Cases
Open case law is here at last
My piece about new Case Law service from the The National Archives.
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 […]
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 […]
ICLR online – who’s putting it through its paces?
I’m wondering who’s using ICLR online and how they’re getting on? The service launched 18 October to a list of over 350 delegates that was “fairly select and exclusive due to the nature of our Council”. Before the event no doubt there was lots of direct mail and email promotion by ICLR to its customer […]
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 […]
Free case law – an overview
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 […]
More on Legal Opinions on Google Scholar
From the Law Librarian Blog on a one and a half hour interview with Google engineer Anurag Acharya on the Law Librarian Blog Talk Radio looking into Google Scholar Legal Opinions and Journals: Google designed this for people who know how to use Google at the very least, and to be successful with mining cases […]
Supreme Court judgments – where to read the full story
Thanks to Jennie Law for pointing out that the new UKSC needs to get its publishing act together. It’s been in existence for almost four weeks now and has the most advanced court technology in the world. It delivered its first judgment on 14 October, yet no cases yet appear in the Decided Cases section. […]
CaseCheck crosses the border
CaseCheck, headed by Stephen Moore, has since late 2007 been delivering case summaries from the Scottish Courts and EAT in a Web 2.0 environment. Now, in a tie-up with Law Brief Publishing, CaseCheck has added 4,000 England and Wales and EU case summaries from Law Brief Update. Law Brief Publishing was set up by Tim […]
AustLII case law developments
The good people at AustLII have been working on a citator for common law cases and the fruits of their labours can now be checked out at LawCite (Alpha). LawCite is an international case citator and is the first product of a 3 year Australian Research Council funded project to research into automated systems for […]
CaseCheck
Here’s a great new Law 2.0 initiative. CaseCheck, headed by Stephen Moore, offers case summaries from the Scottish Courts and EAT, delivered latest-first and also categorised, with RSS feeds. Selected committed users author the summaries; all users can add comments. Does that sound like a familiar formula? Yes, it’s built with an open source blog […]
Open Law leading the way
The recent accessions page on BAILII shows that a number of leading judgments from the 17th century onwards have recently been added. These are the first fruits of the BAILII/JISC Open Law project which aims to identify significant older judgments to which reference is regularly needed in legal education. JISC is the Joint Information Systems […]
What’s up with Daily Law Notes?
ICLR is in the process of morphing its Daily Law Notes service into WLR Daily. “Welcome to the new look case summary service from ICLR that replaces the Daily Law Notes. The service remains the same; providing free 24 hour access to summaries but in a new easier to use format.” What this, in fact, […]
More free law – open access to judgments for legal teaching
On 5 May JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) and BAILII unveiled the Open Law project which has the potential to transform the delivery of legal teaching and public access to legal materials in the UK. Open Law will focus on the core needs of staff and students on law courses at all levels, including […]
The road to free law
Published in the Solicitors Journal, October 2000 [links updated] As most practitioners will be aware, there exists no freely available, comprehensive and up-to-date database of UK law on the internet, but progress has been made. The Statute Law Database? There is no sign yet of the Statute Law Database. A note on the Lord Chancellor’s […]
