Public access to legal information » VoxPopuLII

The Free Law Reporter - Open Access to the Law and Beyond

free access to law, information retrieval, Innovation in legal technology, Public access to legal information 3 Responses »

May 252011

RIP, MIX, LEARN: FROM CASE LAW TO CASEBOOKS

Like many projects, the Free Law Reporter (FLR) started out as way to scratch an itch for ourselves. As a publisher of legal education materials and developer of legal education resources, CALI finds itself doing things with the text of the law all the time. Our open casebook project, eLangdell, is the most obvious example.

The theme of the 2006 Conference for Law School Computing was “Rip, Mix, Learn” and first introduced the idea of open access casebooks and what later became the eLangdell project. At the keynote talk I laid out a path to open access electronic casebooks using public domain case law as a starting point. On the ebook front, I was a couple of years early.

The basic idea was that casebooks were made up of cases (mostly) and that it was a fairly obvious idea to give the full text of cases to law faculty so that they could write their own casebooks and deliver them to their students electronically via the Web or as PDF files. This was before the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad legitimized the ebook marketplace.

The devilish details involved getting our hands on the full text of cases. We did a quick-and-dirty study of the 100 top casebooks and found that there was a lot of overlap in the cases. This was not too surprising, but it meant that the universe of case law — as represented by all the cases in all the law school casebooks — was only about 5,000 cases, and that if you extended that to all the cases mentioned — not just included — in a casebook, the number was closer to 15,000. I approached the major vendors of online case databases to try to obtain unencumbered copies of these cases, but I had no luck. Although disappointing, this too is not surprising, considering that these same case law database vendors are part of larger corporations that also sell print casebooks to the law school market.

Of course, the cases themselves are public domain and anyone with a userID and password could access and download the cases I needed. But the end-user agreements that every user must click “I Agree” to, include contract language that precluded anyone from making copies of these public domain cases for anything but personal use. Contract law trumped access to the public domain materials.

Fast forward a couple of years, to the appearance of Carl Malamud’s public.resource.or g, providing tarballs of well-formatted case law every single week. Add to that the promise of re-keying a large back catalog of cases via the YesWeScan.org project (also from public.resource.org) and we could now begin to explore ideas that had been simmering on the back burner for several years.

CASE SEARCH AS EBOOK: LEAN FORWARD / LEAN BACK

One of the neat features at FreeLawReporter.org is that it allows you to convert the results of a search into a downloadable ebook in .epub format which you can read on your Apple iPad or Barnes & Noble Nook and other ereader devices. (.epub ebooks may be readable on Amazon Kindles soon.) The idea for this feature sprang from some articles I had read about how people read on the Web versus how people read books. Jakob Nielsen explains it well in a post entitled “Writing Style for Print vs. Web”:

Print publications — from newspaper articles to marketing brochures — contain linear content that’s often consumed in a more relaxed setting and manner than the solution-hunting behavior that characterizes most high-value Web use.

What does this have to do with case law and ebooks?

It’s all about what kind of reading you are doing. When you are doing research — especially online research, which involves refining your search terms, clicking through lots of links, and opening lots of browser tabs — you are “leaning forward,” actively looking for something that you plan to read in greater depth later. In the case of legal research, the results of your efforts are a collection of cases — dozens or hundreds of pages long. Once you have found the most on-point cases, you know that you need to read them deeply and carefully in order to follow and understand the arguments. This type of reading I call “leaning back,” and is more suited to the environment you create as a book reader than the one you create as a Web reader.

Turning case law searches into books seems like a natural consequence of the movement between “lean forward” Web searching and “lean back” book reading. There is a lot of anecdotal writing about this, but I am h ard-pressed to find scientific literature that is definitive. Fortunately, with FreeLawReporter.org, open source tools, and a smart developer, we can experiment and let users decide what works best for them. This is an important point that deserves some expansion.

“FREE” AS IN “FREE TO EXPERIMENT AND INNOVATE”

The primary product of the online legal database vendors is targeted primarily at big law firms. They get the big cases, have the big clients, and spend the most on legal research. As you move down the scale of firm size, you also move down in ability and willingness to pay for legal research, or ability to charge the cost of legal research back to the client. By the time you arrive at small firms and solo practitioners, the amount of time spent doing legal research is much reduced, and, in the case of purely transactional practices, legal research is done only rarely.

The use of these databases in legal education, however, is different. Legal research instructors try to give students a flavor for what using the databases in the real world will be like, but without knowing what type of law the students will end up practicing. The instruction, therefore, must be generalized. The databases are optimized for users who have almost unlimited (in time and cost) access. The databases were not designed for optimizing legal education. With the online database vendors, you get a powerful and comprehensive product, but you cannot change it to suit particular educational goals. You must adjust to it.

A database of the law should be available to the legal education community as a free, open, and customizable system that has affordances for instructors and researchers, i.e., law librarians and law faculty. We are only beginning to explore these ideas, but one analogy is that Wexis is to the Free Law Reporter as Windows is to Linux. The free and open aspect of the Free Law Reporter (FLR) will let legal research instructors, law faculty, law students, and even the public do things that are not possible within the contractually locked-down and/or digitally rights-managed systems that are designed primarily as a product for the most expensive lawyers in the marketplace.

With FLR, we can experiment with tweaking the algorithms behind the search engine to optimize for specific legal research situations. With FLR, we could create closed-universe subsets that could be used for legal research exercises or even final exams. With FLR, we could try out all sorts of things that we cannot do anywhere else.

I don’t expect FLR to be a replacement for anything else. It is a new thing that we have not seen before — a playground, a workshop, a research project, and a tool shed for legal educators. It can only grow in value and increase in quality, but we need help.

WHY “REPORTER”?

The choice of the name “Free Law Reporter” was deliberate. The “free” refers to both the cost and the open source aspects of the project, in the Free Software Foundation tradition. Richard Stallman has often expounded on the importance of access to the code you run on your computer; so too should every citizen have access to the laws of the land. In the past, case law was outsourced by the government to vendors who created the original Reporter system, which was made widely available to the public via state, county, and academic law libraries. Many libraries have, of necessity, cut back on their print subscriptions, reduced their hours of access, reduced their staff, or closed altogether, but the real loss of access to the public started when the law transitioned to online legal databases.

Now that online access to the law is the new normal, the disintermediation of law libraries is nearly complete, but the courts and governments have not kept up with the equal access during the transition. In the legal publishing lifecycle, there is an opportunity to add value, between the generation of the raw data of law, and the fee-based publication of law by online database vendors. FLR, with the help of law librarians, can seize that opportunity. This is not just a value proposition respecting public access to the law. Academic law libraries should have free and open access to the law, access that allows them to define and construct the educational environment for law students.

I am not sure whether the Free Law Reporter (FLR) can grow into what I envision. We are only at the beginning, but I believe it’s about time we got started. I do know that we cannot succeed without the assistance and participation of the law librarian community. Right now, this assistance is mostly provided by law schools’ continued annual CALI membership.

We are working to make participation in the growth of FLR possible, by finding ways to tap the cognitive surplus of law librarians, students, faculty, and lawyers. The key challenge, I believe, is the construction of a participation framework where many small contributions can be aggregated into something of great, cumulative value. Wikipedia, Linux, and many other open source projects are exemplars from which we can take cues. There is so much to do and I am excited by the technical and organizational challenges that FLR presents. Expect to hear more from us about this project as we get our legs underneath us.

John Mayer is the Executive Director of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), a 501(c)(3) consortium of over 200 US law schools. He has a BS in Computer Science from Northwestern University and an MSCS from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He can reached at jmayer@cali.org or @johnpmayer.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editor-in-Chief is Robert Richards, to whom queries should be directed.

Building Sustainable LIIs - or Free Access to Law as Seen Through the Eyes of a Newbie

africa, free access to law, Public access to legal information No Responses »

May 032011

How are free access to law (FAL) services being used throughout the world? And how can these services be made sustainable? This post describes a research effort devoted to answering those two questions. The effort is funded by IDRC, and is being conducted by the Chair on Legal Information at the University of Montreal.

[Lexum — the Canadian legal technology firm that created and administers CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute — began its existence as LexUM, a research unit of the University of Montreal. In 2009, LexUM was divided into two parts. One part, called Lexum, became an independent company, while the second part, called the Chair on Legal Information, remained with the University of Montreal. For purposes of simplicity, “LexUM” and “Lexum” will both be referred to in this post as “Lexum.”]

This post also describes my personal experience of participating in this research and learning about free access to law.

Project Overview

At the Chair on Legal Information at the University of Montreal, with a team of researchers situated all over the world, we’ve been working on two on-going research projects since 2009: (1) A review of legal information in four West African countries, and (2) a global study on the sustainability of Free Access to Law initiatives.

In conducting these research projects over more than two years, we have interviewed lawyers, magistrates, judges, law students, public servants, law librarians, and anyone else we could find who could talk about legal information in their countries.

Here is how I came to be involved in this effort.

Being Introduced to Free Access to Law

October 2009: a 6.8-magnitude earthquake hits Indonesia; U.S. President Barack Obama receives the Nobel Peace Prize; we’re in the midst of the global financial crisis; and unbeknownst to me, I’m about to discover a world I have never heard of before: the world of Free Access to Law (FAL).

The idea of Free Access to Law, although it has been around for nearly 20 years in Canada, was entirely new to me in October 2009. Prior to that, I hadn’t worked in the field of law, although I had spent years in its neighbouring field, political science, and worked for a number of groups and organisations involved in issues concerning human rights and social justice.

A fairly simple concept it seemed to me, this FAL creature. How much could there be to know about putting the law on the Internet? Through our research, I was to find that FAL is a very complex phenomenon — a world of knowledge and expertise, questions and debates, values and principles; and a movement in which hundreds upon hundreds of individuals from all around the globe are active — and that many factors influence the effectiveness and sustainability of FAL services.

The First Study: The Use of Free Access to Law Services in West Africa

For the first study, our purpose was to find out how lawyers were accessing and using legal information in our subject countries: Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal, and Togo.

The context for this study was the development of free access to law services in these countries. In the first half of the 2000s, free access to law (FAL) initiatives for the countries of Burkina Faso and Niger — JuriBurkina and JuriNiger, respectively — were launched with the coordination of Lexum. Once JuriBurkina and JuriNiger had begun operations, efforts were soon in place to develop similar sites in Senegal and in Togo. In Senegal, after expressing initial enthusiasm for the idea, the Bar eventually lost interest in the project and declined to cooperate in moving the project forward. In Togo, the Bar expressed its interest in the project a little late, so Lexum included them in a review of legal information project, while seeking their support for FAL efforts at the same time

In our first study, we sought answers to the following questions: What kind of information did lawyers in these countries need, in what format, how often, and for what purpose? How had these FAL Websites changed the way lawyers in these countries do their job?

Here are the key findings of the first study. First, many legal professionals in these countries knew little about the FAL sites’ existence, let alone their purpose. Second, JuriBurkina and JuriNiger were found to have had a limited impact on the way the lawyers who are their target audience conduct their research, mostly because the lawyers either didn’t know about the sites or didn’t find what they were looking for on the sites.

The legal professionals we met during our research were not talking about how they are and have been using the sites, nor how free access to legal information online has changed their research habits. Rather, we were being told about the potential of the sites, and what is likely to change -– and this only in the instances in which the respondent had ever heard of or used either JuriBurkina or JuriNiger.

Third, the content of the FAL sites in these countries was very limited. These content limitations appeared to affect users’ perceptions of the relevance of the sites. When we examine the sites, we see little in the way of updates and few documents. JuriBurkina, hosted locally, was also down on a regular basis until Lexum brought it back on its servers, where it’s been available ever since.

Fourth, contextual factors contributed significantly to these content limitations. In Burkina Faso, Lexum and the local Bar were hoping to launch an all-inclusive legal information portal for the country, where users could access statutes, statutory material, case law, and eventually secondary material as well. Yet restrictions on access to legislative content led to the launch of a site containing mostly case law — in a civil law country. In Niger, access to judgments was greatly limited following the 2010 coup. With a military regime in place, data sources were less than keen on handing over decisions.

Fifth, differential access to technology may have affected the perceived usefulness of the FAL services. Both the lawyers and law students we met in West Africa have greater access to mobile phones (that lack Internet access) than they do to computers with Web access, and the West African FAL sites are available only via the Web.

The Second Study: The Sustainability of Free Access to Law Services

Our second, global study is known as the “Free Access to Law – Is it Here to Stay?” research project. [Editor’s Note: The first report related to this study is available here.] With partners in Asia, Southern Africa, and West Africa, we have attempted to evaluate how we could ensure that sites providing legal information for free to the public can continue to do so in the long term. We were interested not just in funding models, but also in organizational models, taking into consideration variables related to political, social, and technological contexts. We asked: Can a strong team of dedicated individuals, with know-how and funding, build sustainable FAL initiatives?

For this second project, too, we went around interviewing the usual suspects — users and makers of freely accessible legal information — in Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. We asked the makers of FAL such questions as: How were they running their sites, coping with limited resources, deciding on which projects to undertake, and managing relationships with data sources?

Here are some key findings of this study. First, contextual factors, particularly political and technological, are critical to an FAL initiative’s capacity to ensure sustainability. Without the participation of those who make the law, be it legislative or case law, it is difficult for an FAL initiative to fulfill its mission.

Technological contextual factors are of particular importance respecting the sustainability of FAL initiatives. Legal Information Institutes have elected the Web as the best way to offer public and free access to legal information: The Web is relatively cheap, and reaches unparalleled numbers of users instantaneously. But easy and inexpensive Internet access — unfortunately, like many things in this world — is not a universal fact of life. Although perhaps one of the most democratic forums of our time, the Web is still far from being available in most households around the globe. [Editor’s Note: The ITU’s The World in 2010 pamphlet provides recent data on Internet use and access in developing countries.]

