law Database has been just around the corner since at least 1998. In fact the news is that TSO (formerly The Stationery Office) is working with the DCA to modernise its Statute Law Database. According to Tony Hopkins, Head of the Statutory Publications Office at the DCA. “The new editorial system provides us with a platform that will allow us to continue with the update programme and also assist with the development of an enquiry facility, by the end of this year, for those in the government service. Giving the public access to consolidated legislation is also a prime business objective and it is planned to make an internet-based service available during Spring of next year.”
Who’s who in statutory publishing?
Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO) is part of the Cabinet Office and delivers services relating to access and re-use of government information. The publishing arm of the former HMSO was privatised in 1996, then trading under the name The Stationery Office Ltd, with the administration of Crown copyright and the regulation of the contracts covering the printing and publication of legislation and other official materials being retained by HMSO.
The Statutory Publications Office (SPO) is an office within the Department for Constitutional Affairs and is producing a Statute Law Database (SLD) of United Kingdom legislation in line with its aim to deliver effective and accessible justice for all. The SPO is using TSO’s ActiveText content management system to maintain the SLD.
TSO (formerly The Stationery Office) is a private company which took over the trading operations of HMSO in 1996 and produces and supplies most statutory and government publications. Alongside this huge bookshop it provides publishing and content management services, and now likes to be known as “The Information Management Company”. For a short while its online presence was called ukstate.com. Either they thought better of it or the Queen complained, as that quickly morphed into TSO Online.
The establishment professes to be quite happy with Tesco’s new Legal Store which supplies LawPack self-help books and book/CD kits for common legal issues, providing quick Q&A advice and a jargon buster online and referring users on to the Law Society’s Solicitors Online site for further advice. Tesco ‘wants to demystify the law by offering shoppers simple and easy to understand legal products’; Lawpack believes that ‘lawyers will see quite a lot of enquiries from this’ and the Law Society concurs, describing it as ‘an innovative addition to the legal services market [which will] encourage [people] to seek legal advice’. Not so happy, presumably, are the existing online Contract Store and the like. Although Tesco Legal Store documents cannot be downloaded online, at these prices who could resist ordering a quick divorce with the supper.
A DIY Conveyancing Kit is notably absent and Tesco would not be drawn on its longer-term plans for legal services if the market is liberalised as a result of the Clementi review.
The government is to offer a one-stop shop on the internet for all the services it offers citizens, aiming to put all its service online by 2005 with one central site for people to interact electronically with officials. The current UK Online serice has been deliberately designed to get citizens in and out as quickly as possible, directing them to appropriate services on the relevant government sites, but at the moment there is no way of linking between departments. The proposed site is intended to address that issue, though it isn’t clear yet what will happen to the UK Online portal.
The UK Parliament’s website needs a radical overhaul as there is widespread dissatisfaction among users, a select committee of MPs said on 16 June 2004. While the site has received praise as an example of open and accessible government, the committee found that people often had difficulty finding the answers even to simple questions: the search facility was not satisfactory and information was not classified and grouped in a helpful way. It is “convinced of the need for a radical upgrading of the website at an early opportunity”.
Lund University Libraries last week launched phase 2 of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The new version of DOAJ now includes records at article level and a search functionality allowing users to search articles in potentially all Open Access Journals. The Directory aims to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals (journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access) thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. Includes all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content. 21 journals are currently listed under Law.
The Electronic Law Journals (ELJ) project was established by the CTI Law Technology Centre at the University of Warwick in 1995 to promote the development of an electronic legal culture in academic journal reading, writing and publishing. A comprehensive directory was established to assist users to quickly find accurate information about UK law journals (both paper and electronic) with links, where applicable, to online information sources such as publishers’ home pages, electronic contents and abstracts of journals etc. Although this resource is now out of date, it is still quite useful, but check details with the appropriate publisher (such as price changes etc), before purchasing.
A new website that allows voters to search and annotate the text of parliamentary debates has been launched by a team of volunteer programmers. TheyWorkForYou.com is the fruit of nine months’ work by a loose group of e-democracy activists whose aim is to breathe new life into Hansard. It does this by “scraping” the content of the official Hansard website shortly after it comes online every weekday morning at 8am, allowing short passages to be accessed almost instantly, and linking those speeches and questions to the records of individual MPs. Users can also annotate each speech, question or answer with their comments.
Punctuation is a touchy subject for some lawyers of the old school; indeed good legal drafting was based on the premise that one should not use puntuation at all. Thankfully, most have deserted that position and would agree that punctuation “has always been offered in a spirit of helpfulness, to underline meaning and prevent awkward misunderstandings between writer and reader”. If yours is a bit rusty, try these:
Plain English and the law (don’t miss this example)
On 3 June the Office of the e-Envoy metamorphosed into the e-Government Unit of the Cabinet Office (with some functions transferred to the Treasury Office of Government Commerce) in preparation for Ian Watmore taking up the headship of the unit in September. Andrew Pinder, the former e-Envoy, exited with the job done:
“96% of the population know of a place they can get access to the internet … survey after survey shows that the UK has one of the best environments in the world for e-commerce [and as] for the third target, to make all government services available electronically by the end of 2005, we’re well on the way.”
After such achievement it will be embarrasing for the successor unit to be told that their home page sports the title … you guessed, “Homepage”!
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