Membership of the FALM is normally by invitation, with members nominating new candidates, although self-nomination is rare but possible. Consensus of existing members is required, but will now be guided by the formal membership criteria. There is an in-person FALM meeting held conjointly with each LvI Conference, and since 2011 Minutes and meeting photos have been published. The FALM Secretariat of nine or less members, consisting of three past and future conference hosts, an editor of the FALM-affiliated Journal of Open Access to Law (JOAL) and four or five co-opted members manages FALM business between LvI meetings, guided by a set of Administrative Procedures.
1. The WorldLII Consortium
AsianLII utilises the WorldLII Catalog for Asian countries, and a similar approach to country ‘home pages’ as is used by WorldLII. AustLII’s development of AsianLII in 10 developing countries is supported by AusAID, with the aim that independent LIIs will emerge over time. AsianLII is supported by many of the regional law organisations, and by ‘Country Supporting Institutions’ in many of the countries covered. The Legal Information Institute (LII) is a non-profit, public service of Cornell Law School that provides no-cost access to current American and international legal research sources online at law.cornell.edu.
PacLII is the most substantial free access to law facility in developing countries, and was the earliest regional system. A distinguishing feature of PacLII since inception has been its priority on digitising legislation and cases from paper sources, due to the lack of digital sources. Since 2000 PacLII has received grants from New Zealand’s overseas funding agency (NZODA), and from AusAID. PacLII is regarded as indispensable by judges in the Pacific region, particularly for how it allows them to find precedents from jurisdictions similar to their own. There as yet few government-based FALM members, but government-based ‘LIIs’ face different funding challenges.
- CommonLII provides a facility to search over 560 databases from all 53 Commonwealth countries, plus some territories and other common law jurisdictions (Hong Kong and Ireland).
- Another aspect of the collaboration between LIIs involved in the WorldLII consortium is the free-access LawCite citator, located on WorldLII and on other LIIs that wish to use it.
- 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.
- “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.
- 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.
LII has an extensive collection of law from the Supreme Court of the United States. It hosts all Supreme Court decisions since 1990 and over 600 historic Supreme Court pre-1992 decisions in web form (by party name, by authoring justice, and by topic). Since its inception, the Legal Information Institute has inspired others around the world to develop namesake operations. Since its inception, the Legal Information Institute has inspired others around the world to develop namesake operations.6 These services are part of the Free Access to Law Movement.
The ‘Law via Internet’ Conferences have been the principal means by which cooperation between LIIs has been established. The first was hosted by AustLII in 1997, as were the 2nd (1999), 3rd (2001) and 5th (2003). LexUM/CanLII hosted the 4th (2002), French organisations (as FrLII) hosted the 6th (2004), PacLII the 7th (2006), and LexUM/CanLII the 8th (2008). Many of the conference papers are available online in an AustLII database (1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005), on the FrLII website (2004), or on LexUM (2002, 2008) and comprise a considerable resource on legal information systems.
The non-profit organizations wex lii legal information institute ZamLII databases can also be searched on CommonLII, with users returned to the ZamLII databases. At the time of writing, access was not available to ZamLII’s servers. SAFLII is having discussion with ZamLII concerning cooperation. The Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII), established in 2002, has been operated since 2003 by the China IT & Law Centre jointly established by Department of Computer Science and the Faculty of Law of the University of Hong Kong. It provides 12 databases of the law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR). The case law covers most significant Courts and Tribunals, in considerable depth in some cases (the Court of Appeal back to 1968).
The “Law via Internet” Conferences
It is a multi-LII system which largely depends upon the content of other LIIs (AustLII, BAILII, PacLII, HKLII, NZLII and SAFLII), but also adds over 50 databases from 19 Commonwealth countries which do not yet have their own LIIs (mainly in South Asia and the Caribbean). Part of CommonLII’s purpose is to encourage new LII development in these countries and regions, and AustLII is developing partnerships there. CommonLII provides a facility to search over 560 databases from all 53 Commonwealth countries, plus some territories and other common law jurisdictions (Hong Kong and Ireland). CommonLII utilises the WorldLII Catalog for the countries it covers, and a similar approach to country ‘home pages’ as is used by WorldLII. Some special search facilities allow all legislation, cases or law reform to be searched together, or for all countries in a region to be searched together.
