Access to Justice 2.0: Access to Legislation And Beyond

Abstract

This article provides a conceptual account of 'access to legislation' and 'access to legislative information' ('A2L'), which consolidates an important and relatively new movement within the access to justice field. According to this new conceptualisation, A2L refers to the ability of people to access and understand the content of laws which govern their lives, and therefore requires, as a normative matter, more than a formal promulgation of the law by the state. A2L stems from a State's duty to provide -and the correlative right of the individual to gain -effective access to legislative information. Drawing from global experiences, the article brings together three arenas in which actions are taken for the realisation of A2L: electronic legislative databases, plain language drafting and legal literacy, in order to present a broad and coherent conception of A2L. It is argued that the wide range of possible activities through which A2L can be carried out nowadays, sets a new (or, 'Neo') high standard of state obligation to enable and facilitate such access.

Linking legislative openness to open data in Canada

“…Infomediaries also may be viewed as opportunities to outsource government's or legislatures’ responsibility to move beyond mere availability and towards accessibility of content (Sieber and Johnson ). As a basic principle of constitutional democracy, access to legislative information should stem directly from legislatures (Roznai and Mordechay ). Presumably, legislatures should not rely on infomediaries to make sense of the information.…”

“…Presumably, legislatures should not rely on infomediaries to make sense of the information. Scraping according to keywords and subsequent structuration is not likely to supply the legal literacy espoused by Roznai and Mordechay (). Non‐profit infomediaries also tend to analyze open data to identify any malfeasance or corruption.…”

“…leaves modern‐day readers to struggle with long sentences, archaic words and strings of synonyms or near‐synonyms” (Day , 40). Roznai and Mordechay () argue that meaningful access to legislative information demands plain language. Achieving plain language is difficult: the audience is hard to identify or anticipate; plain language does not equal clear language; and accuracy of meaning may clash with plain language (Hunt ; Williamson and Fallon ).…”

Temporary legislation, better regulation, and experimentalist governance: An empirical study

“…Our findings suggest that temporary legislation can create problems of legal clarity in the more basic sense of not knowing which laws are currently in force. This finding requires attention, especially given the growing acceptance of the idea that people have a right to be easily informed about the valid laws governing their lives (Roznai & Mordechay ). I do not think, however, that this in itself is a fatal argument against temporary legislation.…”

The limits of plain legal language: understanding the comprehensible style in law

“…4 The limits of plain law 4.1 The importance of pragmatics At the end of the first section, I discussed the main criticisms of the plain-legal movements. Continuing that line of thought here, I want to argue that, if we want to understand the 9 The new tools the Internet provides in access to justice was realised very early and both commercial publishers and governments have initiated projects to exploit it (Roznai and Mordechai, 2015). The potential of legal websites to perform research on laymen's understanding of law has been also recognised (e.g.…”