The membership criteria are not fixed but involve adherence to, and support of, the Declaration and activities similar to (but not necessarily identical with) a LII. All 23 LIIs listed in the gazetteer following are members of the FALM, except ZamLII (invited, but no reply). At the 2007 meeting in Montreal, initial steps were taken to turn the ‘Movement’ into a more formally constituted ‘Association’ (FALA), but these have not yet been finalised due some LIIs needing to refer the question back to management boards and the like.
- LII has an extensive collection of law from the Supreme Court of the United States.
- Since 1997 they have published the journal JurPC as a free, weekly Internet journal (also on the JurPC site).
- The LIIs searchable from SAFLII are SeyLII (Seychelles), LESLII (Lesotho), MalawiLII (Malawi), SwaziLII (Swaziland), ULII (Uganda), Zambia LII (Zambia), and ZimLII (Zimbabwe) All seven of these LIIs use the “LII in a Box” facility developed by AfricanLII.
- This is a challenge for a movement which is potentially global, but also indicates that the Free Access to Law Movement and the development of LIIs may yet be far from reaching its maximum impact.
- Each LII has different views about the need to protect its own databases, often for privacy reasons with case law (this varies between jurisdictions), but more generally to avoid its often-considerable investment of public monies in collecting data from disparate sources and adding value to it.
The citator is international, containing citation records in significant numbers from court decisions in 75 countries (primarily but not exclusively from common law countries). The LawCite citator and the databases from which it is generated have been built by entirely automated means without editorial intervention, using data mining techniques based on heuristic recognition of citations in source documents. The LawCite software is developed by AustLII, and the data mining which it creates is done on AustLII’s servers. The “back end” databases are also used in the mark up processes of collaborating LIIs that choose to use AustLII’s mark-up software, adding links to cases or articles on other LIIs, or to LawCite citation records.
LawPhil
Once registered and running, the organization has to maintain compliance with the appropriate state agency that regulates charitable organizations. Resource mismanagement is a particular problem with NPOs because the employees are not accountable to anyone who has a direct stake in the organization. For example, an employee may start a new program without disclosing its complete liabilities.
The PacLII mirror at AustLII is the one seen by users outside the Pacific, due to slow access speeds to the Vanuatu server. On this model, searches over the locally stored concordances at AustLII produce rapid search results, and users then returned to the databases on the originating LII. A further subset of a dozen or so LIIs, most conveniently described as “the WorldLII consortium” (as discussed later), collaborate more closely than simply through FALM membership.
Each document is accompanied by a summary in English and, in many cases in additional languages, plus subject terms selected from the multilingual index to GLIN. All summaries are available to the public, and public access to full texts is also available for 25 of the 40 jurisdictions covered by GLIN. Searching is the only access mechanism, but allows results to be sorted by relevance, by date or by jurisdiction. The GLIN data is also presented on WorldLII so that it can be searched using the Sino search engine. The GLIN abstracts can also be browsed there by year (from 1776), and by country (and by year within each country).
1. Demands for Free Access – What They Mean
The Kenya Law Reports (eKLR) is operated by the National Council for Law Reporting, a corporate body established by legislation with the exclusive mandate to publish the Kenya Law Reports, the official law reports of the Republic of Kenya which may be cited in proceedings in all courts of Kenya. Its databases are its Case Search (cases have an ‘eKLR’ citation and brief headnotes), Laws of Kenya (complete statutes and subsidiary legislation), various forms of legal notices, and the Environment and Land Law Reports. However, printing has been disabled for cases already published in the book form of Kenya Law reports. This is the first instance of a previous pay-for-use service becoming a member of the Free Access to Law Movement.
Citizens United expanded First Amendment protections for nonprofit organizations with regard to political speech. The number of databases searchable via WorldLII was not recorded for its first few years from 2002, but since then, the rate of expansion of searchable databases has been relatively steady, growing from 450 in 2005 to 2070 in 2016. This expansion is likely to continue, particularly as more of CanLII’s databases become searchable via WorldLII.
Search
Most LIIs use the Robots Exclusion Standard (see also the The Web Robots Pages) to exclude spiders/robots from at least their case-law, but some allow robots to copy other data. See the robots.txt file at the root of any LII plus its privacy policy, for individual LII details. LawPhil is one of the few LIIs to provide all its data via a Creative Commons licence. CanLII has quite liberal Terms of Use for re-use of data on the CanLII site, but republishers are required to prevent Google’s robot indexing. There are databases of legislation in English for almost all countries, but AsianLII also includes a large database collection in Bahasa (for Indonesia) and smaller collections in Portuguese (for Macau) and Vietnamese.
