The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) Open Law project received JISC funding to digitise materials of core relevance to UK law degrees. As a result, thousands of historical legal judgements and law reports, essential to students studying law, are now available free of charge in perpetuity to all UK Higher and Further Education institutions and Research Councils.
The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) provides access to the most comprehensive set of British and Irish primary legal materials that are available for free and in one place on the internet. In September 2006, BAILII included 74 databases covering 7 jurisdictions. The system contains around 9.4 gigabytes of legal materials and around 186,000 searchable documents with about 4 million internal hypertext links.
The databases on BAILII are derived from a number of sources. Some of the data comes from existing free to air sites. Most of the databases are based on published and unpublished CD-ROMs or rely opon direct and indirect feeds by relevant courts, government departments and other organisations. All of the data has been converted into a consistent format and a generalised set of search and hypertext facilities have been added. Further details as to where databases come from are provided on the database home pages.
The software and approaches that are used on BAILII have been provided with the assistance of AustLII (the Australasian Legal Information Institute).
Subject areas
The Open Law Project focuses on the core needs of staff and students on law courses at all levels. Other non-core areas will also be covered, so that staff and students dealing with legal issues on non law courses such as accounting and business, environmental management, planning and social work, will also benefit.
Academic level
This resource is relevant to staff and students at all levels.
Background
- What is the Open Law project?
JISC has provided funding to enable BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) to run the 36-month Open Law project, the intention of which is to digitise thousands of core historical legal judgments and law reports and for the first time make these freely and openly available electronically. The digitisation of these judgments and other reports means that the project will digitise a total of over 40,000 pages. At present BAILII provides free access to British and Irish primary legal materials.
The project has two main aims:
- To provide access to the most relevant judgments to meet the core needs of those teaching and studying law at all levels. Other non-core areas will be covered to a lesser extent so that staff and students dealing with legal issues on non-law courses e.g. business and planning, will also benefit.
- To improve and enhance the system interface to make it both more user-friendly (making it suitable for people with differing levels of IT literacy) and to add facilities that are particularly useful to UK legislation and materials.
The inclusion of the core and historical legal materials adds substantial value to the system as a whole since the interlinking of materials will allow users to click from a citation in the contemporary case to a historic document. As BAILII allows direct linking to materials without needing to use a password, lecturers can produce teaching materials which link directly to the judgment or other supporting documents.
- How will BAILII be doing this?
There are two posts funded by JISC. One requires librarian skills to negotiate the access to the required documents and implement digitisation. The person will work closely with academics, librarians and special interest groups such as the Committee of the Heads of Law Schools, the Society of Legal Scholars and the Association of Law Teachers. He/she will also look at syllabi for various subjects (particularly the core subjects of law) to identify materials to be added to the collection. The person in this post will also look for potential sources of materials and resolve copyright and licensing issues when obtaining permission to place the text of these legal materials into BAILII.
- How can the legal community become involved?
There are several ways:
- You can send us copies of your reading lists.
- You can get together with specialist groups and decide what your priorities would be.
- You can tell us which cases or other materials you feel are most missing from the BAILII database and which you see as essential for teaching.
The person in the post will be responsible for meeting with the academic community, communicating via the JISC email system and making sure that your needs are met so far as licensing limitations apply.
JISC and BAILII have set up a JISCMAIL email list. This list ensures that the legal community is kept up to date on developments in the Open Law Project and will enable the community to get involved in the project in the ways suggested above.
To join this email list please go to:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=openlaw&A=1
Enter your email address and name. Please note that your email address must end in AC.UK.
- What about the technical community?
In the 1970s and 1980s there was a considerable interest from computer scientists in legal information retrieval. This, sadly, has died away and there is currently little research going on in the field. BAILLI are keen to re-invigorate the interest of the computing community in legal information and will encourage researchers who wish to do projects based upon BAILII materials, with the aim of further developing an interface which fits the needs of the academic community.
- Further Information
If you require further information about the Open Law Project, please either contact:
Professor Philip
School of Law
Queen's University of Belfast
Belfast BT7 1NN
Tel: +44 (028) 9097 3476
Fax: +44 (028) 9097 3376
Email: p.leith@qub.ac.uk
or at JISC Collections:
Anna Vernon, a.vernon@jisc.ac.uk
Complementary Resources
Users can combine the primary materials from the BAILII Open Law Project (for example historical judgements) with the secondary materials from the law journals in Brill Journal Archive Online and Oxford Journals Archive (the Law archive) for their legal research tasks.