Accessible law

5 February 2011 in Articles, FreeLegalWeb, Legal web

Goo

First published on VoxPopuLII, February 2011.

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 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 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.

This article explores what more we need in order to understand the law and how this need can be met, from a UK perspective.

Free access to law

Free access to primary law is of course a prerequisite for the interpretation and understanding of the law. In the UK and most countries with a common law tradition, the cause of free access to law is espoused by the Free Access to Law Movement, a collective of legal information institutes that began with the creation of the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute (LII) in 1992. In the UK we are represented by the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII), set up in 2000 with the enormous help of the pioneering Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII). In October 2002, at the 4th Law via Internet Conference in Montreal, the LIIs published a joint statement of their philosophy of access to law in the following terms:

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;
  • Independent non-profit organisations 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.

So, to paraphrase liberally, we have a right to access the laws of our land, free of charge and openly licensed. “The problem for aggregators like LII,” Leiter points out, “is that the information that they provide is only as good as the sources available to them. And governments are just not very good sources of their own information.” In the US, Law.Gov is a movement working to raise the quality of government information, proposing a distributed repository of all primary legal materials of the United States. It 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.” In other words, we need more than free access to law; we need free access to good law data.

UK legislation

In the UK we were fortunate that the previous administration’s Power of Information agenda was being implemented by the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), whose role also includes that of Queen’s Printer (of legislation). In December 2006, the long-awaited Statute Law Database (SLD) had been published, having been more than 10 years in development. This provided (subject to a number of shortcomings) point-in-time access to all in-force UK primary legislation since the year dot (forever), and access to all secondary legislation published since 1991. Responsibility for the SLD then lay with the Statutory Publications Office (SPO), part of the Ministry of Justice. In 2008 the decision was taken to merge the SPO into OPSI, who had been publishing all as-enacted legislation since 1988. The merger would bring the online legislative services together, creating a single place where visitors could access the widest range of legislative content held by the government, alongside supporting material. That service is Legislation.gov.uk, launched in July 2010, which has now replaced the SLD and OPSI legislation services.

The Legislation.gov.uk interface provides simple and direct browse access to legislation by type, year and number, and simple or advanced searches to locate matching legislation. Primary legislation can be viewed as at any point in time since 1991. More important than this improved access to legislation, however, is the fact that the content is open. It is all well-structured XML; any piece of legislation or legislation fragment can be addressed reliably and simply in various useful formats via the URI scheme; and any list of legislation resulting from a query can be delivered as an Atom feed. And a new licensing model for public sector information (which in the UK is subject to Crown copyright) was introduced at the same time – the Open Government Licence.

Unfortunately, there are insufficient government resources to maintain an up-to-date, consolidated statute book, as Shane O’Neill observes:

The lack of up-to-date consolidation – no fault of the Legislation.gov.uk team who have laboured valiantly on their Sisyphean task – must be a concern to those who harboured greater ambitions (not least Government and judiciary). It leaves access to an up-to-date and consolidated statute book in the hands of those who have invested in and deliver highly exclusive legal information services [Westlaw/LexisNexis - hereafter Wexis].

The Legislation.gov.uk service is delivered by 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 some detail in an earlier post on VoxPopuLII:

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), on her blog. John is also on the expert panel of technologists advising the government on making public sector information more open and accessible on the Web, an initiative which led to the development of data.gov.uk, which currently provides access to over 5,600 central government datasets.

UK case law

Unfortunately, the public provision of case law in the UK is woefully inadequate, and we have to rely on the efforts of BAILII (a charity) to collate and deliver anything approaching a comprehensive collection of recent judgments. BAILII does a grand job in the circumstances, but – through no fault on its part – it is not comprehensive and it is not open. The various courts all publish their judgments in their own fashion, with no consistency of approach; in fact the High Court of England and Wales does not publish its own judgments at all, but passes selected handed-down judgments to BAILII to publish. To make matters worse, our right to access this case law is far from clear. There is some argument whether judges are public servants or not and hence whether their judgments are public sector information or not. In addition, regarding older judgments, the low level of originality required for copyright protection in the UK means that almost all older cases are copyright of either the transcriber or the reporter (or the publisher who commissioned them).