Second, respecting securing user buy-in to an FAL site, we found that the key is to ensure that the information published is highly relevant: that it is the information most needed by the site’s users. If FAL is to continue to play the pivotal role it has had in defining how users access legal information, sustainability is going to depend on our capacity to adapt, such that we provide a service needed by specific groups of users operating in specific contexts.

Common Findings of Both Studies

The findings of the studies actually coincide in more than one way. The first concerns the importance to users of the perceived relevance of information available from FAL services. This may seem like an obvious conclusion, but it was not expressly stated by our respondents, and had to be inferred from our data. The users we met had a tendency to speak of the “comprehensiveness” of collections as being one of the primary factors determining whether they would adopt an information source for their professional needs. A strong majority also said that before searching online, they would refer to their firm’s private collection, to their national archives, or to their Bar’s library. But their firm’s private collections were far from being “comprehensive.” What those collections were, though, was targeted, and focused on the lawyers’ specific informational needs.

The second common finding concerns the importance of contextual factors to the sustainability and perceived usefulness of FAL sites. Many free access to law initiatives are faced with limited access to technological, human, and financial resources. For initiatives working under such constraints, carefully choosing which information to prioritize for publication is essential. Yet, as noted above, our research suggests that the information that is published must be perceived as highly relevant by the users of the FAL service, if users are to “buy-in” to the service for the long term and integrate the service into their research practices.

In addition, the contextual factor of technology seems to affect both the sustainability of FAL sites and users’ perceptions of the usefulness of those sites. The evidence from West Africa suggests that the inability of lawyers and law students to access FAL sites via mobile phones may have contributed to users’ perceptions that the sites lacked relevant information. Respecting sustainability, the persistence of low levels of Internet access in developing countries poses a possible obstacle to widespread public buy-in to Web-based FAL services over the long term.

Issues Needing Further Research

In addition to the issues raised by the findings discussed above, our research on the use and sustainability of free access to law services has also highlighted additional issues that warrant further study. The first concerns justice and the rule of law. Free access to law, as a movement, gives itself the mandate to reinforce the rule of law. But in societies where a great social distance divides those who produce the law and those governed by it, we may need to go beyond the concept of law and start thinking about justice.

The second concerns the role of law in highly unequal societies. What is the role of a free access to law initiative in a context in which the law and legal information are not considered to belong to the public? In which legal information — written in a language not spoken by the majority of the population — is effectively the property of the elite? In which the law in force is a tool of oppression and segregation?

The third concerns access to technology and the digital divide. Limitations on Internet access must be taken into consideration not only respecting sustainability and users’ perceptions of the relevance of FAL services, but also to insure the coherency of FAL’s mission to democratize access to legal information. After over a decade of free access to law around the world, we must never stop thinking about what’s next and how we can best ensure open access.

Reflections and Conclusion

April 2011: I’ve now worked on IDRC-funded free access to law projects with Lexum and the Chair on Legal Information at the University of Montreal for just less than two years. When I began this work in the fall of 2009, free access to law seemed to me to be a relatively “simple” concept. Now, after eighteen months of research, I’ve come to understand the complexity and large scope of free access to law: that it involves hundreds of professionals working on six continents; that its success and sustainability are influenced by numerous technological, political, and social factors; and that its value depends in large part on cultivating relationships with users in their particular social and cultural contexts.

Keep an eye out for our case studies coming out this summer—but to sum things up for now, it would be simply that, like most things in the social sciences, one size does not fit all.

[Editor’s Note: For an earlier commentary on the sustainability of legal information institutes, please see Mariya Badeva-Bright’s VoxPopuLII post, Is Free Access to Law here to stay?]

[Editor’s Note: The original version of this post contained an error. The original version of the post stated that the studies described in the post are being conducted by Lexum and the Chair in Legal Information of the University of Montreal. That information is incorrect. The studies described in the post are being conducted solely by the Chair in Legal Information of the University of Montreal. Lexum has no role in the studies. We regret the error. The post has been corrected as of 5 May 2011.]

Isabelle Moncion is a research assistant at the Chair in Legal Information of the University of Montreal, and a project manager with Lexum. She holds an MA in political science with a specialisation in international development from the University of Quebec in Montreal, and a B.Sc. in political science and communications from the University of Ottawa.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Robert Richards is Editor in Chief.

Indian Kanoon - The Genesis And The Legal Thirst

Demand for free access to law, Demand for public access to legal information, free access to law, india, information retrieval, Innovation in legal technology, Public access to legal information, Relevance ranking in legal information retrieval 7 Responses »

Apr 222011

Indian Kanoon is a free search engine for Indian law, providing access to more than 1.4 million central laws, and judgments from The Supreme Court of India, 24 High Courts, 17 law tribunals, constituent assembly debates, law commission reports, and a few law journals.

The development of Indian Kanoon began in the summer of 2007 and was publicly announced on 4 January 2008. Developing this service was a part-time project when I was working towards my doctorate degree in Computer Science at the University of Michigan under of guidance of Professor Farnam Jahanian of Arbor Networks fame. My work on Indian Kanoon continues to be a part-time affair because of my full-time job at Yahoo! India (Bangalore). Keep in mind, however, that I don’t have a law background, nor am I an expert on information retrieval. My PhD thesis is entitled Context-Aware Network Security.

The Genesis

Indian Kanoon was started as a result of my curiosity about publicly available law data. In a blog article, Indian Kanoon – The road so far and the road ahead, written a year after the launch of Indian Kanoon, I explained how the project was started, how it ran during the first year, and the promises for the next year.

When I was considering starting Indian Kanoon, the idea of free Indian law search was not new. Prashant Iyengar, a law student from NALSAR Hyderabad, faced the same problem. The law data was available but the search tools were far from satisfactory. So he started OpenJudis to provide search tools for Indian law data that were publicly available. He traces the availability of government data and the development of OpenJudis in detail in his VoxPopuLII post, Confessions of a Legal Info-holic.

Prashant Iyengar traces the genesis, successes, and impacts of Indian Kanoon in a more detailed fashion in his 2010 report, Free Access to Law in India – Is it Here to Stay?

The Goal

I have to make it clear that Indian Kanoon was started in a very informal fashion; the goals of Indian Kanoon were not well established at the outset. The broadest goal for the project came to me while I was writing the “About” page of Indian Kanoon. From this point on, the goals for Indian Kanoon started to crystallize. The second paragraph of this page summed it up as follows:

“Even when laws empower citizens in a large number of ways, a significant fraction of the population is completely ignorant of their rights and privileges. As a result, common people are afraid of going to police and rarely go to court to seek justice. People continue to live under fear of unknown laws and a corrupt police.”

The Legal Thirst

During the first year after the launch of Indian Kanoon, one constant doubt that lingered in the minds of everyone familiar with the project (including me) concerned just how many people really needed a tool like Indian Kanoon. After all, this was a very specialized tool, which quite possibly would be useful only to lawyers or law students. But what constantly surprises me is the increasing number of users of the Website. Indian Kanoon now has roughly half a million users per month, and the number keeps growing.

The obvious question is: Why is this legal thirst — this desire for access to full text of the law — arising in India now? I can think of umpteen reasons, such as an increase in the number of Indian citizens getting on the Internet, which is proving to be a better access medium than libraries; or that the general media awareness of law, or the spread of blogging culture, is fueling this desire.

On further reflection, I think there are two main drivers of this thirst for legal information. The first one is the resources now available for free and open access to law. Until very recently, most law resources in India were provided by libraries or Websites that charged a significant amount of money. In effect, they prohibited access to a significant portion of the population that wanted to look into legal issues. The average time spent per page on the Indian Kanoon Website is six minutes; this shows that most users actually read the legal text, and apparently find it easier to understand than they had previously expected. (This is precisely what I discovered when I began to read legal texts on a regular basis.)

The spread of the Internet, considered by itself, is not an important reason for the current thirst for law in India, in my view. Subscription-based legal Websites have been around for a while in India, but because of the pay-walls that they erected, none of them has been able to generate a strong user base. While the open nature of the Internet made it easy to compete against these providers, the availability of legal information free of charge — not just availability of the Internet — has removed huge barriers, both to start ups, and to access by the public.

The second major reason for this thirst for legal information — and for the traffic growth to Indian Kanoon — lies in technological advancement. Government websites and even private legal information providers in India are, generally, quite technologically deficient. To provide access to law documents, these providers typically have offered interfaces that are mere replicas of the library world. For example, our Supreme Court website allows searching for judgments by petitioner, respondent, case number, etc. While lawyers are often accustomed to using these interfaces, and of course understand these technical legal terms, requiring prior knowledge of this kind of technical legal information as a prerequisite for performing a search raises a big barrier to access by common people. Further, the free-text search engines provided by these Websites have no notion of relevance. So while the technology world has significantly advanced in the areas of text search and relevance, government-based — and, to some extent, private, fee-based — legal resources in India have remained tied to stone-age technology.

Better Technology Improves Access

Allowing users to try and test any search terms that they have in mind, and providing a relevant set of links in response to their queries, significantly reduces the need for users to understand technical legal information as a prerequisite for reading and comprehending the law of the land. So, overall, I think advances in technology, some of which have been introduced by Indian Kanoon, are responsible for fostering a desire to read the law, and for affording more people access to the legal resources of India.

The Road Ahead

Considering, however, that fear of unknown laws remains in the minds of large numbers of the Indian people, now is not the time to gloat over the initial success of IndianKanoon. The task of Indian Kanoon is far from complete, and certainly more needs to be done to make searching for legal information by ordinary people easy and effective.

Sushant Sinha runs the search engine Indian Kanoon and currently works on the document processing team for Yahoo! India. Earlier he earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Michigan under the guidance of Professor Farnam Jahanian. He received his bachelor and masters degrees in computer science from IIT Madras, Chennai and was born and brought up in Jamshedpur, India. He was recently named one of “18 Young Innovators under 35 in India” by MIT’s Technology Review India.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editor in chief is Robert Richards.

Accessible Law

Adding legal commentary to free access to law services, Crowdsourcing and free access to law, Crowdsourcing and legal information systems, Crowdsourcing the writing of secondary legal resources, free access to law, free law data, Legal commentary, Legal information institutes, Legal social media, Public access to legal information, Secondary legal resources, Web 2.0 and law, Wikis and law 8 Responses »

Feb 152011

Professor Richard Leiter, on his blog, The Life of Books, poses The 21st Century Law Library Conundrum: Free Law and Paying to Understand It:

The digital revolution, that once upon a time promised free access to legal materials, will deliver on that promise; it’s just that the free materials it will deliver, even if it comprises the sum total of all primary law in the country at every level and jurisdiction, will amount to only a minor portion of the materials that lawyers need in order to practice law, and the public needs in order to understand it.

This article explores what more we need in order to understand the law and how this need can be met, from a UK perspective.

Free access to law

Free access to primary law is of course a prerequisite for the interpretation and understanding of the law. In the UK and most countries with a common law tradition, the cause of free access to law is espoused by the Free Access to Law Movement, a collective of legal information institutes that began with the creation of the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute (LII) in 1992. In the UK we are represented by the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII), set up in 2000 with the enormous help of the pioneering Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII). In October 2002, at the 4th Law via Internet Conference in Montreal, the LIIs published a joint statement of their philosophy of access to law in the following terms:

Legal information institutes of the 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;

Independent non-profit organisations 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.

So, to paraphrase liberally, we have a right to access the laws of our land, free of charge and openly licensed. “The problem for aggregators like LII,” Leiter points out, “is that the information that they provide is only as good as the sources available to them. And governments are just not very good sources of their own information.” In the US, Law.Gov is a movement working to raise the quality of government information, proposing a distributed repository of all primary legal materials of the United States. It believes that “the primary legal materials of the United States are the raw materials of our democracy. They should be made more broadly available to enable an informed citizenry,” and that “governmental institutions should make these materials available in bulk as distributed, authenticated, well-formatted data.” In other words, we need more than free access to law; we need free access to good law data.

UK legislation

In the UK we were fortunate that the previous administration’s Power of Information agenda was being implemented by the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), whose role also includes that of Queen’s Printer (of legislation). In December 2006, the long-awaited Statute Law Database (SLD) had been published, having been more than 10 years in development. This provided (subject to a number of shortcomings) point-in-time access to all in-force UK primary legislation since the year dot (forever), and access to all secondary legislation published since 1991. Responsibility for the SLD then lay with the Statutory Publications Office (SPO), part of the Ministry of Justice. In 2008 the decision was taken to merge the SPO into OPSI, who had been publishing all as-enacted legislation since 1988. The merger would bring the online legislative services together, creating a single place where visitors could access the widest range of legislative content held by the government, alongside supporting material. That service is Legislation.gov.uk, launched in July 2010, which has now replaced the SLD and OPSI legislation services.

The Legislation.gov.uk interface provides simple and direct browse access to legislation by type, year and number, and simple or advanced searches to locate matching legislation. Primary legislation can be viewed as at any point in time since 1991. More important than this improved access to legislation, however, is the fact that the content is open. It is all well-structured XML; any piece of legislation or legislation fragment can be addressed reliably and simply in various useful formats via the URI scheme; and any list of legislation resulting from a query can be delivered as an Atom feed. And a new licensing model for public sector information (which in the UK is subject to Crown copyright) was introduced at the same time – the Open Government Licence.

