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

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

The Best Things in Law are Free?: Towards Quality Free Public Access to Primary Legal Materials in Canada

In this article the author explores the move in several jurisdictions towards providing primary legal materials online without charge. In Canada the federal government, most provincial governments and many courts currently provide some form of online access to primary legal materials. However, this is not done in a unified, comprehensive or systematic manner. The author evaluates the legal information institute model as it has emerged in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, and considers whether such a model would be useful or workable in Canada. In the course of this assessment, the author canvasses such issues as the public fo r primary legal materials, the meaning of access to such materials, the problems of Crown copyright, information monopolies and the normative implications of freeing the law

An Investigation Into The Use Of Sound Moderators On Firearms For Game And Feral Management In New South Wales

This report has been prepared as a summary of the key findings of a study investigating the feasibility of using sounds moderators on firearms in New South Wales (NSW) for the purposes of hunting game and feral animals. The study was commissioned by the Game Council for NSW (hereafter referred to as the ‘Council’) with the intent of identifying any known impediments to the use of sound moderators for hunting purposes. While based largely on secondary data, the investigative panel found no link between sound moderators and their use in petty or organised criminal activity. Further, and based upon a review of other legislative regimes where moderator use is legally permitted, the panel submits that the benefits pertaining to moderator use by the civilian, hunting, law enforcement and military communities points to a need for a more informed debate on legislative change within NSW

Sustainable and Open Access to Valuable Legal Research Information: A New Framework

This article evaluates the current status of access to foreign and international legal research information, analyzes the challenges that information providers have experienced in providing valuable and sustainable access, and proposes a model that would help create and facilitate effective and sustainable access to valuable foreign, comparative, and international legal information

‘Justice system data’: a comparative study

A report examining how Canada, Australia and Ireland manage the data and information that is generated by their justice system

Sentence level relation extraction via relation embedding

Relation extraction is a task of information extraction that extracts semantic relations from text, which usually occur between two named entities. It is a crucial step for converting unstructured text into structured data that forms a knowledge base, so that it may be used to build systems with special purposes such as business decision making and legal case-based reasoning. Relation extraction in sentence-level is the most common type, because relationships can be usually discovered within single sentences. One obvious example is the relationship between the subject and the object. As it has been studied for years, there are various methods for relation extraction such as feature based methods, distant supervision and recurrent neural networks. However, the following problems have been found in these approaches. (i) These methods require large amounts of human labelled data to train the model in order to get high accuracy. (ii) These methods are hard to be applied in real applications, especially in specialised domains where experts are required for both labelling and validating the data. In this thesis, we address these problems in two aspects: academic research and application development. In terms of academic research, we propose models that can be trained with less amount of labelled training data. The first approach trains the relation feature embedding, then it uses the feature embeddings for obtaining relation embeddings. To minimise the effect of designing handcraft features, the second approach adopts RNNs to automatically learn features from the text. In these methods, relation embeddings are reduced to a smaller vector space, and the relations with similar meanings form clusters. Therefore, the model can be trained with a smaller number of labelled data. The last approach adopts seq2seq regularisation, which can improve the accuracy of the relation extraction models. In terms of application development, we construct a prototype web service for searching semantic triples using relations extracted by third-party extraction tools. In the last chapter, we run all our proposed models on real-world legal documents. We also build a web application for extracting relations in legal text based on the trained models, which can help lawyers investigate the key information in legal cases more quickly. We believe that the idea of relation embeddings can be applied in domains that require relation extraction but with limited labelled data

Achieving the Aims of Open Justice? The Relationship Between the Courts, the Media and the Public

This article begins by outlining what the principle of open justice is intended to achieve. It then investigates the nature of the relationship that exists between the courts and the media, and between the media and the public, and suggests that these relationships are not always conducive to realising the aims of open justice. While the reporting role of the traditional news media will undoubtedly persist, at least for the foreseeable future, it is argued that, since courts now have the means to deliver to the public a fuller and truer picture of their work than the media can, they should seize the opportunity to do so

Lay litigants' access to legal information in libraries

This study examines the availability and accessibility of legal information for lay litigants - those people who have chosen to represent themselves in legal proceedings. It looks specifically at the information held in libraries and whether these libraries and the information held in them can be accessed by lay litigants. Although this study looks at the ability of lay litigants to access legal information, it also discusses legal information access by the public in general. Distinctions have however been drawn between those seeking general legal information and lay litigants The overall purpose of this research is to establish the current levels of access to information that lay litigants have, and whether the current situation is adequate and tenable. Principles and policies such as that of equal access to the law and the New Zealand government's commitment towards open government; enabling online access and its e-policy have been taken into consideration in evaluating whether the current situation is sufficient. Distinctions have also been drawn between those seeking general legal information and lay litigants

Legal Information Management in a Global and Digital Age: Revolution and Tradition

This article presents an overview of the public policy issues surrounding digital libraries, and describes some current trends, such as Web 2.0, the social network. It discusses the impact of globalization and the Internet on international and foreign law information, the free access to law movement and open access scholarship, and mass digitization projects, then turns to some concerns, focusing on preservation and long term access to born digital legal information and authentication of official digital legal information. It finally discusses new roles for librarians, called upon to evaluate the quality of information teach legal research methodology and be advocates in information policy. Law librarians are encouraged to join professional associations and undergo continuous professional education. A recent development in the U.S.A., to add a legal research test on the bar exam, is of interest to the whole world, because it signifies the importance of sound legal research training to the competent practice of law