The Meaning of 'Free Access to Legal Information': A Twenty Year Evolution

Abstract

Abstract. Free online access to legal information is approaching maturity in some parts of the world, after two decades of development, but elsewhere is still in its early stages of development. Nowhere has it been realised fully. The main question asked in this paper is what should "free access" mean in relation to legal information in order for it to be fully effective? As with software, we must ask whether free access to law is "free as in beer, or free as in speech?" The six most significant attempts over the last twenty years to answers this question are analysed to show that a substantial degree of international consensus has developed on what "free access to legal information" now means. Of thirty separate identifiable principles, most are found in more than one statement of principles, and many are now relatively common in the practices of both States and providers of free access to legal information (government and NGO). Many concern measure to avoid the development of monopolies in publication of the core legal documents of a jurisdiction. Which principles are essential to the meaning of "free access to legal information", and which are only desirable, is usually clear. Two complementary meanings of "free access to legal information" emerge. The first states the obligations of the State in relation to ensuring free access to legal information -but not necessarily providing it. The key elements concern the right of republication. The second meaning states the conditions under which an organisation can correctly be said to be a provider of free access to legal information. We argue that a better definition is needed than the "consensus" suggests, and propose one based on the avoidance of conflicts 2 with maximisation of the quality and quantity of free access. One use of such a set of principles is to help evaluate the extent to which any particular jurisdiction has implemented free access to legal information. A brief example is given of Australia, a county with a generally good record but some deficiencies. Finally the paper considers what steps should be taken to most effectively realise a reformulated concept of "free access to legal information", by civil society, by States at the national level, and at the international level.

Semantic Web for the Legal Domain: The next step

“…We've also done a lot with the automated extraction of statutory and regulatory definitions, with particular attention to scoping language, in order to link all defined terms in the statutes and regulations back to the relevant definitions." Thus, LIIs set out the principles of legal information and FALM principles -the so-called Hague principles (2008) 17 -with Linked Open Data (LOD) [29,53] 18 to enhance the quality of search and enrich the level of the information provided. LIIs have recently launched a scholarly journal on governance and models of legal publishing.…”

“…Several national and EU Esprit, FP5, FP6, and FP7 projects funded the construction or refinement of upper (foundational), core, and domain and linguistic ontologies [24]. 53 The methodological stages of knowledge representation, the iterative lifecycle of legal ontology building, and lessons learned have been carefully explained and discussed in several monographs [14,26,61,89]. There are five dimensions of law that have been addressed through computational modelling: the structure of legal documents, norms and normative systems, concepts and legal conceptions, cases and precedents, argumentation and legal reasoning [107].…”

Open Law: Technology in Service of the Rule of Law

“…Drawing on the work of Greenleaf, Mowbray and Chung [17] and The Declaration on Free Access to Law we can define an open law system as one which ensures that primary legal materials are available for consultation, use, and re-use; this access is provided free of charge.…”

Application of an Ecosystem Methodology Based on Legal Language Processing for the Transformation of Court Decisions and Legal Opinions into Open Data

“…Peruginelli describes law as "the operating system of our society", stating that "the nature of law is so pervasive, it becomes essential for everybody to know about it" [2]. Initiatives such as the "free access to law movement" [3] and public accessibility projects will probably result in governments providing online access to even more legal information resources in the future [4]. The volume of these heterogeneous documents is expected to constantly rise, forming datasets that show many of the characteristics that define Big Data.…”