Unfortunately, there are insufficient government resources to maintain an up-to-date, consolidated statute book, as Shane O’Neill observes:

The lack of up-to-date consolidation – no fault of the Legislation.gov.uk team who have laboured valiantly on their Sisyphean task – must be a concern to those who harboured greater ambitions (not least Government and judiciary). It leaves access to an up-to-date and consolidated statute book in the hands of those who have invested in and deliver highly exclusive legal information services [Westlaw/LexisNexis – hereafter Wexis].

The Legislation.gov.uk service is delivered by The National Archives (of which OPSI is part) with John Sheridan, Head of e-Services and Strategy, at the helm. John describes the development in some detail in an earlier post on VoxPopuLII:

We had two objectives with legislation.gov.uk: to deliver a high quality public service for people who need to consult, cite, and use legislation on the Web; and to expose the UK’s Statute Book as data, for people to take, use, and re-use for whatever purpose or application they wish.

There’s more about the technical project and the people behind it from Jeni Tennison, technical lead and main developer (at TSO), on her blog. John is also on the expert panel of technologists advising the government on making public sector information more open and accessible on the Web, an initiative which led to the development of data.gov.uk, which currently provides access to over 5,600 central government datasets.

UK case law

Unfortunately, the public provision of case law in the UK is woefully inadequate, and we have to rely on the efforts of BAILII (a charity) to collate and deliver anything approaching a comprehensive collection of recent judgments. BAILII does a grand job in the circumstances, but – through no fault on its part – it is not comprehensive and it is not open. The various courts all publish their judgments in their own fashion, with no consistency of approach; in fact the High Court of England and Wales does not publish its own judgments at all, but passes selected handed-down judgments to BAILII to publish. To make matters worse, our right to access this case law is far from clear. There is some argument whether judges are public servants or not and hence whether their judgments are public sector information or not. In addition, regarding older judgments, the low level of originality required for copyright protection in the UK means that almost all older cases are copyright of either the transcriber or the reporter (or the publisher who commissioned them).

Understanding the law

Does free access to law or, even better, free access to good law data, make the law accessible? Will it empower the average citizen? Unfortunately not. As Leiter says, it is only a fraction of what lawyers need to practice law and the public needs to understand it. The law is not practically accessible: it is difficult to identify, obtain and understand legal resources, and they are frequently out of date. Whilst it is reasonable to expect legal advisers to invest in the necessary commercial services to inform themselves, these services are becoming increasingly unaffordable for the less affluent law practices and third sector advice bodies. For the non-lawyer, the law is all but impenetrable, and solving many legal problems and resolving disputes is in practice affordable only to the rich or those who are eligible for some kind of state support. Lord Justice Toulson in R v Chambers [2008] EWCA Crim 2467 famously bemoaned the complexity of legislation:

To a worryingly large extent, statutory law is not practically accessible today, even to the courts whose constitutional duty it is to interpret and enforce it. There are four principal reasons. … First, the majority of legislation is secondary legislation. …Secondly, the volume of legislation has increased very greatly over the last 40 years …Thirdly, on many subjects the legislation cannot be found in a single place, but in a patchwork of primary and secondary legislation. … Fourthly, there is no comprehensive statute law database with hyperlinks which would enable an intelligent person, by using a search engine, to find out all the legislation on a particular topic.

The give-us-the-data-and-we’ll-organise-the-world crowd also display a touching naïvety when it comes to the law. For example, on the launch of Legal Opinions on Google Scholar, Anurag Acharya, “Distinguished Engineer” at Google, said:

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. … we were struck by how readable and accessible these opinions are. Court opinions don’t just describe a decision but also present the reasons that support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations.

Any initiative that makes the law more accessible is to be welcomed, but to empower the average citizen you have to go the extra mile, by explaining the law. Lawyers and legal researchers have spent years learning the law and acquiring the skills that enable them to navigate and reliably interpret primary law and precedent. They will find value in free access to law and in Google Scholar and other free services that are built on that, but they and the average citizen need more. That need is met largely by commercial publishers, and, while there many smaller independent publishers who provide good value in their niches, as O’Neill observes:

Legal publishing has long been dominated by two huge duopolists (Reed Elsevier’s LexisNexis and ThomsonReuters) whose scale alone enables them to provide a consolidation of the mix of primary, secondary, case law which characterises our common law system. This has created what [barrister Francis Davey] in The Times on 23 May 2006 characterised as “a two-tier justice system with only the very rich able to access the full consolidated law while those lawyers doing pro bono work are discriminated against.”

But there is an increasing amount of quality free legal commentary and analysis on the Web, and we can dream on.

The law wiki dream

Writing in Times Online in April 2006, the eminent Professor Richard Susskind, legal tech guru and adviser to the great and good, spelt out his vision for a “Wikipedia of English law”:

This online resource could be established and maintained collectively by the legal profession; by practitioners, judges, academics and voluntary workers. If leaders in the English legal world are serious about promoting the jurisdiction as world class, here is a genuine opportunity to pioneer, to excel, to provide a wonderful social service, and to leave a substantial legacy. The initiative would evolve a corpus of English law like no other: a resource readily available to lawyers and lay people; a free web of inter-linked materials; packed with scholarly analysis and commentary, supplemented by useful guidance and procedure; rendered intensely practical by the addition of action points and standard documents; and underpinned by direct access to legislation and case law, made available by the Government, perhaps through BAILII. … A Wikipedia of English law could be an evolving, interactive, multimedia legal resource of unprecedented scale and utility.

Susskind referred specifically to wikis and “a Wikipedia,” and that was taken rather literally by those who enthusiastically first took up his challenge. But I don’t believe he necessarily intended it literally, and I don’t believe that “a Wikipedia” or indeed the wiki platform is appropriate. Wikipedia has to be seen as a one-off; no wiki project since has come anywhere near its scale or success. We are most unlikely to build an encyclopedia of UK law from scratch; but why would we try when there is already a vast free legal web?

The free legal web

In 2008, enthused by the developments in open government and by the amount of quality legal commentary that was percolating up on the Web, I proposed to set up a service to exploit this – FreeLegalWeb. In the manifesto I listed the free access law resources then available, and I now list them with appropriate updates, here:

We have [free and open access to legislation]

[We have] other official documents, forms and guidance from government and a commitment to making these resources more accessible and encouraging user generated services.

We have another substantial free access primary law database – BAILII.

We have a number of specialists already maintaining specialist law wikis and enthusiasts contributing law articles to Wikipedia.

We have a growing number of law bloggers, many of whom provide succinct, expert ongoing commentary and analysis.

We have many other individuals, firms and publishers who publish case summaries, articles, updaters and guidance for free access on their websites.

We have public, charitable and private services providing free guidance and fora for the public faced with legal processes.

And finally, we have Web 2.0 technologies that enable (potentially) all these sources to be interrogated, aggregated, “mashed up” and repurposed.

That sounded like a free legal web to me; all we had to do was join it up and curate it! But how feasible is that?

A “bunch of goo”?

Bob Berring, legal research guru and Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, gave his thoughts on the matter on YouTube in October 2009. He believes that government efforts in the provision of free legal information have failed because there are no incentives; and that “volunteer efforts”, worthy as they may be, are unlikely to be sustained. He rightly says that legal information is not easily packaged: we need a map and a compass to navigate it; it needs to be organised and value added. I think we all agree with that. But his conclusion appears to be that only Wexis have sufficient incentive and only they can mobilise the necessary army to add sufficient value for it to be useful. For Bob, the free legal information that’s out there is “a bunch of goo,” and the only thing that can sort out the mess is “the market system”. That’s clearly not the case:

government has an incentive to make legal information more accessible
the legal profession has an incentive to make legal information more accessible
various non-profits have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
citizens have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
and there are many private enterprises short of Wexis who have an incentive to make legal information more accessible.

… How?

Curating the legal web

For help I’m increasingly turning to Jason Wilson, Vice President at Jones McClure Publishing. He has a nice clean minimalist blog with great pics accompanying each post. More importantly, he’s interested in the kind of questions I’m also trying to answer, such as: Can we crowdsource reliable analytical legal content?

I have given considerable thought to this problem (and I have a greater interest in solving it than most), and I just don’t see how a Demand Media or similar model could ever produce good or reliable analytical material.

But in the next breath he acknowledges that a lot of good stuff has indeed already been generated by the crowds, and asks how we will organise that legal web. Actually the question is buried at the end of a dense post about “exploded data” (the value of analytical content):

My thought at this point is that the legal web is in an infancy that we can’t even fathom yet. There is cloud of associated information that our current computer assisted legal research vendors cannot give to us based on their algorithms, especially when they remain in walled-in gardens that don’t account for the vast and valuable information being created by users. The question is whether we will step up to organize this sea of data, or wait until a program can do it for us?

Moving on, in a more accessible post on Slaw he asks how we can effectively curate the legal web:

Curating this growing body of analytical content will be difficult. It suggests a person-machine process of locating and separating good content from bad, and categorizing, verifying, authenticating, and editorializing that content. It will undoubtedly require the creation of a rich taxonomy to help organize and manage the content for later discovery, clean metadata, and a good search engine, and raises issues from data permanency to copyrights to brand dilution. It’s a mess. But a worthy one I think.

and in the comments to that post:

I suppose the point to my post is whether we can wrap a wiki-like structure and interface around the legal web, and make it a destination for learning about both general topics and specific issues, rather than just a portal for all results that match search terms.

Yes we can! However clever the machine, these tasks – “locating and separating good content from bad, and categorizing, verifying, authenticating, and editorializing” – to a large degree require human intervention. But that intervention need only be light touch once we figure out how most effectively to harness the wisdom of the crowds.

Conclusion

Free access to law is not a panacea, but there is plenty of scope for delivering more accessible law by leveraging not just free law but the free legal web; for delivering free services that are good enough for the average citizen, and for lower cost commercial services that are good enough for the average lawyer. Big Law will continue to need Wexis, but the “lower-tier” can be much better served. The final word I will leave with Tom Bruce:

We need to make informed choices between inexpensive automated approaches that work by brute force and the hand-crafted, highly-accurate approaches of legal bibliography that are not always scalable or affordable. We need to recalibrate what we mean by “authority”, and begin to think about measures of quality and reliability for legal text that avoid the creation of unnatural monopolies in legal information.

[Editor’s Note: For more information on crowdsourcing legal commentary, please see Staffan Malmgren’s post. On using social media to enhance access to free legal resources, see Olivier Charbonneau’s post. On making primary law useable by non-lawyer citizens, see earlier posts by Judge Dory Reiling and Christine Kirchberger. For earlier replies to Bob Berring, see Tom Bruce’s responses here and here.]

Nick Holmes is a publishing consultant specialising in the UK legal sector and is Managing Director of legal information services company infolaw (infolaw.co.uk). He is also the founder of FreeLegalWeb CIC (freelegalweb.org).

Email: nickholmes [at] infolaw [dot] co [dot] uk. Twitter: @nickholmes.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editor in chief is Robert Richards.

PACER, RECAP, and the Movement to Free American Case Law

Court docket systems, Court documents, Court information systems, Crowdsourcing and legal information systems, free access to law, Judicial information systems, Law.gov, PACER, Public access to legal information, U.S. Federal Courts 27 Responses »

Feb 032011

Readers of this blog are probably already familiar with the U.S. Federal Courts’ system for electronic access called PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). PACER is unlike any other country’s electronic public access system that I am aware of, because it provides complete access to docket text, opinions, and all documents filed (except sealed records, of course). It is a tremendously useful tool, and (at least at the time of its Web launch in the late 1990s) was tremendously ahead of its time.

However, PACER is unique in another important way: it imposes usage charges on citizens for downloading, viewing, and even searching for case materials. This limitation unfortunately forecloses a great deal of democracy-enhancing activity.

The PACER Liberation Front

In 2008, I happened upon PACER in the course of trying to research a First Amendment issue. I am not a lawyer, but I was trying to get a sense of the federal First Amendment case law across all federal jurisdictions, because that case law had a direct effect on some activists at the time. I was at first excited that so much case law was apparently available online, but then disappointed when I discovered that the courts were charging for it. After turning over my credit card number to PACER, I was shocked that the system was charging for every single search I performed. With the type of research I was trying to do, it was inevitable that I would have to do countless searches to find what I was looking for. What’s more, the search functionality provided by PACER turned out to be nearly useless for the task at hand — there was no way to search for keywords, or within documents at all. The best I could do was pay for all the documents in particular cases that I suspected were relevant, and then try to sort through them on my own hard drive. Even this would be far from comprehensive.

This led to the inevitable conclusion that there is simply no way to know federal case law without going through a lawyer, doing laborious research using print legal resources, or paying for a high-priced database service. My only hope for getting use out of PACER was to find some way to affordably get a ton of documents. This is when I ran across a nascent project led by open government prophet Carl Malamud. He called it PACER Recycling. Carl offered to host any PACER documents that anybody happened to have, so that other people could download them. At that time, he had only a few thousand documents, but an ingenious plan: The federal courts were conducting a trial of free access at about sixteen libraries across the country. Anyone who walked in to one of those libraries and asked for PACER could browse and download documents for free. Carl was encouraging a “thumb drive corps” to bring USB sticks into those libraries and download caches of PACER documents.

The main bottleneck with this approach was volume. PACER contains hundreds of millions of documents, and manually downloading them all was just not going to happen. I had a weekend to kill, and an idea for building on his plan. I wrote up a Perl script that could run off of a USB drive and that would automatically start going through PACER cases and downloading all of the documents in an organized fashion. I didn’t live near one of the “free PACER” libraries, so I had to test the script using my own non-free PACER account… which got expensive. I began to contemplate the legal ramifications — if any — of downloading public records in bulk via this method. The following weekend I ran into Aaron Swartz.