Understanding the law

Does free access to law or, even better, free access to good law data, make the law accessible? Will it empower the average citizen? Unfortunately not. As Leiter says, it is only a fraction of what lawyers need to practice law and the public needs to understand it. The law is not practically accessible: it is difficult to identify, obtain and understand legal resources, and they are frequently out of date. Whilst it is reasonable to expect legal advisers to invest in the necessary commercial services to inform themselves, these services are becoming increasingly unaffordable for the less affluent law practices and third sector advice bodies. For the non-lawyer, the law is all but impenetrable, and solving many legal problems and resolving disputes is in practice affordable only to the rich or those who are eligible for some kind of state support. Lord Justice Toulson in R v Chambers [2008] EWCA Crim 2467 famously bemoaned the complexity of legislation:

To a worryingly large extent, statutory law is not practically accessible today, even to the courts whose constitutional duty it is to interpret and enforce it. There are four principal reasons. … First, the majority of legislation is secondary legislation. …Secondly, the volume of legislation has increased very greatly over the last 40 years …Thirdly, on many subjects the legislation cannot be found in a single place, but in a patchwork of primary and secondary legislation. … Fourthly, 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.

The give-us-the-data-and-we’ll-organise-the-world crowd also display a touching naïvety when it comes to the law. For example, on the launch of Legal Opinions on Google Scholar, Anurag Acharya, “Distinguished Engineer” at Google, said:

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. … we were struck by how readable and accessible these opinions are. Court opinions don’t just describe a decision but also present the reasons that support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations.

Any initiative that makes the law more accessible is to be welcomed, but to empower the average citizen you have to go the extra mile, by explaining the law. Lawyers and legal researchers have spent years learning the law and acquiring the skills that enable them to navigate and reliably interpret primary law and precedent. They will find value in free access to law and in Google Scholar and other free services that are built on that, but they and the average citizen need more. That need is met largely by commercial publishers, and, while there many smaller independent publishers who provide good value in their niches, as O’Neill observes:

Legal publishing has long been dominated by two huge duopolists (Reed Elsevier’s LexisNexis and ThomsonReuters) whose scale alone enables them to provide a consolidation of the mix of primary, secondary, case law which characterises our common law system. This has created what [barrister Francis Davey] in The Times on 23 May 2006 characterised as “a two-tier justice system with only the very rich able to access the full consolidated law while those lawyers doing pro bono work are discriminated against.”

But there is an increasing amount of quality free legal commentary and analysis on the Web, and we can dream on.

The law wiki dream

Writing in Times Online in April 2006, the eminent Professor Richard Susskind, legal tech guru and adviser to the great and good, spelt out his vision for a “Wikipedia of English law”:

This online resource could be established and maintained collectively by the legal profession; by practitioners, judges, academics and voluntary workers. If leaders in the English legal world are serious about promoting the jurisdiction as world class, here is a genuine opportunity to pioneer, to excel, to provide a wonderful social service, and to leave a substantial legacy. The initiative would evolve a corpus of English law like no other: a resource readily available to lawyers and lay people; a free web of inter-linked materials; packed with scholarly analysis and commentary, supplemented by useful guidance and procedure; rendered intensely practical by the addition of action points and standard documents; and underpinned by direct access to legislation and case law, made available by the Government, perhaps through BAILII. … A Wikipedia of English law could be an evolving, interactive, multimedia legal resource of unprecedented scale and utility.

Susskind referred specifically to wikis and “a Wikipedia,” and that was taken rather literally by those who enthusiastically first took up his challenge. But I don’t believe he necessarily intended it literally, and I don’t believe that “a Wikipedia” or indeed the wiki platform is appropriate. Wikipedia has to be seen as a one-off; no wiki project since has come anywhere near its scale or success. We are most unlikely to build an encyclopedia of UK law from scratch; but why would we try when there is already a vast free legal web?

The free legal web

In 2008, enthused by the developments in open government and by the amount of quality legal commentary that was percolating up on the Web, I proposed to set up a service to exploit this – FreeLegalWeb. In the manifesto I listed the free access law resources then available, and I now list them with appropriate updates, here:

  • We have [free and open access to legislation]
  • [We have] other official documents, forms and guidance from government and a commitment to making these resources more accessible and encouraging user generated services.
  • We have another substantial free access primary law database – BAILII.
  • We have a number of specialists already maintaining specialist law wikis and enthusiasts contributing law articles to Wikipedia.
  • We have a growing number of law bloggers, many of whom provide succinct, expert ongoing commentary and analysis.
  • We have many other individuals, firms and publishers who publish case summaries, articles, updaters and guidance for free access on their websites.
  • We have public, charitable and private services providing free guidance and fora for the public faced with legal processes.
  • And finally, we have Web 2.0 technologies that enable (potentially) all these sources to be interrogated, aggregated, “mashed up” and repurposed.

