Opening up the law

In this article from the Spring 2006 issue of Directions Jenny Burnett, Open Law Project Officer, provided an update on the JISC funded Open Law project. The project is now complete – find out about BAILII’s continuing expansion (online article from the Society for Computers in Law, August 2008).

BAILII, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, provides access to the most comprehensive set of British and Irish primary legal materials available for free and in one place on the Internet. The service has now been provided with funding for three years from JISC to digitise the most important judgments and judicial opinions from the past, greatly enhancing the usefulness of the service by providing access to not only copies of judgments in cases since BAILII’s inception but also to many important older judgments.

A specific aim of the Open Law project is to support teaching and learning by providing a database of those cases most useful in the delivery of legal education in higher and further education throughout the UK. The heavy use of standard legal resources in both print and online form, coupled with the restriction of certain materials to reference libraries and their cost, has meant that ensuring the availability of key materials has always been a challenge for law schools. The project’s commitment to open access principles means that in addition all those in involved in legal education, plus the general public, will be able to access the most important legal materials for free.

The project is also carrying out improvements and enhancements to BAILII’s system interface and search facility, with the aim of making them more user friendly, and specifically of making the service suitable for people with differing levels of IT literacy. A usability study will examine and analyse user interaction in order to identify strengths and weaknesses, and we will implement revisions that best meet the needs of BAILII’s user population.

A first step in the process of creating the database has been to identify its potential content. The initial focus has been on the following core areas of law – crime, contract, tort, property, trusts, constitutional and family law. Other important subject areas, such as company law, employment law, competition law, intellectual property and legal history, will be dealt with later in the project.

BAILII has been canvassing widely to ensure that the new service reflects the needs of its users – teachers, academics and law librarians have been contacted by post, e-mail, bulletin board and newsletter, seeking their input in compiling the lists of cases which will eventually comprise the database. A provisional list of around 1,500 judgments has been identified already, meaning that the project will digitise over 40,000 pages in total. But there is still time for law schools to make their requirements and preferences known – send us any material which will help to identify those cases most useful in delivering law courses, such as lists of cases, copies of reading lists and lecture notes, or links to material loaded onto virtual classrooms.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010