Aaron is one of my favorite civic hackers. He’s a great coder and has a tendency to be bold. I told him about my little project, and he asked to see the code. He made some improvements and, given his higher tolerance for risk, proceeded to use the modified code to download about 2,700,000 files from PACER. The U.S. Courts freaked out, cancelled the free access trial, and said that “[t]he F.B.I. is conducting an investigation.” We had a hard time believing that the F.B.I. would care about the liberation of public records in a seemingly legal fashion, and told The New York Times as much. (Media relations pro tip: If you don’t want to be quoted, always, repeatedly emphasize that your comments are “on background” only. Even though I said this when I talked to The Times, they still put my name in the corresponding blog post. That was the first time I had to warn my fiancée that if the feds came to the door, she should demand a warrant.)

A few months later, Aaron got curious about whether the FBI was really taking this seriously. In a brilliantly ironic move, he filed a FOIA for his own FBI record, which was delivered in due course and included such gems as:

Between September 4, 2008 and September 22, 2008, PACER was accessed by computers from outside the library utilizing login information from two libraries participating in the pilot project. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reported that the PACER system was being inundated with requests. One request was being made every three seconds.

[…] The two accounts were responsible for downloading more than eighteen million pages with an approximate value of $1.5 million.

The full thing is worth a read, and it includes details about the feds looking through Aaron’s Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. However, the feds were apparently unable to determine Aaron’s current residence and ended up staking out his parents’ house in Illinois. The feds had to call off the surveillance because, in their words: “This is a heavily wooded, dead-end street, with no other cars parked on the road making continued surveillance difficult to conduct without severely increasing the risk of discovery.” The feds eventually figured out Aaron wasn’t in Illinois when he posted to Facebook: “Want to meet the man behind the headlines? Want to have the F.B.I. open up a file on you as well? Interested in some kind of bizarre celebrity product endorsement? I’m available in Boston and New York all this month.” They closed the case.

Turning PACER Around

Carl published Aaron’s trove of documents (after conducting a very informative privacy audit), but the question was: what to do next? I had long given up on my initial attempt to merely understand a narrow aspect of First Amendment jurisprudence, and had taken up the PACER liberation cause wholeheartedly. At the time, this consisted of writing about the issue and giving talks. I ran across a draft article by some folks at Princeton called “Government Data and the Invisible Hand.” It argued:

Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data.

I couldn’t have agreed more, and their prescription for the executive branch made sense for the brain-dead PACER interface too. I called up one of the authors, Ed Felten, and he told me to come down to Princeton to give a talk about PACER. Afterwards, two graduate students, Harlan Yu and Tim Lee, came up to me and made an interesting suggestion. They proposed a Firefox extension that anyone using PACER could install. As users paid for documents, those documents would automatically be uploaded to a public archive. As users browsed dockets, if any documents were available for free, the system would notify them of that, so that the users could avoid charges. It was a beautiful quid-pro-quo, and a way to crowdsource the PACER liberation effort in a way that would build on the existing document set.

So Harlan and Tim built the extension and called it RECAP (tagline: “Turning PACER around” Get it? eh?). It was well received, and you can read the great endorsements from The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, The Guardian, and many like-minded public interest organizations. The courts freaked out again, but ultimately realized they couldn’t go after people for republishing the public record.

I helped with a few of the details, and eventually ended up coming down to work at their research center, the Center for Information Technology Policy. Last year, a group of undergrads built a fantastic web interface to the RECAP database that allows better browsing and searching than PACER. Their project is just one example of the principle laid out in the “Government Data and the Invisible Hand” paper: when presented with the raw data, civic hackers can build better interfaces to that data than the government.

From Fee to Free

Despite all of our efforts, the database of free PACER materials still contains only a fraction of the documents stored in the for-fee database. The real end-game is for the courts to change their mind about the PACER paywall approach in the first place. We have made this case in many venues. Influential senators have sent them letters. I have even pointed out that the courts are arguably violating The 2002 E-Government Act. As it happens, PACER brings in over $100 million annually through user fees. These fees are spent partially on supporting PACER’s highly inefficient infrastructure, but are also partially spent on various other things that the courts deem somehow related to public access. This includes what one judge described as expenditures on his courtroom:

“Every juror has their own flatscreen monitors. We just went through a big upgrade in my courthouse, my courtroom, and one of the things we’ve done is large flatscreen monitors which will now — and this is a very historic courtroom so it has to be done in accommodating the historic nature of the courthouse and the courtroom — we have flatscreen monitors now which will enable the people sitting in the gallery to see these animations that are displayed so they’re not leaning over trying to watch it on the counsel table monitor. As well as audio enhancements. In these big courtrooms with 30, 40 foot ceilings where audio gets lost we spent a lot of money on audio so the people could hear what’s going on. We just put in new audio so that people — I’d never heard of this before — but it actually embeds the speakers inside of the benches in the back of the courtroom and inside counsel tables so that the wood benches actually perform as amplifiers.”

I am not against helping courtroom visitors hear and see trial testimony, but we must ask whether it is good policy to restrict public access to electronic materials on the Internet in the name of arbitrary courtroom enhancements (even assuming that allocating PACER funds to such enhancements is legal, which is questionable). The real hurdle to liberating PACER is that it serves as a cross-subsidy to other parts of our underfunded courts. I parsed a bunch of appropriations data and committee reports in order to write up a report on actual PACER costs and expenditures. What is just as shocking as the PACER income’s being used for non-PACER expenses, is the actual claimed cost of running PACER, which is orders of magnitude higher than any competent Web geek would tell you it should be (especially for a system whose administrators once worried that “one request was being made every three seconds.”). The rest of the federal government has been moving toward cloud-based “Infrastructure as a Service”, while the U.S. Courts continue to maintain about 100 different servers in each jurisdiction, each with their own privately leased internet connection. (Incidentally, if you enjoy conspiracy theories, try to ID the pseudonymous “Schlomo McGill” in the comments of this post and this post.)

The ultimate solution to the PACER fee problem unfortunately lies not in exciting spy-vs-spy antics (although those can be helpful and fun), but in bureaucratic details of authorization subcommittees and technical details of network architecture. This is the next front of PACER liberation. We now have friends in Washington, and we understand the process better every day. We also have very smart geeks, and I think that the ultimate finger on the scale may be our ability to explain how the U.S. Courts could run a tremendously more efficient system that would simultaneously generate a diversity of new democratic benefits. We also need smart librarians and archivists making good policy arguments. That is one reason why the Law.gov movement is so exciting to me. It has the potential not only to unify open-law advocates, but to go well beyond the U.S. Federal Case Law fiefdom of PACER.

Perhaps then I can finally get the answer to that narrow legal question I tried to ask in 2008. I’m sure that the answer will inevitably be: “It’s complicated.”

Steve Schultze is Associate Director of The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. His work includes Internet privacy, security, government transparency, and telecommunications policy. He holds degrees in Computer Science, Philosophy, and Media Studies from Calvin College and MIT. He has also been a Fellow at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and helped start the Public Radio Exchange.

Time to Turn the Page on Print Legal Information

authentication, digital law, Legal citation, Legal citations, Public access to legal information 15 Responses »

Sep 152010

Question: Is there a good reason why judges should not be blogging their opinions?

Follow my thinking here.

I, like many librarians, love books. By that I mean I love physical books. I love the feel of paper in my hand. I love the smell of books. When I attended library school, there was no doubt in my mind that I would work in a place surrounded by shelf after shelf of beautiful books. I was confident that I would be able to transfer that love of books to a new generation.

That’s not how things turned out. Without recounting exactly how I got here, I should say that I am a technology librarian, and have been since even before I graduated library school. Technology is where I found my calling, and where libraries seem to need the most help. As I delve deeper into the world of library technology, particularly in the academic setting, I am increasingly forced to confront an uncomfortable reality: Print formats are inferior to electronic. And in some of my darker moments, I may even go so far as to echo the comments of Jeff Jarvis in his book “What Would Google Do” when he writes: “print sucks.”

On page 71, talking about the burden of physical “stuff,” Jarvis writes:

“It’s expensive to produce content for print, expensive to manufacture, and expensive to deliver. Print limits your space and your ability to give readers all they want. It restricts your timing and the ability to keep readers up-to-the-minute. Print is already stale when it’s fresh. It is one-size-fits-all and can’t be adapted to the needs of each customer. It comes with no ability to click for more. It can’t be searched or forwarded. It has no archive. It kills trees. It uses energy. And you really should recycle it, though that’s just a pain. Print sucks. Stuff sucks.”

In this paragraph, Jarvis may as well have been talking about the current state of online legal information. Although we may not have figured out the magic bullets of authenticity and preservation, the fact remains that print is a burden. In many cases, it is a burden to our governments, and our libraries.

There are good reasons to proceed cautiously towards online legal information. However, the most significant barriers to accepting new modes of publishing official legal information online, like judges’ blogging opinions, may be cultural and political. In the end, law librarians and other legal professionals can’t allow our own nostalgia and habit to stand in the way of changes that can, should, and must happen.

AALL Working Groups

As many readers may know, the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) began forming state working groups earlier this year. The purpose of those working groups was to “help AALL ensure access to electronic legal information in your state.” This is certainly a worthwhile goal, and one I obviously support. But the PDF document online, calling for formation of these working groups, sends a mixed message.

The very first duty of each working group is to “take action to oppose any plan in your state to eliminate an official print legal resource in favor of online-only unless the electronic version is digitally authenticated and will be preserved for permanent public access, or to charge fees to access legal information electronically. This is an increasingly common problem as states respond to severe budget cuts.”

Perhaps it’s just the phrasing of the document that bothered me. Rather than even providing guidance to states planning to eliminate print legal resources, AALL has set as its default position the opposition to any such plan.

In fairness, I note that the document hints that online-only legal resources might be acceptable if states don’t charge for them, or if such resources meet the rather complex standards laid out in the Association of Reporters of Judicial Decisions’ Statement of Principles.

The Association of Reporters of Judicial Decisions (ARJD) published Statement of Principles: “Official” On-Line Documents in February 2007, revised in May 2008. Most tellingly, in Principle 3 of the Statement they write: “Print publication, because of its reliability, is the preferred medium for government documents at present.”

Later in the document we find out why print is so reliable. Talking about electronic versions, the ARJD says they should not be considered official unless they are “permanent in that they are impervious to corruption by natural disaster, technological obsolescence, and similar factors and their digitized form can be readily translated into each successive electronic medium used to publish them.”

Without question, electronic material must be able to survive a natural disaster. The practice of storing information on a single server or keeping all backups in the same facility could be problematic. But emerging trends and best practices could help safeguard against these problems. In addition, programs like LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) can help alleviate some of these concerns by making sure many copies of each digital item exist at multiple geographic locations.

Also, digital format obsolescence has largely been overstated. PDF documents are not going anywhere anytime soon. Even conservative estimates establish PDF as a reliable format for the foreseeable future.

HTML may be no different. Consider that the very first Web document, Links and Anchors, is almost valid HTML5. Nearly 20 years later, that document is compatible with modern Web browsers.

On the other side of the equation, is print impervious to natural disaster, or even technological obsolescence? Of course not. At Yale, with our rare books library and large historical collection, I have witnessed first hand the damage time can do to a physical book. Even more importantly, books in the last hundred years have been published so cheaply they may fall apart even sooner than books published centuries ago.

Print and Electronic Costs

The reality is that moving to online-only legal information is a good thing for everyone involved in producing and consuming such information. The burden of print is not limited to the costs forced upon states that produce it; that burden is also borne by libraries and citizens who consume it.

As mentioned above respecting the AALL working group document, many states are already looking at going online-only to cut costs, and why shouldn’t they? With current budget situations across the country being what they are, printing costs being particularly high, and electronic publishing costs being so low, of course states are looking at saving money by ending needless printing.

But libraries would also benefit from the cost savings of governments’ moving to electronic formats. Not only do libraries currently have to subsidize printing costs by paying for the “official” print copies of legal materials; libraries also have to pay for the shelf space, as well as manpower to process incoming material and place it on the shelf, and may also have to pay additional costs for preserving the physical material. Not to mention the fact that we may pay for additional services that furnish access to the exact same material in an electronic format.

The costs involved in dealing with print legal resources are well known to most librarians. So why aren’t we clamoring for governments to publish online-only legal information?

Officialness, Authenticity, Preservation, and Citeability

Of course there are genuine concerns about online-only legal information. The big sticking points seem to be (in no particular order) officialness, authenticity, preservation, and citeability. Each issue is worthy of, and has been the subject of, much discussion.

Officiality may be in some ways the easiest and most difficult hurdle for online-only legal information to leap. To make an online version of legal material official, an appropriate authoritative body need only declare that version “official.” The task seems simple enough.

The more difficult part may be political. With organizations like AALL and ARJD currently opposing online-only options, that action may be politically difficult. Persuading lawyers, judges, and legislatures to approve such a declaration could be even more difficult. Can you imagine a bill, regulation, or some other action making a blog the “official” outlet for a particular court’s opinions?

The question of authenticity is more difficult to deal with from a technological perspective, although there has been interesting work done with respect to PDFs, electronic signatures, and public and private keys. The Government Printing Office (GPO) has done a great job leading the way in the area of authenticity: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/authentication/. The new Legislation.gov.uk site unveiled recently has taken a different approach from the GPO’s. As John Sheridan has written in an earlier post, at the moment The U.K. National Archives are not taking any steps towards authenticating the information on the Legislation.gov.uk site, but they recognize the need to address the issue at some point. John Joergensen at Rutgers-Camden has taken yet another approach. And Claire Germain, in a recent paper about authentication practices respecting international legal information (pdf), states that those practices vary throughout the world. Thus the prickly question of authenticating online legal information is an issue that’s not going away any time soon.