That sounded like a free legal web to me; all we had to do was join it up and curate it! But how feasible is that?

A “bunch of goo”?

Bob Berring, legal research guru and Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, gave his thoughts on the matter on YouTube in October 2009. He believes that government efforts in the provision of free legal information have failed because there are no incentives; and that “volunteer efforts”, worthy as they may be, are unlikely to be sustained. He rightly says that legal information is not easily packaged: we need a map and a compass to navigate it; it needs to be organised and value added. I think we all agree with that. But his conclusion appears to be that only Wexis have sufficient incentive and only they can mobilise the necessary army to add sufficient value for it to be useful. For Bob, the free legal information that’s out there is “a bunch of goo,” and the only thing that can sort out the mess is “the market system”. That’s clearly not the case:

  • government has an incentive to make legal information more accessible
  • the legal profession has an incentive to make legal information more accessible
  • various non-profits have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
  • citizens have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
  • and there are many private enterprises short of Wexis who have an incentive to make legal information more accessible.

… How?

Curating the legal web

For help I’m increasingly turning to Jason Wilson, Vice President at Jones McClure Publishing. 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 have a greater interest in solving it than most), and I just don’t see how a Demand Media or similar model could ever produce good or reliable analytical material.

But in the next breath he acknowledges that a lot of good stuff has indeed already been generated by the crowds, and asks how we will organise that legal web. Actually the question is buried at the end of a dense post about “exploded data” (the value of analytical content):

My thought at this point is that the legal web is in an infancy that we can’t even fathom yet. There is cloud of associated information that our current computer assisted legal research vendors cannot give to us based on their algorithms, especially when they remain in walled-in gardens that don’t account for the vast and valuable information being created by users. The question is whether we will step up to organize this sea of data, or wait until a program can do it for us?

Moving on, in a more accessible post on Slaw he asks how we can effectively curate the legal web:

Curating this growing body of analytical content will be difficult. It suggests a person-machine process of locating and separating good content from bad, and categorizing, verifying, authenticating, and editorializing that content. It will undoubtedly require the creation of a rich taxonomy to help organize and manage the content for later discovery, clean metadata, and a good search engine, and raises issues from data permanency to copyrights to brand dilution. It’s a mess. But a worthy one I think.

and in the comments to that post:

I suppose the point to my post is whether we can wrap a wiki-like structure and interface around the legal web, and make it a destination for learning about both general topics and specific issues, rather than just a portal for all results that match search terms.

voxrosieyes-we-can.jpgYes we can! However clever the machine, these tasks – “locating and separating good content from bad, and categorizing, verifying, authenticating, and editorializing” – to a large degree require human intervention. But that intervention need only be light touch once we figure out how most effectively to harness the wisdom of the crowds.

Conclusion

Free access to law is not a panacea, but there is plenty of scope for delivering more accessible law by leveraging not just free law but the free legal web; for delivering free services that are good enough for the average citizen, and for lower cost commercial services that are good enough for the average lawyer. Big Law will continue to need Wexis, but the “lower-tier” can be much better served. The final word I will leave with Tom Bruce:

We need to make informed choices between inexpensive automated approaches that work by brute force and the hand-crafted, highly-accurate approaches of legal bibliography that are not always scalable or affordable. We need to recalibrate what we mean by “authority”, and begin to think about measures of quality and reliability for legal text that avoid the creation of unnatural monopolies in legal information.

Are (law) ebooks the future?

18 January 2011 in Law publishing, ebooks | 11 comments

You can’t have missed the fact that Amazon’s fastest selling product last year was its Kindle ebook reader. Even I bought one. And during the year his Godliness Steve Jobs gave us the iPad tablet. Though the iPad is more than an a e-reader, as such it is of course much more book-like than an iMac or an iPhone. And there are plenty more tablets and e-readers on the way. We can safely say that the ebook has arrived.

But I’ve always been sceptical of the value of ebooks for law. For novels and other linear reading they clearly work well. But law books are different aren’t they? We dip into them, approach them via indexes etc, jump back and forth and put bookmarks and sticky notes on them; and they’re constantly being updated. I’ve long held that ebooks are not the future of law books or rather that the future law book is not a book, and others agree that law books belong in the cloud.

