Internet Newsletter for Lawyers
May/June 2003, by Delia Venables

News from BAILII
by Joe Ury

You can help BAILII by filling in our short survey located at www.bailii.org/survey. The information you provide will help us in our requests for further sponsorship so that we can continue to provide our users with free-at-point-of-use access to an ever-growing set of British and Irish primary legal materials. The survey does not require any information that could identify you personally or be used to contact you.

Lord Justice Brooke has recently announced:

1. At the end of last term, arrangements were made for all the judgments of the Civil Division of the England and Wales Court of Appeal to be posted on the website of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute at www.bailii.org (apart from judgments on permission applications, which will only be published if a judge so requests). Steps will also be taken to backdate this provision to 1st January 2003. There will now no longer be any need to ask for such transcripts from the Civil Appeals Office: they can all be downloaded from the BAILII site.

2. Once this provision has settled down, steps will be taken to provide a similar service in relation to all judgments of the Administrative Court of the England and Wales High Court (apart from those on permission applications). There will be discussions in the near future about the publications policy to be adopted in relation to the judgments of the Criminal Division of the England and Wales Court of Appeal.

Our users may have already noticed the increase in the number of judgments from those courts. This owes much to the close work we've been doing with the Commercial Court of the England and Wales High Court and the speed at which we get judgments posted on the BAILII site.

BAILII is currently delivering about 400 megabytes of data per day to our users. We are working on even more projects which will further confirm our commitment to the philosophy that all citizens (who are deemed to “know the law”) have the fundamental right to free access to all primary legal source materials in as comprehensive and comprehensible a form as possible.

BAILII does need sponsorship so please join the other sponsors (listed at www.bailii.org/support/sponsors.html) and make your contribution to ensure that BAILII continues to grow and prosper. Cheques should be made out to "British and Irish Legal Information Institute" and sent to British and Irish Legal Information Institute, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Charles Clore House, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR.

Joe Ury is BAILLI Executive Director, joe.ury@sas.ac.uk

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