AALL and ARJD have made a big deal about preservation of online legal information, an issue that’s important for librarians, too. Unfortunately, this is another area where no good answer exists to guide us. As Sarah Rhodes wrote earlier this year, “our current digital preservation strategies and systems are imperfect – and they most likely will never be perfected.”

The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure & Preservation Program (NDIIPP) has some helpful resources. The Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) also provides some good guidance in this area. However, many librarians are still reluctant to accept that digital preservation practices may enable us to end our reliance on print.

A similar reluctance can be seen in resistance to the Durham Statement, which — though directed at law reviews — also says something about other kinds of online legal information. Most notably, Margaret Leary of the University of Michigan chose not to sign the Durham Statement, and discussed her decision to continue to rely on print at a recent AALL program. In a listserv posting quoted in Richard Danner’s recent paper, Ms. Leary asserted: “I do not agree with the call to stop publishing in print, nor do I think we have now or will have in the foreseeable future the requisite ‘stable, open, digital formats’.” Similarly, Richard Leiter explains that he signed the Durham Statement with an asterisk because of the statement’s call for an end to the printing of law reviews.

What constitutes ‘stable, open, digital formats’ for the purposes of satisfying some librarians is unclear. As I mentioned earlier, a number of digital formats currently fit this description. This makes me think that there’s something else going on here, a resistance to abandoning print for other reasons.

Citeability also becomes an issue as print legal information disappears. If there is no print reporter volume in which an opinion is issued, then how would one cite to an opinion (setting aside for a moment Lexis and Westlaw citations)?

However, efforts towards implementing “medium-neutral legal citation formats” have already been made. According to Ivan Mokanov’s recent VoxPopuLII post, most citations in Canada are of a neutral format. In the United States, LegisLink.org has made an effort to improve online citations, as Joe Carmel describes in his recent post. Work on URN:LEX and other standards has resulted in some progress towards dealing with the citeability issue. Organizations like the AALL Electronic Legal Information Access & Citation Committee also deserve credit for taking this on. [Editor’s Note: Those organizations have produced universal citation standards — such as the AALL Universal Citation Guide — which have been adopted by a number of U.S. jurisdictions.] Even The Bluebook supports alternative citation formats. For example, rule 10.3.3, “Public Domain Format,” specifies how to cite to a public domain or “medium-neutral format.” The Bluebook even goes so far as to allow citation in a jurisdiction’s specified format.

But despite all this work, nothing has yet stuck.

The Next Step

One thing you’ll notice respecting all of these issues is that they are currently unsettled. While AALL and ARJD have both suggested that they would look favorably on online-only legal information if it were official, authenticated, and preserved (they do not mention citeability), there is no indication of when we will reach a level of achievement on these issues that would be satisfactory to these organizations. Can governments, libraries, and citizens afford to wait?

Asking states to continue to bear the burden of publishing material in print as they run out of funding, and libraries to bear the expense of preserving that print, is irresponsible. While we might not have all of the answers now, we certainly have enough to move forward in an intelligent manner.

The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) has been working on an Authentication and Preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials Act. [Editor’s Note: The Chair of the Act’s Drafting Committee is Michele L. Timmons, the Revisor of Statutes for the State of Minnesota, and its Reporter is Professor Barbara Bintliff of the University of Texas School of Law.] According to the Study Committee’s Report and Recommendations for the Act’s Drafting Committee, the goal of the draft should be to “describ[e] minimum standards for the authentication and preservation of online state legal materials.” This seems like an appropriate place to start.

Rather than setting unrealistic or vague expectations, the minimum standards provided by the draft act seem to allow some flexibility for how states could address some of these issues. As opposed to working towards a “stable and open digital format,” which seems more a moving target than an attainable goal, the draft act sets forth an outline for how states can get started with publishing official and authentic online-only legal information. While far from finished, the draft act appears to be a step in the right direction.

What Is the Real Issue?

I think the real sticking point on this matter is mental or emotional. It comes from an uneasiness about how to deal with new methods of publishing legal information. For hundreds of years, legal information has been based in print. Even information available on the Lexis and Westlaw online services has its roots in print, if not full print versions of the same material. It’s as if the lack of a print or print-like version will cause librarians to lose the compass that helps us navigate the complex legal information landscape.

Of course, publishing legal information electronically brings its own challenges and costs for libraries. Electronic memory and space are not free, and setting up the IT infrastructure to consume, make available, and preserve digital materials can be costly. But in the long run, dealing with electronic material can and will be much easier and less costly for all involved, as well as giving greater access to legal information to the citizens who need it.

So Judges Blogging?

Question: Is there a good reason why judges should not be blogging their opinions?

Although he was the co-chair of the ARJD committee that produced the Statement of Principles, even Frank Wagner, the outgoing U.S. Supreme Court reporter of decisions, acknowledges that “budgetary constraints may eventually force most governmental units to abandon the printed word in favor of publishing their official materials exclusively online.” He also recognizes that the GPO’s work in this area may put an end to the printed U.S. Reports sooner than other “official publications.”

So were an appropriate authority to make them official, and some form of authentication were decided on, and methods of preservation and citation had been taken into account, would you feel comfortable with judges’ blogging their opinions?

We have to get over our unease with new formats for publishing online legal information. We have to stop handcuffing governments and libraries by placing unrealistic and unattainable expectations on them for publishing online legal information. We have to prepare ourselves for a world where online is the only outlet for official legal information.

I still enjoy taking a book off the shelf and reading. I enjoy flipping through and browsing the pages. But nostalgia and habit are not valid strategies for libraries of the future.

Jason Eiseman is the Librarian for Emerging Technologies at Yale Law School. He has experience in academic and law firm libraries working with intranets, websites, and technology training.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editor in chief is Robert Richards.

Legislation.gov.uk

free access to law, Legal descriptive metadata, Legal identifiers, Legal knowledge representation, Legal metadata, Legal XML, Legislative information systems, Public access to legal information, Semantic Web and law 19 Responses »

Aug 152010

The launch of legislation.gov.uk by The [UK] National Archives marks a step change in public access to a primary source of legal information for citizens in the UK. Legislation.gov.uk is extensive, covering the four jurisdictions that make up the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) and over 800 years of history.

John Sheridan, Head of e-Services and Strategy at The National Archives, writes:

First, some background

We had two objectives with legislation.gov.uk: to deliver a high quality public service for people who need to consult, cite, and use legislation on the Web; and to expose the UK’s Statute Book as data, for people to take, use, and re-use for whatever purpose or application they wish. In particular, our aim was to show how the statute book can contribute to the growing Web of data as well as to the Web of documents.

Legislation.gov.uk replaces two predecessor services the UK government set up to provide access to legislation. The first was created by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO), later to become the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), which is responsible for the official publication of legislation, and the London, Belfast and Edinburgh Gazettes. The functions of HMSO have been operating from The National Archives since 2006, including the provision of public access to legislation online. HMSO started publishing new legislation on the Web in 1996. Where HMSO and later OPSI provided access to legislation as it was enacted or made, a second service was developed, to provide access to the UK Statute Law Database. This contains revised versions of primary legislation, showing how they have changed over time.

Browsing the many different types of legislation in the UK

As in the United States, most lawyers in the UK rely on pay-for commercial legal research services. The people using the government’s online legislation service are generally not lawyers, but are drawn from a much wider group of people who need to know, cite, or use legislation as part of their job. These can range from police officers, to head teachers, to citizens defending their rights. Our users are people who need to know what a statute says, and who go looking for it using Google. They then quickly find their way to legislation.gov.uk.

What do people think they are seeing?

Before starting work on legislation.gov.uk, we did some research into the users of both the OPSI service and the UK Statute Law Database service. This research showed that they were very well used (over 1.5 million unique visitors per month to www.opsi.gov.uk), but that most of the people accessing legislation on the Web were not clear about the status of the material they were looking at. Our research showed that many people using legislation online assume that what they are looking at is both current and in force, simply because it is on the Web and available from an official source. Often users were accessing the original or as-enacted version of a statute, not knowing that they should be looking at the revised version, or that a revised version even existed.

Intuitive presentation

Our job is to present legislative material in such a way that the context and status of the information are clear. Legislation is complicated to understand; for example, an Act may have multiple sections, each with a different commencement date, or the Act may have prospective provisions. With legislation.gov.uk we have tried to develop a user interface that makes the status of each Act clear, so people know whether the statute they are viewing is current and in force. The usability challenge is to align what people think they are seeing with what they are actually looking at. We have done this by presenting both an original (see, e.g., here) and a latest-available version (see, e.g., here) of each Act, and a toggle between the two.

For more advanced users there is a timeline (see, e.g., here) which can be turned on to see how the legislation has changed and to navigate through an Act at particular points in time, including future or prospective versions.

Point in time navigation and the timeline

Open data

On the surface, legislation.gov.uk is an attractive Website, providing simple and direct access to legislation; at legislation.gov.uk people can view whole Acts, or a particular section, in either HTML (see, e.g., here) or in a print version in PDF (see, e.g., here). To achieve this, under the hood two very different sources of data have been combined. The data model for the original (or as-enacted) versions of legislation is largely driven by the typographic layout of legislative documents. For revised legislation, the data model is largely driven by version control, the management of multiple versions of different segments of a statute at different points in time. Reconciling these two different data models was a prerequisite step to developing our system.

An ‘on the fly’ created PDF

We aimed to make legislation.gov.uk a source of open data from the outset. The importance of open legal data is made powerfully by people like Carl Malamud and the Law.Gov campaign. Our desire to make the statute book available as open data motivated a number of technology choices we made. For example, the legislation.gov.uk Website is built on top of an open Application Programming Interface (API). The same API is available for others to use to access the raw data.

Using the API

The simplest way to get hold of the underlying data on legislation.gov.uk is to go to a piece of legislation on the Website, either a whole item, or a part or section, and just append /data.xml or /data.rdf to the URL. So, the data for, say, Section 1 of the Communications Act 2003, which is at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/1, is available at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/1/data.xml. We have taken a similar approach with lists, both in browse and search results. When looking at any list of legislation on legislation.gov.uk, it is easy to view the data. Simply append /data.feed to return that list in ATOM. (See, e.g., here.)

Open standards have played an important role throughout the development of legislation.gov.uk. All the data is held in XML, using a native XML database. The application logic is similarly constructed using open standards, in XSLTs and XQueries. Data and application portability were key objectives. We made considerable use of open source software like Orbeon Forms, Squid, and Apache.

The XML conforms to the Crown Legislation Markup Language (CLML) and associated schema. More general interchange formats for legislation such as CEN MetaLex lack the expressive power we need for UK legislation, but could relatively easily be wrapped around the XML we are making available. We have sought to surface richer metadata about legislation using RDF, but we would welcome feedback from users of the XML data about whether a MetaLex wrapper would be useful. (Note: We have used the MetaLex vocabulary in our RDF along with FRBR, as discussed below.) Similarly, it should be relatively easy to add a wrapper for the OAI-PMH protocol on top of the API we have built. We are not yet clear who would make use of such a service, if we built one, or whether we should leave the creation of an OAI-PMH interface to others. It is another open issue where we would welcome some feedback.

Persistent URIs

A major influence on legislation.gov.uk was a blog posting by Rick Jelliffe for O’Reilly’s XML.com. Jelliffe writes about something he calls PRESTO. He describes this as a system for legislation and public information in which “all documents, views and metadata at all significant levels of granularity and composition should be available in the best formats practical from their own permanent hierarchical URIs.”

Persistent URIs to pieces of legislation are very important, as they are to sources of law more generally. Initiatives like LegisLink, which Joe Carmel has written about here, attempt to retrofit a reliable naming scheme for legislation onto existing document-based systems. The URN:LEX namespace aims to facilitate the process of creating URIs for legal sources independent of a document’s online availability, location, and access mode.

We wanted to create high quality, persistent URIs for UK legislation from the outset. There are a number of different ways one might assign an unequivocal identifier to a legislative document. We have decided to use HTTP URIs and see no particular advantage in using URNs over HTTP URIs and indeed some disadvantages with URNs. Most importantly, HTTP URIs are actionable names. The advantage is that there is a built-in, ready-made, widely deployed and cost-effective resolution mechanism for resolving the identifier to a document, and a document to a representation. Having said that, we would consider supporting URN:LEX URNs in addition to our own URI Set, and would greatly welcome feedback from the community on this issue -– so please do comment if you have a view.

So, it follows, there are three types of URI for legislation on legislation.gov.uk, namely, identifier URIs, document URIs and representation URIs. Identifier URIs are for the ‘concept’ of a piece of legislation, how it was, how it is, and how it will be. (See, e.g., here.) Our use of these follow the Linked Data principles — the identifier URI is for a so-called non-information resource, something which can’t be conveyed in an electronic message. In other words, the URI is for the notion of a piece of legislation, rather than a particular rendition of it in a document. These URIs have been designed following the guidelines the UK Government has created for URI Sets, which our work helped to shape.

With legislation.gov.uk we support content negotiation, and follow the HTTP-Range 14 resolution approach, of responding to a request for the ‘non-information resource’ URI with a 303 response which redirects to a document URI.

Our document URIs refer to particular documents on the Web, for example the current, in-force version of a particular section of an Act. (See, e.g., here.) Crucially there are also point-in-time URIs for documents, which shows how that Act stood on a particular date (/yyyy-mm-dd) (see, e.g., here), or how it was when originally made (/enacted) (see, e.g., here). For any document we can return different representations or formats: a Web page on legislation.gov.uk, the underlying XML, a PDF, an HTML snippet, or even some RDF metadata. We recommend that people cite UK legislation in HTML by pointing to the identifier URI and by using the rel=”cite” attribute in the anchor tag.