There are plenty of popular and student law ebooks in the Kindle Store, and LexisNexis is starting to release law practice books in ebook format, with titles from Sweet & Maxwell to follow. But to think that heavyweight annuals or looseleafs with updating services are going to translate into ebook formats is crazy. Remember that Butterworths’ first digital publications were badged “Books on Screen” but that appellation was quite soon dropped as it became clear that continuing the analogy wasn’t the way forward. There are many online law offerings whose principal content is based on texts initially created for publication in print, but the web services the publishers offer do do more than replicate the book and journal. I’m not saying the law publishers have got it all right, but they do know that they’ve got to figure out a future beyond books; and that means beyond ebooks too.

For as long as publishers are still publishing books, there will be a healthy market for ebooks, but as technologies converge and we do ever more in the cloud we’re going to stop thinking like Gutenberg.

Typography for Lawyers (the book)

9 December 2010 in Typography | 2 comments

With Typography for Lawyers Matthew Butterick – who is a typographer turned lawyer – has performed a service for lawyers that no-one else has done for other professions. Go on, Google “Typography for” and see what you come up with.

You have to be a lawyer seriously concerned about the effect of print on page to get “typography for lawyers” and unfortunately most lawyers are not; rather they care about the law and lawyering – or at least their little corner of the law and lawyering. Fair enough; they’re lawyers first and foremost. But typography matters an awful lot to how lawyers project themselves on the page, to other lawyers, to clients or to the courts; and that’s Matthew’s message: lawyers, more than most other professions, are publishers and should be held to the same standards as professional publishers.

With modern word processing applications and printers we have sophisticated typesetting systems capable of producing high quality, “polished and persuasive”, professional documents. There is no excuse for using them as if they were typewriters upon which all those archaic rules and conventions are based.

So lawyers should buy this book. They need to know about the difference between straight and curly quotes, different types of dashes and different types of spaces. They should learn once and for all why you shouldn’t put two spaces after a full stop or start a new paragraph by hitting the return key twice; and why you almost never should underline stuff or TYPE IN ALL CAPS. And there’s 101 more easily-digestible, well-illustrated rules and tips in this book’s 216 pages. Although there are many references and examples from US practice, it’s not difficult to relate them to UK equivalents.

Even if most lawyers won’t hear or care about this book, in a professional firm there should be at least one person who does. There must be someone responsible for setting standards? Setting up suitable templates and styles for standard use in a firm will go a long way to improving the professionalism of a firm’s printed output and save users time. Matthew doesn’t address this directly – in the next edition, perhaps?

Matthew Butterick is an attorney in Los Angeles; he runs Butterick Law Corporation. Typography for Lawyers grew out of his website of the same name and is published by Jones McLure at $25. Unfortunately, it’s not distributed in the UK so you’ll be paying a bit more for delivery and waiting a little. (My review copy, courtesy of Matthew, arrived from Jones McLure within a week – thanks guys!)

You can preview pages here.

The hype cycle

8 November 2010 in Social networking, Technology | 2 comments

Image: neweurasia.net

Apropos my social meeja blues I consulted the web. Turns out I can plot my disillusionment on Gartner’s hype cycle representing the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies.

Gartner now reckons microblogging is somewhat past the peak of inflated expectations and heading rapidly towards the trough of disillusionment, whereas “consumer-generated media” (do they mean blogs or are they lumping it all together?) has already troughed. So some way to go before the situation normalises and we reach the idyllic plateau of productivity. Watcha think?

Update: There’s a section of the report specifically on social media.The graph for that puts blogging on the plateau. Actually I think it’s been there for some time.

Social meeja blues

2 November 2010 in Blogging, Social networking | 4 comments

Image: OLPC

Time was when I was a guru of social meeja for lawyers. I was an early adopter with a keen eye for the potential of blogs, feeds and all that followed – and I sang its praises. I had a vibrant blawg with a large(ish) (in the scheme of things) band of followers and a small coterie of keen fellow blawgers. I quickly figured out the joys of Twitter and encouraged others to tweet. I had set up a profile on LinkedIn, made connections there and begun following a few emergent groups. I had also set up on Facebook – not sure why, but all those kids couldn’t be wrong, could they? And then the bell curve went mental!

Now everyone’s into social media. Every Joe Blawgs, every Sue Grabbit and Run and every legal service company has a “Twitter feed” and a “Facebook page”; there are hundreds more “blawgs” (I use those quote marks deliberately and forcefully); and on all platforms there are people desperate to make as many friends/followers/connections as possible. It’s all got out of hand, hasn’t it? Turned into some sort of spamfest. Couldn’t we go back to 2005 please?

Am I just being a Grumpy Old Man? Let’s look at what really sucks with some of the social meeja (and some of the good points too).

