Public Legal Information Research Articles

Linguistic complexity of public legal information texts for young persons

Abstract The present study explores the linguistic complexity (LC) of public legal information (PLI) texts for young persons by deploying the Hallidayan model of lexical density and grammatical intricacy. It examines how the Australian legal statutes’ grammatical intricacy and lexical density are reformulated into PLI texts to make them more accessible for a specific vulnerable group. The findings reveal that although the PLI texts were claimed to be written in plain language, they trade some types of complexity for others. The paper extends Halliday’s model of complexity by adding lower rank complexes and embedded clause complexes as realisations of intricacy and density. It proposes “embedded intricacy” as a feature of a hybrid of spoken and written language. Furthermore, the study suggests reconsidering how law can be recontextualised for young persons in a more accessible way.

Law Reporting and Public Access in the Courts: Is Too Much a Good Thing?

AbstractThis article by Paul Magrath considers the role of law reporting not only as a service in support of the administration of justice and legal education, but also in the wider context of open justice, transparency and public legal information. It traces the history of law reporting and considers the pros and cons of the more comprehensive publication of judgments of the senior courts made possible by digitisation and the internet, in comparison with the more selective approach adopted in the past. The article is loosely based on a presentation given at the annual conference of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians held in Bournemouth in June 2019.

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.

Public Legal Information and Law-Making in Parliament

Public Legal Information and Law-Making in Parliament

Law Via the Internet 2015 Conference

AbstractFree access to public legal information for the general public and professionals promotes justice and the rule of law. Presenters at the 2015 Law via the Internet conference discussed projects using the power of technology combined with expert human input to make information accessible, and to extract new information from large document collections. Although the scale is different, there are similarities in the ways in which indexers and informaticians explore meaning, develop standards and consider user needs to make information widely accessible. Glenda Browne reports on the conference.*

Library social partnership development in a cluster space: Belgorod region experience

This research is an applied one and logically continues author’s studies devoted to social partnership development in the library-information field. The institute of social partnership (including the library-information sphere) evolves with the cluster strategies development as an integral part of the Russian community strategy. At the same time an integrated approach and unified methodology to study this problem, as well as description of effective methods and technologies of the library staged development in the social cluster space are needed. Technologies of the social partnership with library participation are a part of the social policy cluster aimed at maximizing to satisfy both material and spiritual needs of the general population. Recent years studying prospects of the municipal library activity are particularly relevant, as forward movement of the library policy in this direction allows positioning the interests of library and information institutions as coinciding with the interests of major members of the local community. Realizing these perspectives is one of the most important conditions of the effective innovative policy formation of the modern municipal library. The objects of study are municipal libraries of Belgorod region using effective profiled strategies of social interaction in their activity. The study aim is analyzing the experience of municipal libraries developing educational technologies for social interaction in the social cluster space of Belgorod region. Objectives are the following: to identify main goals and tasks of the cluster strategy in the library-information sphere of Belgorod region; to propose a typology of main clusters in Belgorod region; to objectify activity main direction for Belgorod libraries according to their types. Participating libraries in the cluster policy indirectly promotes changes in users’ life quality, development of new cultural needs by providing quality public legal-information services, adaptation of rural population to modern life conditions, help in identifying new niches in the labor market, including information ones. Main conclusions: territorial characteristics extrapolated to municipal libraries activities largely determine the general direction of library development. In the modern period preconditions of libraries participation in the regional clustering (modernization of material-technical base, development of regional, municipal, local normative documents, the experience of empirical data theoretical generalization) are largely implemented in Belgorod region. The practical component of the study is the possibility of adapting the libraries experience of Belgorod region into libraries of other territories of the Russian Federation, understanding cooperation of the library social institution, business-structures, nonprofit organizations and regional and municipal authorities.

Judgments as Public Information

AbstractThis article is written by Paul Magrath who is the Head of Product Development and Online Content at the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales (ICLR). His article explores the issues surrounding the custodianship of those public legal documents, such as court judgments, which form primary sources of law but which may also contain private data, and looks at the way custodians of such data can also act as gatekeepers, enhancing or inhibiting access by the public as well as more specialised users. It expands upon an article published by Infolaw.co.uk entitled “Custodians and gatekeepers: maintaining access to public legal information”, and refers to recent case law involving the tension between information in the public domain and the individual's privacy and “right to be forgotten” by search engines. The article also looks at how court documents are made accessible in other jurisdictions and imagines how things might be improved in our own courts, before concluding that the model of a not-for-profit organisation, such as the ICLR or BAILII (the British and Irish Legal Information Institute), may work as well if not better than public or private management of judgments and other legal public information.

