BAILII: the cream of legal datasets

BAILII provides free Internet access to the legal materials of England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland. In this article from the Autumn 2003 issue of Directions Joe Ury, BAILII Executive, provided an overview of the project to date – find out about BAILII’s continuing expansion (online article from the Society for Computers in Law, August 2008), or contact Joe on e-mail:
joe.ury@sas.ac.uk.

BAILII, the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, is the outcome of a long running worldwide campaign to persuade governments to make primary legal materials free and publicly available. An educational charity, BAILII provides a unique service and is a full and challenging alternative to other legal databases, providing access without payment or password.

The data on BAILII comprises judgments from all major courts as well as Law Commission reports and publications – plus legislation going back as far as 1495 in Northern Ireland! BAILII is developing close relationships with the senior judiciary and court and tribunal administrators in each jurisdiction and is working to expand the amount and types of materials offered. BAILII also contributes to WorldLII, the World Legal Information Institute, which is made up of over 270 databases from 48 jurisdictions in 20 countries.

Many commercial publishers of legal materials are now playing ‘catch up’ to match the speed at which BAILII makes judgments available, as well as copying BAILII’s very readable formatting of materials. For law teachers, BAILII offers the facility to make permanent links to specific primary materials, or even to specific paragraphs within these materials, within their electronic teaching resources. This can save extended copying of class materials and makes such collections more useful and comprehensive, allowing students to access the primary source without restrictions.

Behind the scenes BAILII plays an important role in providing a focal point for debates and decisions about the need and appropriate mechanisms for providing public access to legal materials. In the past there were many rather theoretical debates about the advantages of standardised formats for judgments and vendor neutral citations (VNCs), but with the advent of BAILII the processes necessary and the advantages derived from such discussions can be seen, adjusted and established in practice.

The benefits of VNCs are slowly becoming apparent as more cases are cited by this method. The House of Lords judgments on BAILII are a simple example of this form of hyperlinking. The “on appeal from:” field, on the title page of each judgment, provides the VNC of the judgment on appeal, with a link automatically built to that judgment.

BAILII’s search mechanisms provide real advantages for practitioners, researchers, teachers and students. To take one example, it is worth looking at the recent extended Sphere Drake Insurance Plc & Anor v The Orion Insurance Company Plc [1999] EWHC 286 (QB) judgment and comparing it to that same reported judgment on other systems. On BAILII the whole text is there, formatted and with all the appendices as attachments. The index contains links to the appropriate paragraphs and there are also internal hyperlinks to the various charts and spreadsheets where these are referred to within the judgment.

Who uses BAILII? The BAILII server provides us with working statistics to give us some indication, and we have also conducted a user survey to get more refined usage data. 35% of users from our target area (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland) are in education. Of these users 74% identified themselves as undergraduate, 12% postgraduate, 6% research, 4% CPE, LPC or BVC students and 4% as from secondary education. 42% use BAILII once a month, 29% once a week, 23% a few times a year and 6% daily. Some 31% valued BAILII as very important, 28% as important and 33% as useful.

A visit to BAILII shows how much we have achieved in our first 30 months of existence, but we still have a long way to go before we can achieve the same free access coverage to our law as AustLII provides in Australia. By the end of 2003 we hope we will have vastly increased the number of current judgments of the two divisions of the Court of Appeal and the Administrative Court that are posted daily to the site. Next year we would like to increase the numbers of High Court judgments and to make a start on publishing the decisions of the leading appeal tribunals. And we are actively exploring ways to increase our coverage of material from Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland. If we can secure access to the majority of these legal materials BAILII will be an even more notable resource for academics, students, practitioners and litigants and a major utility in providing the public with a resource to help increase their knowledge of our legal system.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010