The good thing about Twitter is you don’t have to follow anyone if you don’t want to. That’s cool! In fact you don’t have to use Twitter at all; it’s not obligatory. On the other hand it is kinda neat to exchange banter with your contacts, show off what you know, learn something from them, make some new contacts. That’s all good if you have the time to follow the fast-flowing river. Thumbs up. What gets me is the dumb people who use Twitter. There’s way too may “marketing” peeps and egotists who broadcast low value pulp and pump up their follower numbers by mentioning and following everyone in sight. I couldn’t give a FF how many followers you have. That’s no measure of your worth to me or anyone else. In fact if it’s too big a number I’ll likely steer clear of you. (And yes, Stephen Fry, that’s you too!)

What about Facebook? Well, forgive me, but though 600 million plus people (and counting) use Facebook I’ve yet to find one who extols its virtues as a professional networking tool. You have to be there just because 600 million others are there (and, let’s not kid ourselves, most of them are way younger than you). But things could change; it could get better. Anything’s possible, but somehow (don’t quote me on this) I think Facebook’s pudding is over-egged. Sooner or later users will wise up to the fact that they’re just advertising fodder.

And LinkedIn? It’s a must-have, at least for now: a bit boring perhaps, but adding functions here and there and growing nicely as a serious business networking tool. What gets me again (and this is no fault of LinkedIn but the dumb people who use it) is the complete strangers who profess to know me and want to connect. Well sorry mate but unless you can establish at least a tenuous connection to me you go in the trash can. A tenuous connection will leave you to suffer in my Inbox for a while. Real connections are welcome. Believe me, working up 500+ connections (and thence, let’s say 50K+ second degree connections) is not the way to play this game.

Blawgs? I still love ‘em. Most of the early wave of blawgers are gamely still at it, though Twitter in particular has taken a lot of the the wind out of our sails. We’ve been joined by plenty more: some great new sources of analysis and comment, many boring law firm news/update blawgs and many misguided marketing initiatives.

And then there are all these new “businesses” set up by/for lawyers on a blog and a prayer. Those college kids in pyjamas and flip flops surely have made it easy for us all to become squillionaires!

Stop by later for another instalment.

Footnotes suck

8 October 2010 in Design and style, Law publishing | 4 comments

When I started out in law publishing I joined a young company with a modern approach. A key point in our house style, which I was instrumental in formulating, was “We eschew [nice word that] the use of footnotes.” Why?

They don’t help the writer who has to partition their thoughts into mains and asides or mains and citations or mains and whatever; they don’t help the reader who has to jump back and forth; they don’t help the editor/publisher/typesetter/webbie who has to create and code the damn things; they don’t help anyone. Of course, loads of writers – academics especially – get off on using footnotes for precisely these reasons; let everyone suffer at the altar of my superior knowledge. Get this: if it’s worth writing, it’s worth including in the main flow. If it’s too wordy to fit in comfortably, then it probably should be somewhere else, like in a Table of X or maybe in the trash can.

I’m pleased to see there’s a Facebook group called International Coalition Against Footnotes And For Parantheticals; pity no-one seems interested.

The legal web – a worthy mess

24 September 2010 in FreeLegalWeb, Legal web | 4 comments

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 have a greater interest in solving it than most), and I just don’t see how a Demand Media [sic?] or similar model could ever produce good or reliable analytical material.

But in the next breath he acknowledges that a lot of good stuff has indeed already been generated by the crowds and asks how we will organise that legal web. Actually the question is buried at the end of a dense post about “exploded data” (the value of analytical content).

My thought at this point is that the legal web is in an infancy that we can’t even fathom yet. There is cloud of associated information that our current computer assisted legal research vendors cannot give to us based on their algorithms, especially when they remain in walled-in gardens that don’t account for the vast and valuable information being created by users. The question is whether we will step up to organize this sea of data, or wait until a program can do it for us?

Moving on, in a more accessible post on Slaw he asks how we can effectively curate the legal web.

Curating this growing body of analytical content will be difficult. It suggests a person-machine process of locating and separating good content from bad, and categorizing, verifying, authenticating, and editorializing that content. It will undoubtedly require the creation of a rich taxonomy to help organize and manage the content for later discovery, clean metadata, and a good search engine, and raises issues from data permanency to copyrights to brand dilution. It’s a mess. But a worthy one I think.

and in the comments to that post:

I suppose the point to my post is whether we can wrap a wiki-like structure and interface around the legal web, and make it a destination for learning about both general topics and specific issues, rather than just a portal for all results that match search terms.

