Access to Legal Information
- A welcome return?
Professor Abdul Paliwala
School of
Law
University of Warwick
1. Introduction
We welcome readers to the first
issue of 2000, with nine refereed articles and a host of
other material, such as commentaries, conference papers and book
and IT reviews.
The focus of this issue is access to
legal information on the web, and we examine some of the broad
issues of getting legal information onto the web. We also take a
look at recent developments in e-commerce, contract law, legal
practice and education.
2. Access to Legal
Information
Three years ago, the editorial of
JILT 1997 (2) welcomed readers with the
following:
This issue of JILT is largely about
electronic legal information. The fact that this was not a
deliberate decision of the editors is testimony to the remarkable
current interest in the issue. In view of Saville LJ's commendation
of the work of AustLII, we are proud to publish The AustLII Papers: New Directions
in Law via the Internet , which constitute a comprehensive
account by the AustLII team of all aspects of AustLII's development
and operation. In our view, the AustLII papers are compulsory
reading for anyone involved with a law web site.
The surface similarity of this issue
to 1997 (2) deceptively disguises the
dramatic changes in development and conceptual thinking which have
taken place since 1997. We are delighted to present the next
group of AustLII papers in this issue. However, the collection from
the Second AustLII Conference on Law via the
Internet , Sydney 1999 (see review by McMahon ) represents not
only the growing sophistication and ambition of AustLII's own work
but worldwide developments in the area of free access to legal
information. This issue has pre-published the proceedings of a
meeting of great significance on Free the
Law held in London in November 1999, in which Graham Greenleaf
from AustLII and others supported the development of an AustLII
type website in the UK. This is in tune with the new focus for
AustLII, as presented by Greenleaf et al in Project DIAL , which is a world wide web law
library providing free access to law:
The challenge is to find a new
approach to legal research on the internet which will provide an
internet-wide (which means world-wide) method of effectively
providing access to legal materials available on the Internet, no
matter where they are located.
The answer we propose is in part a
technical solution, a limited area search engine for law, but to a
large extent the success of the technical component will depend on
an organisational element, the creation of a multi-national group
of collaborators who are willing to make joint use of the
technicaltools we have developed in order to create and sustain a
world-wide legal research facility.
These and other developments such as
the growing sophistication of the home-grown software environment
described by Daniel Austin et al
and the currently commendable resolution of the dilemmas concerning
whether to continue to use HTML or move to other systems such as
that suggested by Philip Chung et
al, indicate the combination of good conceptual thinking,
sophisticated programming, excellent management as well as a strong
dose of common sense which has made AustLII the leading force in
web based legal information.
Yet, the very success of AustLII and
other public legal information providers worldwide has prompted
important questions about where we are going. Tom
Bruce , from the Cornell Legal Information Institute, is ideally
suited to ask these questions as a pioneer and continuing leading
innovator of law on the web. He invites us to resist the
'artificially simplified analysis' which sees the world as a
struggle of 'Robin Hood' public-sector against greedy
private-sector providers. The danger in this approach is that of
public legal information as low quality data dumps which allow
bureaucracies to forego their duty to the diversity of user
needs:
The real challenge is to guarantee
that many different cases and conditions of people can go there and
do that, building a vast diversity of new information sites, and
that still other people can use them as a way of solving those
problems that law is meant to solve.
While being an admirer of AustLII's
achievements, Bruce poses a direct challenge to AustLII's
centralist approach to web development, preferring a distributed
approach. This crucial debate is going to be further pursued by
Bruce and others at the forthcoming BILETA 2000 conference at
Warwick on World Wide Law on the 13th and 14th April. Timothy Arnold-Moore's paper seems to
suggest a compromise under which web innovators can develop new
dimensions of webcasting as in the case of the Tasmanian
legislation system which can coexist under the AustLII umbrella.
Bruce's support for a more distributed approach is crucially
dependent on the development of common standards for a legal web
culture. An aspect of such an approach is the development of
citation systems for legal web material which ensure automated
interconnectivity. There is a great opportunity for further
advances in this area at the forthcoming specialist meeting on citation
systems organised by BILETA and the Society of Computers and
Law.
3.
E-commerce and Contract Law
The growing significance of
E-Commerce is likely to lead to a redefinition of ideas in
contract, tort and commercial law generally. A particular concern
is whether courts and legislators try too hard to fit the old wine
of existing conceptual frameworks into the new electronic
bottles.
Noriko
Kawawa's careful comparison of English and US law on the effects
of the classification of contract in relation liability for injury
caused by electronic information illuminates the issues faced by
the judiciary.
In apparent contrast, legislators
have a clean slate in dealing with electronic transactions. In
practice, as Richard Wu indicates in
his study of the Hong Kong Electronic Transactions Ordinance, the
speed of technological change and exponential growth in the global
nature of transactions make traditional approaches to legislation
obsolete. Wu's call for a flexible redesign of the legislation
matches calls everywhere for new complexity aware legislative
frameworks.
Meanwhile, Alistair Kelman's book review highlights a number of
security and privacy issues surrounding the new 'Database
Nation'.
4.
The Use of IT in Law Firms
Petter Gottschalk's article deals with a different
dimension of technological change, the law firm. Gottshalk applies
this to the context of research on Norwegian law firms and
concludes that there is a significant positive relationship between
the extent of IT use and the extent of firm co-operation and
knowledge co-operation among law firms in Norway. The exciting
aspect of the article is detailed work on the idea of a law firm
and networks involving law firms as 'bodies of knowledge'. The
framework is not without its problems, but enables an analysis
which can cope with the changing shape of legal work.
Andrew Terrett's book 'The Internet - Business
Strategies for Law Firms', further develops some of these themes
and provides a very useful guide for legal firms wishing to develop
a network strategy.
5.
Developments in Legal Educational Software
David
Grantham's revisit to IOLISplus, first introduced in JILT 1999 (1) , highlights computer
assisted learning. It is the second chapter in the development of
the integrated learning system at Coventry University which has
customised the IOLIS courseware to the learning and teaching needs
of Coventry. This article develops the pedagogy and educational
strategy of recent changes to the learning framework and includes
the impact of the introduction of WebCT.
We also gain a unique insight from Orlan Lee into a legal CD-ROM that has
been developed as part of the Business Law course at the Hong Kong
University of Science & Technology.
6.
And finally...
The issue also carries a wide
variety of commentaries, conference reports and papers, and book
and IT reviews. We particularly welcome the publication of the
BILETA award winning student essay by Tyrone
McKenna , which is in accord with JILT's policy of promoting
student work.
We trust you find this first edition
of 2000 an enjoyable and thought-provoking read, and we look
forward to seeing you again in next issue, which will be fully
published at the end of June 2000.
This Introduction
was published on 29 February 2000.
Citation:
Paliwala A, ' Access to
Legal Information - A welcome return?', 2000 (1) The Journal of Information,
Law and Technology
(JILT).<http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/00-1/paliwala.html>. New citation as at 1/1/04:
<http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/jilt/2000_1/editorial/>.
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