Provision Of Legal Information Research Articles

Undocumented immigrants’ and immigrant women’s access to healthcare services in the Basque Country (Spain)

ABSTRACT Background Immigrant populations experience diverse barriers to access healthcare services in the host countries. Among them, undocumented immigrants have more restricted legal access conditions and higher risk of having poorer health. Likewise, women are more likely to seek healthcare and face gender-based factors that hinder their access. Objective This thesis analysed the access of undocumented immigrants and immigrant women to public healthcare services in the Basque Country (Spain). Methods The thesis contained three sub-studies, carried out with qualitative and quantitative methods. For the quantitative approach, the trend in the number of consultations in a free clinic for undocumented immigrants was analysed before and after the launch of a new law, using a negative binomial regression analysis (n = 9,272). For the qualitative approach, qualitative content analysis was applied to 25 in-depth interviews with 14 immigrant women and 11 free clinic healthcare professionals. Results No clear relationship was found between the application of more restrictive legal conditions for immigrants to access public healthcare services and the trend of attendance of undocumented immigrants to a free clinic. Access of undocumented immigrants and immigrant women to healthcare services was subject to barriers dependent on their characteristics, health system functioning, legal requirements and a stereotyped and poor social consideration of immigrants, shared by professionals at the health centres. Meanwhile, provision of legal information and support by individual professionals, social organizations and personal networks represented main facilitators for accessing. Conclusions For the access of undocumented immigrants and immigrant women, structural and individual barriers based on their social vulnerability were found. Among others, gender-based violence reduced women’s possibility to access healthcare services and being undocumented led to restricted access entitlement and to fear rejection at health centres. Therefore, besides ensuring immigrants’ legal entitlement, there is need of promoting rights-based attention to get more inclusive health systems.

Utilising AI in the legal assistance sector—Testing a role for legal information institutes

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in law has again become of great interest to lawyers and government. Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) have played a significant role in the provision of legal information via the web. The concept of ‘free access to law’ is not static, and the evolution of its principles now requires a response from providers of free access to legal information (‘a LII response’) to this renewed prominence of AI. This should include improving and expanding free access to legal advice. This paper proposes, and proposes to test, one approach that LIIs might take in the use of AI (specifically, ‘decision support’ or ‘intelligent assistance’ (IA) technologies), an approach that leverages the very large legal information assets that some LIIs have built over the past two decades. This approach focuses on how LIIs can assist providers of free legal advice (the ‘legal assistance sector’) to serve their clients. We consider the constraints that the requirement of ‘free’ imposes (on both the legal assistance sector and on LIIs), including on what types of free legal advice systems are sustainable, and what roles LIIs may realistically play in the development of such a ‘commons of free legal advice’. We suggest guidelines for development of such systems. The AI-related services and tools that the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) is providing (the ‘DataLex’ platform), and how they could be used to achieve these goals, are outlined.

Utilising AI in the Legal Assistance Sector – Testing a Role for Legal Information Institutes

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in law has again become of great interest to lawyers and government. Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) have played a significant role in the provision of legal information via the web. The concept of ‘free access to law’ is not static, and its principles now require a LII response to the renewed prominence of AI, possibly to include improving and expanding free access to legal advice. This paper proposes, and proposes to test, one approach that LIIs might take in the use of AI (specifically, ‘decision support’ or ‘intelligent assistance’ (IA) technologies), an approach that leverages the very large legal information assets that some LIIs have built over the past two decades. This approach focuses on how LIIs can assist providers of free legal advice (the ‘legal assistance sector’) to serve their clients. We consider the constraints that the requirement of ‘free’ imposes (on both the legal assistance sector and on LIIs), including on what types of free legal advice systems are sustainable, and what roles LIIs may realistically play in the development of such a ‘commons of free legal advice’. We suggest guidelines for development of such systems. The AI-related services and tools that the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) is providing (the ‘DataLex’ platform) are outlined.

All under one umbrella? The Family Guide to National Insurance 1948

The Family Guide to National Insurance was produced in 1948 to coincide with the introduction of the British National Insurance scheme, inspired by the Beveridge Report. The Guide tells people about their legal rights, but it also symbolises a mid-twentieth-century enthusiasm for the welfare state. Making a model of the Guide for a socio-legal workshop helped to consider the physicality of the booklet and to think about how it might have been received by its readers. This article explores the meaning of the booklet, considering its form and its content but also its reception by the public. A survey conducted in 1948 concluded that the Guide had been unsuccessful in reaching those who could most benefit from it, particularly women. This article uses the findings of this survey to consider the booklet as a piece of public legal information and the role of legal consciousness in legal information provision.

Evaluation of Diversification Techniques for Legal Information Retrieval

“Public legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity. Maximizing access to this information promotes justice and the rule of law”. In accordance with the aforementioned declaration on free access to law by legal information institutes of the world, a plethora of legal information is available through the Internet, while the provision of legal information has never before been easier. Given that law is accessed by a much wider group of people, the majority of whom are not legally trained or qualified, diversification techniques should be employed in the context of legal information retrieval, as to increase user satisfaction. We address the diversification of results in legal search by adopting several state of the art methods from the web search, network analysis and text summarization domains. We provide an exhaustive evaluation of the methods, using a standard dataset from the common law domain that we objectively annotated with relevance judgments for this purpose. Our results: (i) reveal that users receive broader insights across the results they get from a legal information retrieval system; (ii) demonstrate that web search diversification techniques outperform other approaches (e.g., summarization-based, graph-based methods) in the context of legal diversification; and (iii) offer balance boundaries between reinforcing relevant documents or sampling the information space around the legal query.