Yes we can! However clever the machine, these tasks – “locating and separating good content from bad, and categorizing, verifying, authenticating, and editorializing” – to a large degree require human intervention. But that intervention need only be light touch once we figure out how most effectively to harness the wisdom of the crowds.

The new UK legislation service

5 September 2010 in Articles, Legislation

Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, September 2010.

Since late July we have a shiny new official home of UK legislation at legislation.gov.uk. In due course this will completely replace the two current legislation services at OPSI and the Statute Law Database.

At present some functionality currently available on the Statute Law Database 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.

The new service at legislation.gov.uk combines and integrates:

  • the “as enacted” versions of legislation from OPSI, immediately on enactment
  • the revised versions of legislation from the Statute Law Database, 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.

Any piece of primary legislation or legislation fragment may be viewed as enacted, as revised (current) or as it stood at any point in time.

Any piece of legislation or legislation fragment can be addressed reliably and simply via a permanent URI scheme and any list of legislation can be delivered as an Atom (RSS) feed.

The service is delivered by the National Archives (of which OPSI is part). John Sheridan, Head of e-Services and Strategy led the development. He says of the new service:

“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.”

A quick tour

Set off from www.legislation.gov.uk.

Browse legislation

From the Browse Legislation tab you can browse legislation by type (eg UK Public General Acts etc) and then by year and number.

A dynamic graphic at the top of the listing for each type displays a bar chart of how many pieces of legislation are published for each year.

On the initial Browse page, clicking on a geographical area (country) in the map on the right will display just those types of legislation that exclusively or primarily apply to the country and those that may contain legislation that applies to it.

Though the graphical elements are attractive and nicely implemented, after the first few visits the novelty does wear off and the graphics intrude.

Versions

You can view primary legislation as it stood at any point in time from 1991.

From the left sidebar, select Latest available (Revised) or Original (As enacted) as needed.

The point-in-time features are not yet fully implemented but are substantially present. When viewing particular provisions, select Show Timeline of Changes from the left sidebar. This shows graphically the various points in time the legislation was revised from which you can select the version you require. Alternatively, you can just tag a date on to the end of a URL in the form /yyyy-mm-dd for a point in time view.

The texts of primary legislation are annotated to show the effect of amendments

Search

Using the Search form that is available at the top of every page you can search legislation by title, type, year and number.

Using the Advanced Search you can limit your search in various other ways.

Full text search is not available at the time of writing and it will be necessary to continue to use the Statute Law Database for this in the interim.

New legislation

From the New Legislation tab you can access lists of new legislation published recently. Listings are offered by type for individual days, and Atom (RSS) feeds are provided for each type of legislation.

Changes to legislation

The changes to legislation facility is not yet implemented. It will provide access to lists detailing the changes made by legislation (primary and secondary) enacted from 2002. The lists will provide details of changes including repeals, amendments, other effects (eg modifications and commencement information).

Is it up to date?

Unfortunately not, though significant improvements have been made to the accessibility of amending provisions.

legislation.gov.uk still relies on the same Statute Law Database. Keeping the SLD fully and expeditiously up to date is of course a goal, and the recent merger of the SPO and OPSI editorial teams has provided the opportunity to deduplicate some effort and hence to improve the timeliness of updates, but it remains the case that the editorial work is time consuming and publishing of consolidated legislation will always lag some way behind the publication of amending instruments.

There are approximately 5,000 items of revised legislation currently held on legislation.gov.uk and these have all been updated with any changes and effects on them contained in legislation made or enacted at any time before the end of 2002 (or, in the case of Northern Ireland revised statutes, before the end of 2005). Approximately half of all items of revised legislation already incorporate any changes and effects on them contained in legislation made or enacted up to the present.

For the remaining items of revised legislation there are changes and effects in one or more of the years from 2003 to the current year that have not yet been applied.

A warning notice appears at the top of the Contents list to notify you of any outstanding changes or effects to the item of legislation you are viewing. The changes and effects can then be viewed when you open provisions from the Contents list.

A permanent URI scheme

Key to the utility of the new legislation service and opening up the information to the public has been the development of a permanent URI scheme for addressing legislation, legislation fragments, versions and related resources.