Free Access to Law Movement: Indian Perspectives

Globalization is the process of integrating nations and people – politically, economically and culturally – into a larger community. The Internet is the key factor leading to globalization and information revolution as well. The Internet also led to the information overload and simultaneously speedy and free access to information. Free access to law contributes to equality before law and access to public legal information supports the rule of law. RTI Act felicitated to access general as well as public legal information. Open access to law is a key for providing universal access to legal literature. The FALM is an affiliation of 40 LIIs under Montreal Declaration. LII of India, JUDIS, Indiacode, Indiakanoon and IndLII are Indian players in this movement directly or indirectly. Almost all the law schools and old law department of various universities and BCI publishing their scholarly journals in print formant out of which only two have online presence at DOAJ. India is lagging behind in the field of online publishing and free access to legal scholarly publications. The law schools are in the best position to steward this movement because they have the obligation and also necessary technical resources. The paper concludes that LII should be developed to be the better alternative of the commercial websites then only it would serve the public in real sense.

Private Standards Organizations and Public Law

Legal information institutes ofthe world, meeting in Montreal, declare that:* Public legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity. Maximising access to this information promotes justice and the rule of law;* Public legal information is digital common property and should be accessible to all on a non-profit basis and free of charge;* Organizations such as legal information institutes have the right to publish public legal information and the government bodies that create or control that information should provide access to it so that it can be published by other parties.We hear of tyrants, and those cruel ones: but, whatever we may have felt, we have never heard of any tyrant in such sort cruel, as to punish men for disobedience to laws or orders which he had kept them from the knowledge of.ABSTRACTSimplified, universal access to law is one of the important transformations worked by the digital age. With the replacement of physical by digital copies, citizens ordinarily need travel only to the nearest computer to find and read the texts that bind them. Lagging behind this development, however, has been computer access to standards developed by private standards development organizations, often under the umbrella of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and then converted by agency actions incorporating them by reference into legal obligations. To discover what colors the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires for use in work-place caution signs, one must purchase from ANSI the standard OSHA has referenced in its regulations, at the price ANSI chooses to charge for it.The regulations governing incorporation by reference as a federal matter have not been revised since 1982, and therefore do not address the changes the digital age has brought about in what it means for incorporated matter to be reasonably available, as 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(1) requires. This Article seeks to bridge that gap, suggesting a variety of approaches that might bring the use of incorporation by reference into conformity with modem rulemaking practices and respect the general proposition that documents stating citizens' legal obligations are not subject to copyright, while at the same time both honoring clear federal statutory policy favoring the use of privately developed standards in rulemaking and respecting the needs standards organizations have to find reasonable means to support the costs of their operations. Business models created in the age of print need to change; the challenge is to find ways to permit the market in privately developed voluntary standards to thrive, without thereby permitting the monopoly pricing of access to governing law.Introduction 499A. Voluntary Consensus Standards 499B. Their Occasional Conversion Into Legal Obligations 502C. And Hence the Problem to Be Discussed 507I. The Uncertain State of the Caselaw on the Copyrightability of Standards That Have Been Converted into Law 511n. Federal Regulation of Incorporation by Reference 518A. The Office of the Federal Register 518B. Copyright Preservation as Affirmative Federal Policy? Congress, the NTTAA, the NIST, and the OMB 524C. Possibilities of Change: An Administrative Conference Study, Rulemaking Proposal, and Reconsideration of OMB Circular A-119 529HI. Can the Public Have its Access-to-Law Cake and Standards Developers Eat Revenue from Standards Sales Too? 537A. Proposed Rulemaking and Digital Rights Management 537B. Standards Developed in the Expectation of Incorporation 543C. Standards Developed Independently of Any Expectation of Their Incorporation 546D. Must Incorporation by Reference Create Legal Obligations? 549IV. Changing Part 51 555Conclusion 559IntroductionA. Voluntary Consensus StandardsThis Article addresses the public/private confusions over standards developing organizations' work. …

Challenges for Free Access to Law in a Multi-Jurisdictional Developing Country: Building the Legal Information Institute of India

This article analyses the complexities involved in providing free public online access to the “public legal information” of the Indian legal system. It starts with some of the causes of the complexity of Indian legal information then describes the considerable progress that has previously been made in the provision of free access to some types of legal information, but why the result is still below international standards. The article then explains a project to remedy some of these deficiencies, the Legal Information Institute of India (LII of India), being carried out by eight Indian law schools and an international partner. It has developed in its first year of public operation, the LII of India, a system with over 750,000 searchable documents and 151 databases. The considerable remaining challenges for creation of a world-standard and sustainable system are then outlined, and steps proposed to address them. The extent to which this collaborative project might be a model for development of free access to legal information in other countries is considered.By “public legal information” we mean that information which, as a matter of public policy, ought to be available for free public access in a society which values democracy and the rule of law. This has been argued elsewhere to include legislation, case law, treaties a country has entered into, reports proposing reform of the law, and such legal scholarship as authors have chosen or are required to make freely available to the public. For the purpose of this article, this definition is assumed.