Queensland Community Legal Centres' Use of Information Technology to Deliver Access to Justice

AbstractIn Queensland, Australia, community legal centres utilise a range of different types of information technology to provide legal advice and assistance to their clients, which include marginalised and disadvantaged groups. In this article Emma Phillips and James Farrell considers the use and efficacy of different types of information technology within the community legal sector, discussing the findings of recent empirical research on this issue in the context of the relevant research literature. The article then explores issues associated with the use of information technology in the provision of legal information and advice, including the limitations associated with this technology in the context of the delivery of legal assistance to vulnerable clients.

Professional Support Lawyers and their Role in Legal Information Provision

AbstractMark Stanley and Tamara Eisenschitz examine the relationship between professional support lawyers and information professionals in law firms of varying sizes. The results broadly support the hypothesis that tensions in larger firms between the two groups are less apparent. More importantly tensions are reduced where each group is doing clearly delineated work, irrespective of the firm's size. Tensions between the two groups are no longer the issue they once were, but these could reignite, especially if information professionals with legal qualifications and PSLs without fee earning experience vye for similar work. This paper recommends that to avoid frictions it is essential for law firm managers to get to grips with the nature and capabilities of these two groups and utilise them appropriately.

From Pages to Clicks – the Questionnaire

Janice Edwards, Librarian at Maclay Murray & Spens, and Chair of the LIM Editorial Board, looks at the responses to the Pages to Clicks questionnaire distributed to members via Lis-Law in the Summer, and its implications for the future provision of legal information.

Challenges for Legal Information Provision in Undergraduate Education: The University of Zimbabwe Law Library

I would like to begin by thanking our hosts and organizers of this Conference for the opportunity afforded me to be present at the IALL, and also to be able to discuss issues relating to legal information provision and transmission in Zimbabwe, a topic which is sadly overlooked and neglected.

Legal Information Provision in the Age of the Laptop

This is very much a personal opinion on the potential demise of the traditional library (which some would argue has already gone). My aim was to reassure library and information professionals that there is a role left for our profession in the world of lawyers who are able to access information at their desks; a world which includes professional support lawyers and know how databases. This is no place for the fainthearted, and especially not for the stereotypical librarian – if such a creature exists. This article will only scratch the surface of some issues, so I welcome comments, feedback and downright disagreement – sdoe@sidley.com

What's new in Legal Information

Over the last six months there have been a number of developments in legal information provision. The major publishers have released new services, and have updated existing products. As a busy information professional it can be difficult to keep up to date with all the changes, and there is not always time to evaluate the benefits of one service over another.

Commonwealth Caribbean Legal Materials: A Select Subject Bibliography

This Bibliography draws together materials authored or edited by librarians and members of the legal community in the Commonwealth Caribbean and further afield. It was compiled as part of a research study onThe Provision of Legal Information in the Commonwealth Caribbean, in an effort to bring together and disseminate a listing of materials, particularly those on the legal information and the various laws and legal systems of the Caribbean.

Murder in the Library or the Death of the Librarian

First of all, apologies for the title. This article is based on a talk I was asked to give to the Welsh Law Librarians Group at their inaugural meeting. I was allocated the graveyard slot in the afternoon and it was intended to be something to make everyone wake up. There is nothing like suggesting librarians are no longer needed to do just that.The purpose of this piece is to look at developments in legal information provision — and information provision generally — over the past five to ten years.

The Provision of Legal Information to Rural Populations in Anglophone Africa

The Provision of Legal Information to Rural Populations in Anglophone Africa

Expert Group Meeting on Population Distribution and Migration

As part of the preparation for the up-coming International Conference on Population and Development, an expert group meeting on population distribution and migration was held in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, in January 1993. Participants considered the scope of migration which included a net internal migration of between 75 million and 1 billion people during 1975-85 and international migration which census data put at 77 million in the 1970s and early 1980s. World economic trends during the 1980s were reviewed, as were changes in the nature and configuration of various countries. The following topics were explored: patterns of population distribution and development, policies affecting internal migration and population distribution, internal migration and its implications for development, economic aspects of international migration, international migration in a changing world, international migration between developing countries, and refugees and asylum-seekers. 37 recommendations were prepared for governments, social institutions, and the international community. The first 10 urge that population distribution be an integral part of development policies, that government policies and expenditures be evaluated for their contribution to social and economic goals, that the capacity and competence of municipal authorities to manage urban development be increased, that government funding be decentralized, that economic and institutional links be developed between urban centers and surrounding rural areas, that alternatives to out-migration from rural areas be created, that the income-earning capacities of migrants be improved, that group mobilization by and for people affected by migration be encouraged, that adequate access to health services and family planning be assured, and that the underlying causes of environmental degradation, natural disasters, and war be addressed with mechanisms developed to protect victims. 13 recommendations deal with international migration and call for appropriate policies, cooperation, protection of human rights, an end to discrimination toward women, the normalization of family life among documented migrants, the promotion of good community relations between migrants and the rest of society, the guarantee of equal economic and social rights to longterm foreign residents and facilitation of their naturalization, the provision of legal information to potential migrants, the provision of equal educational and training opportunities to the children of migrants, and the institution of sanctions against the organizers of illegal migration. The next 7 recommendations urge that the causes of forced migration be addressed, that refugees receive assistance and protection, that the responsibility for refugees be shared equitably, that the right to asylum be protected, that appropriate repatriation programs be supported, that long-standing refugee populations be helped to achieve self-sufficiency, and that the specific needs of refugee women be addressed. The final 7 recommendations cover data and research needs regarding population distribution and migration and urge support for research on population distribution, the collection of national statistics, a review of existing standard definitions and classifications of rural and urban populations and of international migration, cooperation in the registration and monitoring of refugee populations, and the promotion of an exchange of information on trends and policies of international migration.