For example, the Education Act 1996, a UK Public General Act, is addressable at http://www.legislation.gov.uk by its type (ukpga), year (1996) and number (56) as
/ukpga/1996/56

and its contents list is at
/ukpga/1996/56/contents

A fragment such as a section is addressable as
/ukpga/1996/56/section/3

the “as enacted” version as
/ukpga/1996/56/section/3/enacted

and the version current on a particular date as
/ukpga/1996/56/section/3/2001-01-01

Parts, chapters and schedules are addressable similarly.

This scheme is permanent. It will avoid link rot and provides an intuitive format with which any external individual or website can reliably construct an address to any legislative resource. This is not just a technical nicety, but a fundamental improvement that will open up UK legislation for public consumption.

FindLaw UK launches while the UK is on holiday

4 August 2010 in Wexis | 1 comment

Just as we leave home with our buckets and spades, FindLaw UK launches. Originally an independent site where you could … well … find (US) law, FindLaw has been part of the Thomson Reuters empire for some years now and the UK site, like it’s US cousin, is “primarily a collection of free legal resources for consumers”; in other words it’s a site designed to drive consumers into the arms of lawyers.

Per the Official FindLaw [US] Blog:

It includes many helpful articles with free legal information; a question-and-answer community forum; news feeds provided by Reuters; and tools to help consumers find a solicitor to assist them with their legal issue via FindLaw UK’s Contact Law service. FindLaw UK also reaches out to the legal professional audience, with a Solicitor Marketing area discussing tools and strategies for solicitors to enhance their online presence.

With over 5000 pages of content already in place, FindLaw UK is ready for its new audience. Legal consumers in the UK are seeking more extensive and reliable legal information from the Internet, beyond that available from an array of existing sites that contain largely leaflet information. The site will fill what consumers perceive to be a void in quality, free, UK-focused legal content.

The content developed for FindLaw UK focuses on the legal topic areas most sought after by UK legal consumers, including employment, personal finance, and community issues. The site’s content is arranged around life events like getting married or buying property, rather than strictly by legal practice area, to help consumers narrow their search more quickly. And of course, as with FindLaw.com, FindLaw.co.uk will be a living online destination that continues to grow over time.

FindLaw UK expands upon the work of FindLaw’s Solicitor blog, which has been keeping consumers informed on relevant UK law for more than a year and a half now. With the new site we look forward to expanding our UK audience to reach the many consumers seeking legal information, or a quality solicitor.

On the plus side it has been professionally put together for FindLaw by Robert Clarkson and his team. The blog is well written, the articles are sensibly selected from (in the main) public sources and the the FindLaw team provides competent answers to forum questions rather than leaving the blind to lead the blind.

But it’s uninspiring and unoriginal and will add little to human web-happiness. Let’s be honest this site exists 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.

At least there are no embarrassing splogs yet.

Free case law – an overview

5 July 2010 in Articles, Cases

Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, July 2010.

Free case law is old hat now. The House of Lords posted its first judgment on the web in 1996 and BAILII “freed the law” in 2000. But how far have we come since then? This article sums up the current position.

Public sector provision

The Supreme Court at www.supremecourt.gov.uk publishes its Decided cases in PDF with accompanying press summaries.

The Current cases section provides full details of ongoing appeals and News and publications provides information on latest judgments, future judgments and permissions to appeal. You can search the judgments via the general site search or via the Decided cases search. RSS feeds of latest judgments are not available.

An archive of judgments of the former House of Lords from 1996 to 2009 is published at www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld/ldjudgmt.htm. The only search facility available is the general Parliament site search.

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council at www.jcpc.gov.uk publishes its Decided cases from Nov 2009. The design and functionality of this new site is almost identical to that of the Supreme Court (see above), providing also information on Current Cases and News and publications. Privy Council judgments from 1999 to August 2009 and selected judgments pre1999 are published at www.privy-council.org.uk/output/Page31.asp

Inexplicably, HM Courts Service at www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk does not publish judgments of the England and Wales courts. It simply provides a note that judgments from the Civil and Criminal Divisions of the Court of Appeal, from the Administrative Court and the divisions of the High Court, selected by the judge concerned, are available for free by the good graces of BAILII.

The Scottish Courts Service at www.scotcourts.gov.uk publishes Court of Session, High Court of Justiciary and Sheriff Courts decisions from 1998. Access is via either a keyword search or a structured search. RSS feeds of recent cases are provided.

The Northern Ireland Courts and Tribunals Service at www.courtsni.gov.uk publishes its Judicial Decisions from 1999. You can search via the general site search or the judgments search. RSS feeds of latest decisions are not available.