Overview: LIIs, FALM, and Free Access to Law
CommonLII is supported by a range of Commonwealth institutions, including the Commonwealth Law Ministers Meeting and the Commonwealth Secretariat Legal and Constitutional Division, but its funding support to date has come largely from Australian academic and government sources. For example, the US Library of Congress GLIN system obtained government funding for many years, but did not survive losing that funding in 2012, and has not yet been revived. In many developing countries, there are no funds available for development of online legislation or case law unless it is provided by international aid agencies such as the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, CIDA or AusAID. The sustainability of these free access facilities, particularly in terms of updating data, often becomes problematic once the initial aid funding ceases. Where this happens, engagement with the FALM members, and the assistance they can provide, may be valuable.
Part I: Development of the LIIs and Free Access to Law Movement
This article is not about ‘free access to law’ per se, but about a particular grouping of providers of free access to legal information. In many countries the first parties to exploit the advantages of the web for providing legal information came from the academic sector rather than government, and did so with an explicit ideology of free access provision. Within a few years of the first legal information institute in 1992 the first group of such organisations became known collectively as ‘legal information institutes’ or ‘LIIs’ and those expressions became synonymous with free access to legal information.
Scope and membership of the FALM
- From a leadership standpoint, the board of directors must hold meetings at least annually.
- The World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII) (2002) was the first multi-LII site, initially making searchable data from all the founding members of FALM.
- A copy of all LII data is held in Sydney by AustLII, replicated daily using rsync.
- Membership later expanded to include some government-based members (eg the Kenya Law Reports, a semi-government body), and a few commercial organisations (eg Lexum, the Canadian company which built and maintains CanLII).
AustLII and LexUM both continue to assist development of LIIs in other countries (working on systems yet to be announced), and although their approaches have been somewhat different, both have been effective. The proliferation of small LIIs in countries all across Africa (although the majority are in anglophone countries) is very striking. The Southern African Legal Information Institute (SAFLII) (2003) publishes legal information from South Africa and seven other southern and eastern African countries (Angola, Botswana, Mauritius, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, and Tanzania), and some regional institutions.
The web provided the key element required for free public access – a low cost distribution mechanism. For publishers it was close to a “no cost” distribution mechanism if they were not required to pay for outgoing bandwidth. Prior to the web there were many online legal information systems and numerous legal information products distributed on CD-ROM, but there was no significant provision of free access to legal information anywhere in the world. For publishers it was close to a ‘no cost’ distribution mechanism if they were not required to pay for outgoing bandwidth. In 2000 the LexUM team at the University of Montreal, which had published the decisions of Canada’s Supreme Court on the Internet since the early 1990s, built the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), acting on behalf of the organisations of the Canadian legal profession.
The Legal Information Institute was started at Cornell University Law School in 1992 with a number of databases primarily of US federal law (particularly the US Code and US Supreme Court decisions). “The LII”, as it became known, was the first significant source of free access to law on the Internet, and demonstrated that a free access service could provide both a high quality of document presentation, and very high rates of access. The LII has not attempted to develop comprehensive US State and Territory databases, but has focused on federal primary resources (Constitution; U.S. Code; Code of Federal Regulations (CFR); Supreme Court; and Federal Rules). Other resources developed by the LII include Wex, a user-generated legal dictionary and encyclopedia; an Annotated Constitution; and a Supreme Court Bulletin.
LexUM
The Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG) is a research center belonging to the Italian National Research Council. ITTIG is involved in a broad range of activities including research, specialized training, consultancy and technical-scientific transferal in the field of information and communications technology applied to law and public administration. It produces and distributes various national and international databases and developed specialized tools and software for online legal information retrieval. Among these, ITTIG contributed to the conception of the Italian national portal of public laws, Norme in Rete, a distributed database of legislative material available on the various websites of the public administration.
It is aimed at helping the general public to find relevant Hong Kong legal information (see CLIC leaflet) and is funded by the HKSAR Department of Justice. This LII networking, incomplete though it is, offers very substantial content and facilities not available from commercial legal publishers. Furthermore, the global network the LIIs have built compares well with its two commercial counterparts (the international portals of LexisNexis and Westlaw) in terms of global scope, though not necessarily in depth for individual countries. The number of databases from each of the LIIs listed above which are searchable via each of the three portals is set out below (as at December 2016). Other FALM members also assist in providing data which is searchable via the portals.
The Declaration’s statement that “bodies that create or control public legal information should provide access to it so that it can be published by other parties” refers to official bodies (courts, governments etc). It does not mean that an independent LII must declare its content to be “open content” (available for re-use by anyone), but only that a LII must not hinder others from obtaining the data from its official sources and republishing it (as stated later in the Declaration). In some countries where doctrines of Crown Copyright still apply (for example, Australia), a LII is not at liberty to permit users to reproduce its data for all purposes. For some LIIs, the question of re-use is further complicated by privacy and strategic issues.