Of course, we quickly discovered, it is one thing to suggest a design approach like PRESTO, and quite another to actually implement it. Jeni Tennison, who, working as a consultant to The Stationery Office, devised the URI Set for legislation (and much else about the legislation.gov.uk system), has blogged about the limitations of PRESTO and XPath-based URLs. I hope Jeni will find the time to blog some more about legislation.gov.uk, as there are many stories to be told.

One of the earliest pieces of design work we did for legislation.gov.uk was the URI Set. We wanted to follow PRESTO principles, but also account for changes over time, and for some of the peculiarities of UK legislation, in particular different geographic extents. (See, e.g., here.) PRESTO thinking is very evident on legislation.gov.uk; just look at the URLs as you move through the site.

Linked Data

We were also keen that the UK’s Statute Book make a contribution to the growing Web of Linked Data. The UK government is working hard to publish government data using Linked Data standards as part of work on data.gov.uk. The idea of the Web of Linked Data is to connect related information across the Web based on its meaning. In practice this means creating names for things (by ‘thing’ I mean anything: people, places, ideas) using HTTP, and when someone requests some information about that thing, returning data about it, ideally using RDF.

Legislation can make an important contribution to the Web of Linked Data. First, many important concepts and ideas are formally defined by statute. For example, there are 27 types of school in the UK and each one has a statutory definition. (See, e.g., here and here.) What it means to be a private limited company is again defined by statute, as are the UK’s eight data protection principles. One of our objectives with legislation.gov.uk is to enable people creating vocabularies and ontologies to exploit these definitions. This can be done, for example, by using the skos:definition property, to link terms in a vocabulary to the statute. The idea is to ease the process of rooting the Semantic Web in legally defined concepts. Part of the value of this linking is that it enables automatic checking to determine whether a part of the statute book has been repealed, in which case the related concept no longer exists. Crucially, legislation.gov.uk gives accurate information about when a section is repealed, by what piece of legislation, and when that repeal comes into force.

At the moment, the RDF from legislation.gov.uk is limited to largely bibliographic information. We have made use of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the MetaLex vocabularies, primarily to relate the different types of resource we are making available. FRBR has the notion of a work, expressions of that work, manifestations of those expressions, and items. Similarly, MetaLex has the concepts of a BibliographicWork and BibliographicExpression. In the context of legislation.gov.uk, the identifier URIs relate to the work. Different versions of the legislation (current, original, different points in time, or prospective) relate to different expressions. The different formats (HTML, HTML Snippets, XML, and PDF) relate to the different manifestations. We have also made extensive use of Dublin Core Terms, for example to reflect that different versions apply to geographic extents. This is important as, for example, the same section of a statute may have been amended in one way as it applies in Scotland and in another way for England and Wales. We think FRBR, MetaLex, and Dublin Core Terms have all worked well, individually and in combination, for relating the different types of resource that we are making available.

One challenge we have is with changes to legislation that have yet to be applied to the data by the editorial team. Since we know what these effects are, we have also tried to represent this in RDF. We have used the MetaLex vocabulary to do this, but the result is complicated to interpret, and thus we suspect difficult for users of the data. MetaLex does not aid the elegant expression of amendment information (such as: statute A is changed by statute B, but only when commencement order C brings that change into force). We will be developing our own light-weight ontology for expressing some of these relationships, with the primary focus on ease of querying our data, rather than creating an ontology with the expressive power to be a cross-jurisdictional model.

It should then be possible to align this ontology with others post hoc. Our current use of RDF — and the potential to do more — is another issue where we would welcome feedback from the community.

Early adopters

People have already started to make use of the legislation.gov.uk URIs to support their Linked Data. One example is a project by ESD Toolkit. They have a created a SKOS vocabulary for all the different types of service that Local Authorities need to provide. They have linked this vocabulary to the powers and duties placed on Local Authorities in the legislation, using legislation.gov.uk identifier URIs. They have also used the API to pull back some of the text of the relevant statutes.

The future

We think there is huge potential over the next few years in the development of “accountable systems”. These are systems that are explicitly aware of statutory and other legal requirements and are able to process information explicitly in a way that complies with the (ever-changing) law. Here the legislation URIs can help enormously, either for people seeking to develop such accountable systems or any time someone wants to integrate an external system with the official source for statutory information. If the API is used in this way, we will need to consider carefully whether, and if so, how, the data is authenticated. We are not currently supplying digitally signed versions of UK legislation (unlike the GPO in the US) but we will be supporting the use of HTTPS, to provide a reasonable level of secure access to the data. However, if the data starts to be increasingly used in a new generation of accountable systems, we may need to address authenticity, with a view to increasing the guarantees we can make over the data.

There is much more we can do with legislation as data. Parts of the statute book are surprisingly well structured. For example, every year there is one or more Appropriation Acts. These typically contain a schedule with a table listing each government department, the amount allocated to it by Parliament for the year, and what that departments’ objectives are (see, e.g., here). It wouldn’t take much to create an XSLT just for these tables in the Appropriation Acts, from the XML provided from the API, to extract this data from all the Appropriation Acts, and publish that as Linked Data. There are many other examples of almost-structured data in legislation, waiting to be freed by developers, now that they have easy access to the underlying source.

We see this as a start. There is still much to do if we are to realise the potential of the statute book as public source of data. We are aiming to improve the modelling and the quantity of RDF data we make available about legislation, but it’s what others will do with the data that is really interesting. Now the UK has opened its statute book as Linked Data, we are keen to share our work with other governments, and to engage with academics in the legal informatics community and others with an interest in exploiting this rich source of information.

John Sheridan is Head of e-Services and Strategy at The [UK] National Archives, where he leads the team responsible for legislation.gov.uk. He is a specialist in official publishing on the Web, and in using Linked Data standards for government information. He also co-chairs the W3C eGovernment Interest Group.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editor in chief is Robert Richards.

IT and the Access to Justice Crisis

Applications, comparative, Dissertations, free access to law, knowledge management, Legal information behavior, Legal information systems for pro se litigants, Legal information systems for self represented litigant, Legal knowledge management, Nonlawyers' legal information behavior, Nonlawyers' legal information needs, Pro se litigants, Public access to legal information, Self represented litigants 2 Responses »

Aug 012010

This post explores ways in which information technology (IT) can enhance access to justice. What does it mean when we talk about “the access to justice crisis,” and how can information technology help to resolve it? The discussion that follows is based on my 2009 book, Technology for Justice: How Information Technology Can Support Judicial Reform, particularly Part 4, on the role of information and IT in access to justice.

The normative framework for access to justice

International conventions guarantee access to a court. Everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing by an independent tribunal in the determination of their civil rights and obligations or of any criminal charge against him or her, according to The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (article 14) and regional conventions like the The European Convention on Human Rights (article 6). In practice, the normative framework for access to justice does not provide us with clearly defined concepts.

The major barriers to access to justice identified in the scholarly literature are:

Distance, which can be a factor impeding access to courts. In many countries, courts are concentrated in the main urban centers or in the capital.
Language barriers, which are present when justice seekers use a language that is different from the language of the courts.
Physical challenges, like impaired sight and hearing and motor and cognitive impairments; these as a barrier to access are an emerging topic in the debate on technology support in courts.

These first three factors are all relatively straightforward and do not strike at the heart of the legal process.

Cost, for instance lawyers’ fees, court fees and other components of the price of access to justice, in many forms, has been identified as a factor affecting access to courts. However, cost is extremely hard to research and subject to a lot of ramifications. Because of this complexity, cost will not be discussed directly in this post.
Lack of information and knowledge, lack of familiarity with the court process, the complexity of legal and administrative systems, and lack of access to legal information are commonly identified factors (Cotterrell, The Sociology of Law p. 251; Hammergren, Envisioning Reform: Improving Judicial Performance in Latin America, p. 136). They are related because they all refer to the availability of information. They are the starting point for our discussion.

Potentially, information on the Internet can provide some form of solution for these problems, in two ways. First, access to information can support fairer administration of justice by equipping people to respond appropriately when confronted with problems with a potentially legal solution. Access to information can compensate, to some extent, for the disadvantage one-shotters experience in litigation, thereby increasing their chance of obtaining a fair decision. Second, the Internet provides a channel for legal information services, although experience with such online service provision is limited in most judiciaries. The discussion here will therefore focus on access to legal information and knowledge. Lack of information and knowledge as a barrier to access to justice is the focus for discussion in the first few paragraphs. The first step is to identify the barriers.

Knowledge and information barriers to access to justice

What are the information barriers individuals experience when they encounter problems with a potentially legal solution? We need empirical evidence to find an answer to this question, and fortunately some excellent research has been done, which may help us. In the U.K., Hazel Genn led a team that researched what people do and think about going to law. Their 1999 report is called Paths to Justice. A similar exercise led by Ben van Velthoven and Marijke ter Voert in The Netherlands, called Geschilbeslechtingsdelta 2003 (Dispute Resolution Delta 2003), was published in 2004. Although there are some marked differences between them, both studies looked at how people deal with “justiciable problems”: problems that are experienced as serious and have a potentially legal solution. Analysis of empirical evidence of people and their justiciable problems in England and Wales and The Netherlands produced the following findings with regard to these barriers:

Inaction in the face of a justiciable problem because of lack of information and knowledge occurs in a small percentage of cases.
Unavailability of advice negatively affects dispute resolution outcomes. It lowers the resolution rate. Cases in which people attempted to find advice were resolved with a higher rate of success than those of the self-helpers.
Respecting the inability to find advice: If people go looking for advice, the barriers to finding it have more to do with their own competencies, such as confidence, emotional fortitude, and literacy skills, than with the availability of the advice. In the United Kingdom, about 20 percent of the population is so poor at reading and writing that they cannot cope with the demands of modern life, according to data from the National Literacy Trust. In The Netherlands, the percentage of similarly low literacy is estimated at about 10 percent, according to data from the Stichting Lezen en Schrijven, the Reading and Writing Foundation.
Respecting incompetence in implementing the information received: Different competence levels will affect what can be done with information and advice. Competencies in implementing the information received include, for example, skills such as working out what the problem is, what result is wanted, and how to find help; simple case-recording skills; managing correspondence; confidence and assertiveness; and negotiating skills, according to research reported by Advicenow in 2005. Some people do not want to be empowered by having information available. They want assistance, or even someone to take over dealing with their problem. People with low levels of competence in terms of education, income, confidence, verbal skill, literacy skill, or emotional fortitude are likely to need some help in resolving justiciable problems.
Ignorance about legal rights exists across most social groups. Genn notes that people generally are not educated about their legal rights (Genn p. 102).
Respecting lack of confidence in the legal system and the courts and negative feelings about the justice system, Genn observes that people are unwilling voluntarily to become involved with the courts. People associate courts with criminal justice. People’s image of the courts is formed by media stories about high profile criminal cases (Genn p. 247). This issue is related to the public image of courts, as well as to the wider role of courts as setters of norms.

Information needs for resolving justiciable problems

After identifying knowledge and information barriers, the next step is to uncover needs for information and knowledge related to access to justice. Those needs are most strongly related to the type of problem people experience. The most frequently occurring justiciable problems are simple, easy-to-solve problems, mostly those concerning goods and services. People themselves resolve such problems, occasionally with advice from specialist organizations like the consumers’ unions (e.g., in the U.S., the National Consumers League). For more important, more complex problems, people tend to seek expert help more frequently. The most difficult to resolve are problems involving a longer-term relationship, such as labor or family problems. Any of the problems discussed in this section may lead to a court procedure. However, the problems that are the toughest to resolve are also the ones that most frequently come to court.

The first need people experience is for information on how to solve their problem. In The Netherlands, the primary sources for this type of information are specialized organizations, with legal advice providers in second place. In England and Wales, solicitors are the first port of call, followed by the Citizens’ Advice Bureaux. In both countries, the police are a significant source of information on justiciable problems. This is especially remarkable because the problems researched were not criminal justice issues.

If people require legal information, they primarily need straightforward information about rules and regulations. Next, they look for information about ways to settle and handle disputes once they arise. Information about court procedures is a separate category that becomes relevant only in the event people need to go to court.

Respecting taking their case to court: People need information on how to resolve problems, on rights and duties, and on taking a case to court. The justiciable problems that normally come to court tend to be difficult for people themselves to resolve. These problems are also experienced as serious. Many of them involve long-term relationships: family, employment, neighbors. Therefore, people will tend to go looking for advice. Some of them may need assistance. Most people seek and receive some kind of advice before they come to court.

In summary, information needs in this context are mostly problem-specific. Most problems are resolved by people themselves, sometimes with the help of information, or help in the form of advice or assistance. The help is provided by many different organizations, but mostly by specialized organizations or providers of legal aid and alternative dispute resolution (ADR).

Different dispute resolution cultures

There are, besides these general trends, interesting differences between England and Wales and The Netherlands. The results with regard to dispute outcome, for instance, show the following:

The Netherlands has fewer unresolved disputes, more disputes resolved by agreement, and the rate of resolution by adjudication is half that of England and Wales. It looks as if there is more capacity for resolving justiciable problems in Dutch society than there is in society in England and Wales. Apart from the legacy of the justice system where there is a propensity to settle differences that Voltaire described in one of his letters, many factors may be at work in The Netherlands to produce a higher level of problem-solving capacity. One probable factor is the level of education and the related competence levels for dealing with problems and the legal framework. The functional illiteracy rate is only half that in the United Kingdom. Another factor may be a propensity to settle differences by reducing the complexity of problems through policies and routines.

Diversion or access, empowerment or court improvement?