Challenges for Free Access to Law in a Multi-Jurisdictional Developing Country: Building the Legal Information Institute of India

This article analyses the complexities involved in providing free public online access to the ‘public legal information’ of the Indian legal system. It starts with some of the causes of the complexity of Indian legal information, then describes the considerable progress that has previously been made in the provision of free access to some types of legal information, but why the result is still below international standards. Developing a free access legal information system for India involves more complex technical and organizational issues than is the case for most other countries. This is because of the complexity of India’s constitutional structure and resulting legal institutions, the value it places on democracy (and the particular form of ‘monitory democracy’ it has developed), human rights and the rule of law, the litigious nature of its citizens, its linguistic complexity, and its expanding market economy. Although India’s constitutional right of freedom of speech has been interpreted to include access to information, this constitutional principle has not yet been developed in relation to legal information to require governments to meet the needs of the ordinary citizen to access legal information for free or to international standards of quality. The English language is likely to retain its privileged, but not exclusive, position in the legal system for some time to come. In addition to the separate deficiencies of each of the existing sources of free access online resources in India, the over-riding problem is that no free access source have created facilities so that all of these sources – case law, Central and State legislation, treaties, open access scholarship and law reform – to be searched together. There is no comprehensive site which allows users to search any one of these ‘five pillars’ of legal information across India, let alone all five of them. The article then presents a project that attempts both to build on, enhance and consolidate much of the good work that has already been done by Indian government organizations, and NGOs, to develop free access to legal information in India, and to overcome many of the deficiencies identified in the previous section. The Legal Information Institute of India (LII of India) is being developed by eight Indian law schools and an international partner (AustLII, the Australasian Legal Information Institute). It has developed in its first year of public operation, the LII of India, a system with over 750,000 searchable documents and 151 databases. The national launch of LII of India was organized and hosted by National Law University, Delhi on 9 March 2011 by Union Minister of Law and Justice, Dr M Veerappa Moily. It was followed by ‘satellite launches’ in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Kolkota during March and April 2011, hosted by the respective National Law Universities in those cities. The system is therefore only now becoming known but is receiving over 6,000 page requests per day, and will have received approximately 2.25 million accesses in the 2011 calendar year. The considerable remaining challenges for creation of a world-standard and sustainable system are then outlined, and steps proposed to address them. The extent to which this collaborative project might be a model for development of free access to legal information in other countries is considered. The future of LII of India depends on a number of factors, including establishment of an effective technical team and servers in India, an Indian-based governance structure, collaboration with organizations in India with similar goals, establishment of local financial sustainability, and continuing technical support from AustLII during the establishment phase. These challenges are discussed, as well as the difficulties in extending development at the State level, and the longer term challenges of providing information in languages other than English, and the legal issues surrounding that task.

Challenges for free access to law in a multi-jurisdictional developing country: building the legal information institute of India

This article analyses the complexities involved in providing free public online access to the “public legal information” of the Indian legal system. It starts with some of the causes of the complexity of Indian legal information then describes the considerable progress that has previously been made in the provision of free access to some types of legal information, but why the result is still below international standards. The article then explains a project to remedy some of these deficiencies, the Legal Information Institute of India (LII of India), being carried out by eight Indian law schools and an international partner. It has developed in its first year of public operation, the LII of India, a system with over 750,000 searchable documents and 151 databases. The considerable remaining challenges for creation of a world-standard and sustainable system are then outlined, and steps proposed to address them. The extent to which this collaborative project might be a model for development of free access to legal information in other countries is considered.By “public legal information” we mean that information which, as a matter of public policy, ought to be available for free public access in a society which values democracy and the rule of law. This has been argued elsewhere to include legislation, case law, treaties a country has entered into, reports proposing reform of the law, and such legal scholarship as authors have chosen or are required to make freely available to the public. For the purpose of this article, this definition is assumed.