The Tribunals Service site at www.tribunalsservice.gov.uk is a convenient gateway to all the tribunals sites, each of which publishes its own decisions. There is some commonality in the features of these databases.

BAILII

BAILII provides access to the most comprehensive set of British and Irish primary legal materials available for free and in one place on the internet. BAILII includes over 80 databases covering 7 jurisdictions and in excess of 200,000 searchable documents.

Scope of case law

BAILII publishes most significant judgments from the courts of the four jurisdictions of the UK and from the courts of Ireland since 1996, receiving regular feeds from the courts. Coverage of historic judgments prior to 1996 is limited but growing.

In 2003 arrangements were made for all the substantive judgments of the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal and the Administrative Court to be posted on BAILII. Judgments on permission applications and other preliminary applications are only published there if a judge so requests. The number of judgments from the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal and the other Divisions of the High Court has been steadily increasing.

There is still a restriction on the number of English cases from divisions of the High Court which can be added to the BAILII database, arising from the fact that the shorthand writers who transcribe judgments which have been given verbally (as opposed to those handed down on paper) own the copyright in the transcribed version of the judgment. This prevents the judgment being added to the BAILII database without the consent of the shorthand writer. BAILII, being a free website, has no funds with which to acquire a licence to copy and display these transcripts.

BAILII continues to press for the system to be changed so that all judgments may be freely available. A large number of transcribed judgments of the Court of Appeal and the Administrative Court for the period July 1996 to August 1999 were kindly provided by the official shorthand writers Smith Bernal. All handed down English Court of Appeal cases decided since July 1996 should be on BAILII.

Handed down first-instance decisions of the England and Wales and Northern Ireland High Courts are generally only provided to BAILII where the judge giving the judgment indicates that they are of sufficient interest to be made available for publication on the internet.

Decisions of the Irish Supreme Court and High Court are reasonably comprehensive since February 2001.

BAILII has few Northern Ireland cases decided prior to 2000.

BAILII has few Scottish cases decided prior to 1999.

Full coverage of House of Lords and Privy Council cases commenced during 1996.

Supreme Court cases are included from inception in 2009.

Historic judgments

The OpenLaw project undertaken by BAILII during 2007–2009 was funded by JISC and aimed to support legal teaching in collaboration with academics, librarians and special interest groups such as the Society of Legal Scholars. Through review of subject syllabi, BAILII identified, scanned, converted to text and published over 2,500 judgments that are important in the core teaching areas of law. The OpenLaw project itself is now closed.

BAILII continues to negotiate with legal publishers for the freeing up of more historic judgments for publication. In 2009 the Scottish Council of Law Reporting gave BAILII permission to publish approximately 600 Scots law judgments that are frequently cited in judgments and are important in the core teaching areas of law.

Not on BAILII but on its sister site CommonLII is a database of the English Reports (1220-1873), based on data provided by Justis. The reports at www.commonlii.org/uk/cases/EngR are scans in PDF but are full text searchable, for the first time giving the world free access to the very depths of common law legal history.

Functionality

The basic BAILII browse is by jurisdiction, then by court, and then alphabetically or by year / month / alpha.

For case law BAILII offers a standard simple search, selecting All databases or a particular jurisdiction, a Case Law Search or an Advanced Search (which is somewhat less advanced than the former!).

Advanced searches require use of Boolean terms and connectors. Whilst Boolean searches are familiar ground for information professionals, others will need to mug up on them. Most lawyers used to Google searches will be sorely disappointed if they just whack in a few keywords.

Results can be ordered by Title, Jurisdiction, Relevance, Date, or Date (oldest first). Relevance is according to Boolean criteria and the context of hits is not shown, so again, all but the professional searcher will feel somewhat at sea.

RSS feeds

BAILII does not publicise the fact that it offers RSS feeds. However, selecting the Recent Decisions option on the left menu www.bailii.org/recent-decisions.html and changing the extension to rss, gives us the URL for the BAILII Recent Decisions feed:

This feed is not terribly helpful as it is one large feed in court-by-court order, matching the Recent Decisions web page. However, useful derivatives for individual courts have been created by me and several others using Yahoo Pipes – see pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/search?q=BAILII.

LawCite

An important addition to the LII stable of websites is LawCite at www.lawcite.org – an international case citator from the good people at AustLII, also accessible via BAILII. You can search LawCite for a standard citation or by various criteria.

The LawCite database is generated on an entirely automatic basis from all the LII databases with no editorial input and includes a fairly complete collection of all common law cases cited in the past decade plus most of the important uncited decisions before this.

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