The debate respecting whether diversion or court improvement should come first as an objective of legal policy, has been going on for some time. These are the options under discussion:

Preventing problems and disputes from arising;
Equipping as many members of the public as possible to solve problems when they do arise without needing recourse to legal action;
Diverting cases away from the courts into private dispute resolution forums; and
Enhancing access to legal forums for the resolution of disputes.

Genn argues that it is not an answer to say that diversion and access should be the twin objectives of policy, because they logically conflict. I would like to contribute some observations that could provide a way out of this apparent dilemma.

First, user statistics from the introduction of the online claim service Money Claim Online and the case study in Chapter 2.3 of my book suggest that changes in procedure facilitating access do not in themselves lead to higher caseloads. Changes observed in the caseloads are attributable to market forces in both instances.

The other observation is that Paths to Justice and the Dispute Resolution Delta clearly found that self-help is experienced as more satisfying and less stressful than legal proceedings. Moreover, resolutions are to a large degree problem specific. A way out of the dilemma could be that specialist organizations that make it their business to provide specific information, advice, and assistance, should enhance their role. There is an empirical basis for this way out in the research reported in Paths to Justice and the Dispute Resolution Delta. Although goods and services problems are largely resolved through self-help, out-of-court settlement, or ADR, nonetheless a fair number of them still come to court. Devising ways to assist individuals in informal problem solving and diverting them to other dispute resolution mechanisms can keep still more of these problems out of court. Even in matters for which a court decision is compulsory, like divorce, mediation mechanisms can sort out differences before the case is filed. Clearly, information on the Internet will provide an entry point for all of these dispute resolution services. Online information can thus help to keep as many problems out of court as possible. All this should not keep us from making going to court when necessary less stressful. Information can help reduce people’s stress, even as it improves their chances of achieving justice. The Internet can be a vehicle for this kind of information service, too.

Taking up this point, the next section focuses on courts and how information technology, particularly the Internet, can support them in their role of information providers to improve access to justice. Two strains concerning the role of information in access to justice run through this theme: information to keep disputes out of court, and information on taking disputes to court.

Information to keep disputes out of court

An almost implicit understanding in the research literature is that parties with information on the “rules of thumb” of how courts deal with types of disputes will settle their differences more easily and keep them out of court. Such information supports settlement in the shadow of the law. Most of this type of settlement will be done with the support of legal or specialist organizations. In the pre-litigation stage, information about the approaches judges and courts generally take to specific types of problems can help the informal resolution of those problems. This will require that information about the way courts deal with those types of problems becomes available. Some of the ways in which courts deal with specific issues are laid down in policies. Moreover, judicial decision making is sometimes assisted by decision support systems reflecting policies. In order to help out-of-court settlement, policies and decision support systems need to be available publicly.

Information on taking disputes to court

If a dispute needs to come to court, information can reduce the disadvantage one-shotters have in dealing with the court and with legal issues. This disadvantage of the one-shotters — those who come to court only occasionally — over against the repeat players who use courts as a matter of business, was enunciated by Marc Galanter in his classic 1974 article, Why the Haves Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change. Access to information for individual, self-represented litigants increases their chances of obtaining just and fair decisions. Litigants need information on how to take their case to court. This information needs to be legally correct, as well as effective. By “effective,” I mean that the general public can understand the information, and that someone after reading it will (1) know what to do next, and (2) be confident that this action will yield the desired result. In a case study, I have rated several court-related Web sites in the U.K. and in The Netherlands on those points, and found most of them wanting. My test was done in 2008, and most of the sites have since changed or been replaced. And although the U.K. Court Service leaflet D 184 on how to get a divorce got the best score, my favorite Web site is Advicenow.

Such an information service requires a proactive, demand-oriented attitude from courts and judiciaries. Multi-channel information services, such as a letter from the court with reference to information on the court’s or judiciary’s Web site, can meet people’s information needs.

Beyond information push

Other forms of IT, increasingly interactive, can provide access to court. [Editor’s note: Document assembly systems for self-represented litigants are a notable example.] Not all of them require full-scale implementation of electronic case management and electronic files. In order to be effective for everyone, the information services discussed will require human help backup. There are also technologies to provide this, but they may still not be sufficient for everyone. The information services discussed here, in order to be effective, will need to be provided by a central agency for the entire legal system. A final finding is the importance of public trust in the courts in order for individuals to achieve access to justice. Judiciaries can actively contribute to improved access to justice in this field by ensuring that correct information about their processes is furnished to the public.

In summary, access to justice can be effectively improved with IT services. Such services can help to ameliorate the access-to-justice crisis by keeping disputes out of court. The information services identified here should serve the purpose of getting justice done. They should not keep people from getting the justice they deserve by preventing them from taking a justified concern to court. If people need to go to court, information services can help them deal with the courts more effectively.

[Editor’s Note: A very useful list of resources about applying technology to access to justice appears at the technola blog.]

Dory Reiling, mag. iur. Ph.D., is a judge in the first instance court in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She was the first information manager for The Netherlands’ Judiciary, and a senior judicial reform expert at The World Bank. She is currently on the editorial board of The Hague Journal on the Rule of Law and on the Board of Governors of The Netherlands’ Judiciary’s Web site Rechtspraak.nl. She has a Weblog in Dutch, and an occasional Weblog in English, and can be followed on Twitter at @doryontour.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editor in chief is Robert Richards.

The Impact of Metadata Standards on Traditional Legal Online Services in Germany

Legal metadata, Public access to legal information, Standards 2 Responses »

Jun 152010

It is common sense within the information industry that revenue will shift from print to online (see Ulrich Hermann, CEO of Wolters Kluwer Germany, in FAZ on April 7th 2010, p. 15).

But what is the impact of current technical trends in metadata standards on legal online services in Germany? Is there any impact? If you take the real market penetration of metadata standards into account, one could say that the concept of metadata standards has failed. At least, standards such as the “Saarbrücker Standard” (a standard, created in 2000, for court decisions in German jurisdictions) have never been used widely. Nevertheless we kicked off jurMeta — a proposed new metadata standard for German-language legal resources — at the EDV-Gerichtstag 2009, a major German conference on judicial information systems.

Market trends in Germany

In order to understand the impact of metadata standards, we need to consider such standards in the context of legal online services in Germany, and current trends.

What are the market trends in online services in Germany? The content coverage is rapidly growing, particularly from an end-user’s perspective. State authorities and publishing houses are publishing primary content free of charge for various reasons; law firms are running blogs with comments on the latest court cases (JuraBlogs); lawyers and clients are using services that publish advice, even when related to concrete disputes (frag-einen-anwalt.de). European legislation (in particular the Public Sector Information Directive) is encouraging member states and public sector bodies to take proactive measures to promote reuse of public sector information in order to exploit its business potential.

At the same time the technical infrastructure for sharing information is getting better. Interested persons do not need any technical skills to instantly set up a vertical search engine with Google custom search. Open source tools are even covering high end demands of private online publishers. There is an open source tool or project that addresses the private publisher’s needs in any aspect, e.g. performance (CouchDB), machine learning (Mahout), or relevance ranking (Open Relevance Project). And in most cases it is not only a solution but a high end solution that can be adopted free of (licensing) cost.

Of course social networks have to be named as a trend in law online. Services such as Marktplatz-Recht.de, JUSMEUM, and justanswer are creating communities of legal professionals. These services combine the benefits of online communities with expertise in the area of law and thus generate new revenue streams. Social networks organize value-adding-processes efficiently since they allow one to exploit cognition [i.e., the people having the most knowledge] at the source. (I once called this the paradigm of the “cheapest value adder”; see Gütezeichen als Qualitätsaussage im digitalen Informationsmarkt: dargestellt am Beispiel elektronischer Rechtsdatenbanken (2000), p. 25.) Chances are high that vertical social networks will repeat the success of their generic predecessors, at least at a smaller scale.

Do legal online services exhibit these features only in Germany? The answer is No. These market trends are most likely valid throughout the world. I will come to the specifics of legal online services in Germany shortly.

First let me sum up what I consider to be the major driver in legal online services for the next couple of years. This is what I would like to label “Digital Convergence”–not the above-mentioned individual trends in the areas of content, technical infrastructure, and users/community, but a synergetic combination of these three trends that will drive the future of legal online services.

What are the characteristics of legal online services in Germany in 2010?

First, the fact that Germany is a code-based country makes legal online services in Germany an ideal target for any kind of invention in the area of text retrieval. For example, at the federal level there are more than 5,000 pieces of legislation with more than 100 provisions each. If you think of one specific term in paragraph 4 of § 97 GWB as a very precise reference to a specific legal issue, consider that

§ 97 GWB is one out of more than 500,000 provisions,
these provisions follow a semantic structure, and
nearly all existing legal documents refer to specific provisions at the European, federal, state, or municipal level.

You thus get a sense of the challenge of legal online services in Germany. But you also get a sense of their potential. One could put it this way: The semantic web of legal content in Germany already exists; we “only” have to apply a common syntactical representation in order to create a very rich business resource by linking millions of individual and heterogeneous documents. The projects that share a common syntactical representation (e.g., jurMeta) will be rich sources for additional value-adding processes such as data mining.

Second, end-users of legal documents are by nature very conscious about retrieval quality. No matter whether they are aware of the parameters for retrieval quality such as scope, recall and precision, end users (e.g., lawyers) know that the one make-or-break case could exist; therefore the goal of any kind of information retrieval effort is to retrieve this one case but not others. To measure the relevance of retrieval results is very difficult, but determining relevance in law is far easier than in other domains. The importance of retrieval quality to end users of legal information systems is of course not specific to Germany, but is still an important driver for resource allocation in online retrieval projects. Therefore, legal research is the ideal test area for technical innovations in search and retrieval. Taking into account that lawyers are an attractive target group, investors will to a larger degree focus on legal research as a business opportunity. Such investment should speed progress.

Third, an important parameter for legal online services in Germany is the availability of primary legal content (legislation and case law). Public authorities in Germany claim copyright — at least to some extent — in official documents, and their efforts at publishing primary legal content online have been rudimentary. The existing offerings of legal content set up by state authorities are end-user oriented and very heterogeneous. The service providers — such as this firm — that technically publish the legal documents on behalf of the public authorities are private companies with business interests relating to legal information. Thus, allowing these companies to publish primary legal content on behalf of the public authorities is like letting the fox rule the henhouse. After all, official documents are the result of the tax-funded work of public authorities.

A modern publication infrastructure for primary legal content should functionally separate data collection from dissemination. Official documents should, if required, be anonymized, and stored on servers in a well-structured format for anybody to download either free-of-charge, or at cost of dissemination. This would allow non-commercial projects as well as commercial users to focus on value-adding processes, rather than crawling and re-engineering data that already exists as part of proprietary collections. In economic terms, this would lead to improved resource allocation, strengthen electronic media as tools for democratic processes, and support the goals of the Public Sector Information Directive.

Legal online research in Germany in 2020

In order to analyze the impact of metadata standards on legal publishers, I will be so bold as to predict how legal online services could look in 2020:

a) Public authorities will be obliged to publish any official document electronically in a well-structured format on servers accessible for anybody, for commercial or non-commercial use, at cost of dissemination.
b) There will be a wide range of legal online information services free of charge serving all sorts of information needs and target groups. These will range from easy-to-use systems for one-time users to expert systems for professionals.
c) The motivations for setting up legal online information services will vary to a larger extent than they do today. Successful online projects will have to support this growing range of motivations. (See Felix Zimmermann, JurMeta: A New Metadata Initiative for Legal Documents.) Since setting up legal online services will even be easier in 2020 than in 2010, more people will set up such services.
d) If one measures retrieval quality by recall and precision, I bet nearly all free services in 2020 will be better than the existing commercial legal online services in Germany in 2010. I invite anybody to come up with a proposal for a concrete experimental design with which to test this thesis, and I am curious to see the results of the experiment that proves this thesis wrong. But in any case:
e) The beneficiary of these trends will be the end user of legal information.

Impact on fee-based services and traditional publishing houses

Assuming that legal information services will radically improve in the future, is there a business opportunity for traditional publishing houses in legal online services at all? If the answer is yes, what will be the parameters for (business) success?

Applying a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis will identify the threats and opportunities for publishing houses. An important threat is the increasing speed of activity and change in the market. The technical lead-time of open-source-based start-ups might be too large for traditional publishers. An acquisition could help a traditional publisher catch up, but only if the acquirer is willing to adjust its processes and business principles. All traditional publishing houses I know claim to be customer oriented. I am convinced that market pressure (i.e., competition) will increase because of the numerous new legal online services being launched over the next couple of years. A substantial opportunity for traditional publishing houses lies in increasing the benefits that users derive from legal information, rather than trying to convert book selling to online media.

The biggest advantage of established legal publishing houses, as opposed to new start-ups, is their brand recognition, and the chance to position themselves as gatekeepers for high quality information. The corresponding threat is –- again –- based on new technologies: Services such as UserVoice allow new content providers to gain user feedback more effectively than through traditional market research, and at very low cost. Online social networks are analyzing the interactions among users, and are trying to exploit users’ behavior and ratings on the fly for business purposes. We will see whether traditional publishing houses will timely make use of such technologies, or whether such publishers will be able to catch up if they miss the chance to apply these new tools.

Conclusion

Assuming that, as mentioned above, a combination of trends will drive the future of legal online services, the publisher that identifies the synergies of the “digital convergence” and first applies them in customer products has the best chance to benefit from the current trends. Those that move too late might lose even more revenue than currently expected due to the change from print to online information.

So what about the impact of metadata standards such as jurMeta on legal online services in Germany? Metadata standards are an important component of the concept of the above-mentioned “digital convergence.” They are the syntactical bridge from the raw materials of German legal documents to the Semantic Web of legal information in Germany. Metadata standards for legal information services support decentralized value-adding processes, and thus are the key parameter for exploiting the synergies enabled by “digital convergence.” The metadata standards that best serve the various needs of the greatest number of legal online projects and services, will succeed.