Most of the FALM members in this category come from the civil law tradition (and mainly from Europe as well). The Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) is a loose affiliation of free access to law providers. It meets annually if possible during the “Law via Internet” Conference, and by email between Conferences. The first sustained attempt to build some form of international network took place at the at the LII Workshop on Emerging Global Public Legal Information Standards hosted by the LII (Cornell) in July 2000, involving participants from the US, Canada, Australia and South Africa. The expression “WorldLII” was first used there to describe a collaborative LII portal.
Online Aptitude Test & Adp Interview Preparation
- PacLII is the most substantial free access to law facility in developing countries, and was the earliest regional system.
- Whether FALM and the development of independent LIIs has yet reached its maximum impact depends largely on FALM finding ways to increase both its membership and its significance, while retaining its goals.
- Our lawyers have provided legal services to successful enterprises such as Menlo Ventures and Google.
NPOs provide a way for individuals to pool their resources and skills to achieve common goals. They also offer employees an opportunity to use their talents for good, without being motivated solely by profit. Ultimately, the legal entity that’s right for your business depends on your goals. As one entrepreneur, non-profit organizations wex lii legal information institute Jane Chen, outlined in Harvard Business Review, there are pros and cons to each entity.
Freedom to republish official sources is at the heart of the Free Access to Law Movement, and essential for the operation of LIIs. As yet, the most durable multi-LII networks have been based on common law jurisdictions. The World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII) (2002) was the first multi-LII site, initially making searchable data from all the founding members of FALM. In common law countries, there is widespread common usage of the same, or similar type of “neutral citation”, also sometimes called a “LII citation”, applied to decisions at the time the court or tribunal first makes them available.
The list of LvI Conferences shows that they have been held in most years since 1997, with the 17th LvI being held in 2017. The first LvI was hosted by AustLII in Sydney 1997, as were the 2nd (1999), 3rd (2001) and 5th (2003). LexUM/CanLII hosted the 4th (2002) in Montreal, which is when FALM was established and the Declaration on Free Access to Law adopted. FALM also includes many members that differ from this description of LIIs (as discussed later). GlobaLex is provided as an information service only and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on as a source of, legal advice.
According to the Declaration, public legal information (PLI) “means legal information produced by public bodies that have a duty to produce law and make it public. It includes primary sources of law, such as legislation, case law and treaties, as well as various secondary (interpretative) public sources, such as reports on preparatory work and law reform, and resulting from boards of inquiry. The Declaration adds that “publicly funded secondary (interpretative) legal materials should be accessible for free but permission to republish is not always appropriate or possible.
From 1999 AustLII started to use its search engine (Sino) and other softwares to assist organisations in other countries, usually with academic roots, to establish LIIs with similar functionality (see “The WorldLII Consortium” below). In relation to Australasia, AustLII (including NZLII) provides (as at November 2017) nearly 800 databases, including 850,000 decisions, and 65,500 journal articles and other items of commentary. Its databases cover, as well as legislation and caselaw (from 1788), over 100 law journals and scholarship repositories, and all law reform reports and treaties. The AustLII Communities facilities include content developed and updated by organisations and user groups external to AustLII, including “law handbooks” and textbooks. The principal aim of the FALM, re-affirmed at its 2007 meeting, is the provision of assistance by its members to organisations who wish to provide free access to law in countries where that has not yet occurred. It also provides mutual support to organisations already providing free access to law who wish to join the FALM.
The LII was originally based on Gopher and provided access to United States Supreme Court decisions and the US Code. Its original mission included the intent to “carry out applied research on the use of digital information technology in the distribution of legal information,…and to make law more accessible.” In the early years of LII, Bruce developed Cello the first web browser for Microsoft Windows. Since 2007 the IRS has distributed its IRS Tax Products DVD with LII’s version of 26 USC (Internal Revenue Code). The Juristiches Internetprojekt Saarbrücken (JPS), known also as Law Web Saarbrücken, is a project coordinated by the Institute of Law and Informatics (Institut für Rechtsinformatik) at the Universität des Saarlandes in Germany. Until late 2007 the website had interfaces in 17 languages (see the archive at Law Web Saarbrücken), but lack of use of the other language interfaces have resulted in the new interface only being in German.
For example, ITTIG regularly provides updates to the DoGi database of legal scholarship data. Philippines law from the LawPhil Project (2001-) republished on AsianLII includes over 50,000 decisions of its Supreme Court. “Legal information institute” (or “LII”), as used here, therefore refers to a subset of the providers of free access to law, namely those from across the world who have decided to collaborate both politically and technically. After 25 years of development, these LIIs, taken together, continue to be the most coordinated and among the largest providers of free access to legal information, but they are far from alone in providing free access to legal information. This article is not about “free access to law” per se, but about a particular grouping of providers of free access to legal information. LII was established in 1992 at Cornell Law School by Professor Peter Martin and Tom Bruce with a $250,000 multi-year startup grant from the National Center for Automated Information Research.