Dr. Andreas Bock is CEO of kjur.de. After writing his Ph.D. thesis on the quality of digital information services (Gütezeichen als Qualitätsaussage im digitalen Informationsmarkt: dargestellt am Beispiel elektronischer Rechtsdatenbanken (2000)) at the Institute for Legal Informatics of the University of Hannover with Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Kilian, he worked for Westlaw (2000 to 2003) and LexisNexis (2003 to 2007), heading product development of their respective international legal online projects in Germany. Dr. Bock currently practices law at Kehr-Ritz. Together with Felix Zimmermann, he launched kjur.de, an online service for free legal content, in 2009.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editor in chief is Robert Richards.

Crowdsourcing Legal Commentary

Adding legal commentary to free access to law services, Applications, Crowdsourcing and free access to law, Crowdsourcing and legal information systems, Crowdsourcing the writing of secondary legal resources, free access to law, Legal commentary, Legal metadata, Legal social media, Legal social networks, Legal treatises, open source software, Public access to legal information, Secondary legal resources, Web 2.0 and law, Wikis and law 5 Responses »

Mar 312010

Background: The Need for Free Legal Commentaries

A legal commentary — also known as a legal treatise — is an unofficial text, intended to complement a particular source of law, often consisting of one or more statutes. A commentary on a statute provides information on how to interpret terms in the statutory text, summarizes examples of the statute’s application, references other relevant parts of the statutory law, and explains the legislative history and policy background of the statute. As statutory law is typically written in an open-ended way, setting forth norms in general language and usually without examples of how the law should be applied, a newcomer may have difficulty understanding it. Legal commentaries help with this.

In many jurisdictions, the texts of statutes are published by the legislature, usually without claim to copyright, and thus are made available to all, including to free-access-to-law services. Legal commentaries, by contrast, are written by private parties, who have a copyright on the resulting text, copies of which they typically sell at price levels that prevent most persons other than legal professionals from accessing them. Thus, most citizens may have free access to law, but not to the texts necessary for understanding it.

My background is that of a software developer, but in 2005 I started law school in Sweden. At that time, I couldn’t find any good freely accessible web service containing Swedish statutory law, so I built one called lagen.nu (which, translated, means “the law, now”). When the site debuted it contained around 4,000 pages of statutory law, and another 10,000 pages with headnotes on legal cases, with hyperlinks and cross-references. Over the next few years the site was gradually improved, with better hyperlinking of references, the addition of the full text of case law, and an improved graphical interface. The purpose of the site was and is to make law accessible to the common person. But making available official data such as statutory and case law can only get you so far, as there are many aspects of the law which are not apparent from the face of primary legal documents.

The Swedish legal system, like most civil law systems, is based more on statutory law than are most common law systems. Jurists in Sweden therefore spend much time interpreting statutory law. There are several publishers — including Thomson Fakta and Norstedts Juridik — that provide legal commentaries on Swedish central acts. The commentaries are written for legal professionals, which is evident in both the extent of the commentaries and their price. (As an example, the standard commentary on the Swedish code of judicial procedure fills four loose-leaf binders and costs 4435 SEK [$611 US].) As such, they are not accessible in any realistic sense to laypeople.

Therefore, I started thinking about how one could create a free commentary on Swedish law. Traditional commentaries require enormous resources, the most critical and expensive being the time of professors or other experts. Commentaries written for legal professionals generally fall into either of two categories: (1) in-depth works, or (2) practice tools. In-depth works — such as Fitger’s Rättegångsbalken — provide extensive treatment of the subject, delve deeply into the historical and teleological background of the regulation in question, and examine every conceivable exceptions-from-the-exception-to-the-rule detail. Those commentaries can be ten times the length of the actual statutory text, and are typically published in book form. In particular, they are written for readers who already understand the basic concepts and structure of the regulation, and who have time to dig deeper. For ordinary people, this level of detail is neither needed nor wanted.

In addition, there are practice tools, shorter commentaries more suited for the practicing lawyer who needs to quickly understand a particular regulation. These are still written for professionals, and are typically accessible as part of an electronic database subscription. Such subscriptions are priced far beyond the reach of non-professionals as well.

Thus neither form of commentary is written for laypeople, and neither is readily available to them. In order for the law to be accessible to all, it needs to be explained differently, and the explanation needs to be freely available. Writing this sort of commentary doesn’t require a tenured professor. In fact, the basic aspects of any central act can be adequately explained by any law student having the following two qualities:

a) A thorough understanding of the subject (for example, having taken the relevant course and having received a good grade); and

b) A talent for explaining complex things succinctly. At this, the student may even outdo the professor, as the student — having recently been a novice respecting the topic — will have a better understanding of how the subject is approached by someone new to it.

In any given act, there are a handful of key sections. A brief introduction to the act, combined with short explanations of these key sections, would be enough to create something useful to a nonlawyer. A person with a good knowledge of the act could write this in an evening. Something more extensive, like a basic commentary on the interesting parts of any central act, could be written in one or two weeks of work.

Still, there are a lot of central acts in Swedish law, and of only a few of these do I have extensive knowledge. Since I wouldn’t be able to write all the commentary myself, I’d have to create something that made it possible for people more knowledgeable than I to contribute their knowledge. Thus, the solution would have two aspects — one technological, one social. During the spring, summer, and autumn of 2009, we tried to create this solution.

Technology: Collaborative Writing Tools

In our proposed free online system, a commentary for a single act would normally contain a brief introduction to the act itself, followed by comments on the most important sections. A simple way to do this is to write the entire commentary as a single text document, divided into different parts, each referencing a particular section of the act. Acts in the Swedish law system can vary greatly in length, with some being only a sentence long, and some being over 100,000 words long and containing over 1000 different sections. However, the decision to use one single commentary text per act was made in order to keep things simple.

Swedish acts are typically divided into chapters, which are divided into sections (though for shorter acts, only sections are used). For example, the second section of the fourth chapter of an act is referenced as “4 kap. 2 §”. We adopted a convention of using such a reference as a header preceding the commentary for the referenced section.

Apart from headings, we tried to use as little formatting as possible. Basic bold and italics were desirable, as were different sorts of lists (ordered, unordered, and definition lists), but not things like multiple fonts or footnotes. Hyperlinks, both internal within the system and external to other web pages, were encouraged.

Apart from commentaries on the acts themselves, we wanted to be able to describe important concepts referred to in the acts. To write succinct explanations of statutes, one often has to refer to central legal concepts (such as “The rule of law“). If that reference can be linked to a page that describes the concept in greater detail, the commentary can be made shorter and the user can decide whether to follow the link if more explanation is needed. Furthermore, the concept can be referred to from multiple commentaries.

In order for the process to be as simple as possible, we needed a web-based editing system that didn’t require any particular piece of software on the user’s computer. We also didn’t want to spend significant time developing or customizing software.

The decision was made to use MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, for the task. MediaWiki is a very robust and well developed piece of software with an active developer community. It’s also easy to extend with “hooks,” that is, small pieces of code that are configured to run in certain situations (such when a page is saved). Pages can be hyperlinked, and basic formatting such as headings and lists can be done using a simple markup language, normally referred to as “wikitext.”

As MediaWiki is based around the editing of pages, the commentary for each act in our system would take the form of a page, and the description for each legal concept would also constitute a page. In Swedish law, acts and ordinances are published in a collection called SFS (Svensk författningssamling). Each act or ordinance is given an identifying number: e.g., the public access to information and secrecy act is known as “SFS 2009:400”. In our free online system, this would correspond to a commentary page called SFS/2009:400.

Unlike Wikipedia, we did not want to use MediaWiki as the interface for the reader. The primary reason for this was that we wanted to present the statutory text and the commentary side-by-side. In order to do that, we needed to extract the text that we had edited using MediaWiki, split it up into commentaries for each individual section, and then weave the statutory text and the commentary text together. (Click here to see an example.)

The architecture of lagen.nu is such that no pages are ever created dynamically in response to a user’s request. Instead, everything is pre-rendered in the form of static HTML files on disc. This makes the site responsive even when running on modest hardware and under high loads. A hook was developed so that every time a wiki page in the main namespace was saved, a program to weave together that commentary text with the statutory text was run. The result was stored as a normal HTML file on disc.

Writing the program to do this weaving was not a trivial task. In particular, translating the minimalist wikitext markup into XHTML fragments proved to be difficult, and not all MediaWiki markup was supported. We also needed to do custom processing of the commentary text. Luckily, a library was found that parsed the MediaWiki markup and returned the equivalent XHTML markup. This library was extended in order to identify references to acts, sections, and legal cases present in the system. This enabled the commentary authors, who were not expected to learn advanced hyperlinking syntax, to just write normal legal prose, which was then linked automatically.

Using this setup, the editing process boiled down to these steps:

Find the act to be commented on on the main site, and click the “edit commentary” link.
This leads to a MediaWiki editing page — or, if the user is not logged in, to a login form.
The user creates or edits the commentary, saving occasionally.
When saving, the edit can be flagged as a “minor edit”. When this is the case, the weaving process is not run, enabling the user to save work that is still in progress without changing the contents of the main site.
When the user is satisfied (which does not necessarily mean that he/she is altogether done with writing the commentary, just that it is in such a state that it can be published on the main site), the page is saved and the weaving process is run.
The user can then check the main site and verify that the statutory text and the commentary text look OK side by side.

Social Aspects: Coordinating the Writing Effort

The plan was to get motivated law students to write the commentary for our free online system. We formed a group of 14 people, consisting mostly of law students, but including some practicing or retired lawyers. They were each given an assignment, normally consisting of a single act, and the instruction to write the best commentary on that act that they could fashion, within a 40 hour period. For some longer acts, this limit was extended to 60 or 80 hours. The authors retained copyright in their work, and were to receive attribution for it, but they agreed to license it under a Creative Commons license (specifically the CC-BY-SA license). They were also given a small monetary compensation for their work. The deadline for completing the writing assignments was set for October 1st.

At the start of summer 2009, we held an initial workshop where the motivation and impetus of the project were explained, and where people were given some hands-on instruction in how to write and edit commentary. For the rest of the summer, project members communicated using an email mailing list, together with occasional get-togethers on Saturdays at the central library in Stockholm.

During this time, the framework for writing, as well as the results, were constantly examined and improved. My roles were those of software developer (fine-tuning the weaving process), editor (suggesting improvements to individual commentaries as they were written), and project manager (gently reminding everyone of the impending October deadline).

It soon became apparent that everyone had his or her own idea of how commentaries should be written. In general, this diversity is a good thing — if everyone tries out their ideas, we can see what works and what doesn’t. However, if everyone is forced to invent their own wheels, progress is slow and resources that could be used for writing are wasted on other things.

Therefore, we wrote a style guide, containing basic guidelines with examples on how to write concisely and simply, how to refer and link to legal concepts and external resources, how to prioritize, whom to write for, and so on. A getting-started guide, and a shorter guide to MediaWiki markup, were also written.

During the writing period we were featured in the daily press, trade magazines and national radio. We were also nominated for a prize awarded by the Centre for Easy-to-Read.

Evaluation: Does It Work?

From July to September 2009, we commented on 17 acts, 1,200 individual sections, and 500 legal concepts, resulting in a total output of over 400 pages of text. A great amount of knowledge was created in an amazingly short time span. The quality assurance, which was done by me, proved to be an interesting challenge, as I’m not (as stated above) an expert on all of the acts for which commentaries were written. However, having taken basic classes on all the areas of law addressed by the commentaries, I was able to recognize most of the content of the commentaries (and to dig deeper if I found statements that seemed at odds with what I had learned). Overall, the quality of the commentaries was surprisingly high.

In conclusion, the commentary project has been a learning experience. Following the intensive activity of the summer and autumn, fewer commentaries have been added to the system. One reason for this might be that we no longer have the funds to pay authors. The monetary compensation was small but not insignificant. However, it seemed that the major incentives for authors were the opportunity to make law more accessible to others, as well as the chance to educate themselves by explaining the law to others. We have now enabled non-registered users to comment on the commentaries, using the Discussion namespace of MediaWiki. This way, we have identified and fixed many omissions and mistakes in the original commentaries.

One thing that seemed to work really well was the procedure of assigning work and following up on it. Writing a commentary on a long statute can be accomplished using free time over the course of a month or two. Setting a deadline, monitoring progress, and providing relevant feedback can serve as incentives for authors, too.

The commentaries produced by our project are written using best-efforts principles. There are no guarantees that the information in the commentaries is complete, updated, or even correct. However, having a principal author for each commentary gives that author an incentive to ensure the information in the commentary is as good as possible. Authors may use, and in fact have used, their commentaries as work samples. Even so, having someone other than the author read the text and provide feedback can improve the quality of a commentary as well.

With the commentary project, I feel we have proved that legal commentaries can be written in a crowdsourced way (even though we used monetary compensation to motivate our authors), and that wiki technology has the required capabilities, and is sufficiently user-friendly, for such an undertaking.

The next step for our commentaries project is to formalize and sustain an assignment and feedback workflow. This will require multiple project managers, and ideally some form of delegation of responsibility for different parts of the law. Further, I am confident that the project can be sustained using a voluntary framework. This remains to be proven, though.

Note: This project was supported by a grant from Internetfonden, for which we are eternally grateful.

Staffan Malmgren — the creator of the Swedish free access to law service lagen.nu — is a project manager at the Swedish Courts administration by day, working on coordinating the publishing of official legal information on the web, using structured and standardized formats (by night, he’s working on his final law school thesis, on the subject of jurisprudential relevance ranking in legal information systems).

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