British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) and....
....the Irish Legal
Information Initiative (IRLII)
Freeing the Law in Ireland
by John Mee
One of the most exciting features of the BAILII project is its multi-jurisdictional nature. The BAILII website (www.bailii.org) provides free access to primary legal materials from the European Union, the UK, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Ireland. This article discusses the contribution of Ireland to the BAILII project and also draws attention to IRLII, a complementary website run by University College Cork (www.irlii.org).
Ireland has been strongly involved in BAILII from the outset and, indeed, the first public launch of the BAILII website took place in Cork in April 2000. The Irish contribution is co-ordinated by myself at University College Cork, as one of the trustee-directors of the BAILII charity. It is funded by the Law Society of Ireland and the Irish Bar Council. The work has been greatly assisted by Micheal O'Dowd, a technically gifted law student (recently graduated) and his predecessors, Conor O'Mahony and Michelle Anders.
An unusual feature of the Irish situation is that, to date, BAILII has provided the only free access to the decisions of the Irish courts. BAILII contains a more or less comprehensive collection of the decisions of the Irish Supreme Court, the jurisdiction's highest court, going back to 2001 (with a fair number of additional cases from 2000 and 1999). The other superior court in the Irish system, the High Court, is also well-represented with a collection of over 1500 decisions going back to 1997. The fact that there is no official website providing access to judgments (and the related fact that there has, up to very recently, been no fully reliable feed of electronic judgments available to BAILII) has made more challenging the task of building up these databases. This has required ongoing work at UCC (with the assistance of law students) to make the cases ready for BAILII.
Most of the Irish judgments on BAILII have been obtained from the Irish Courts Service, although some have been scanned at University College Cork and others have been obtained from other sources. It is understood that the Courts Service intends (in October/November 2004) to start putting up judgments on its website (www.courts.ie).
The Courts Service site will initially contain Supreme Court cases going back to 2001 and Court of Criminal Appeal cases from 2004 (with High Court cases to be added at some future point). It is hoped that this long-awaited development will facilitate the consolidation of BAILII's Irish collection. Particularly useful would be the inclusion of Court of Criminal Appeal judgments on BAILII, something which has been impossible in the past due to the unavailability of a supply of electronic versions of the judgments.
BAILII also has decisions of the Irish Competition Authority going back to 1996 and of the Information Commissioner back to 1998, as well as the reports and consultation papers of the Irish Law Reform Commission from its establishment in 1976 (a rich source of comparative material for UK researchers).
In terms of legislation, BAILII has Irish statutes going all the way back to Irish independence in 1922 and the statutory instruments (delegated legislation) from 1922-1998.
The role of IRLII
In 2001, I established the IRLII (Irish Legal Information Initiative) website at www.irlii.org, hosted by University College Cork. It is managed by myself and Micheal O'Dowd. While it is a 'LII' like BAILII, AUSTLII or CanLII, IRLII is called an 'Initiative' rather than an 'Institute' to emphasise that it is intended as a complement to BAILII rather than as a rival. IRLII started life as a simple webpage, where recent judgments could be uploaded pending their availability on the BAILII database. At that stage, it took some weeks for new cases to be uploaded onto the BAILII website. Now that BAILII's permanent staff, led by Joe Ury, have been established in London, the Irish judgments can be promptly loaded onto the main BAILII site. However, rather than discontinue the IRLII service, the decision was taken to broaden its appeal.IRLII now offers customised access to the BAILII site for Irish users. Moreover, it offers five additional services which go beyond the type offered on the main BAILII site: the IRLII Index of Irish cases, the Leading Cases database, the Periodicals Index, the Statutory Instruments Index, and Statutes. These will now be explained in turn.
- The IRLII Index of Irish Cases endeavours to index all judgments delivered
by the Superior Courts in Ireland since 1997 (whether or not the judgment is on
BAILII), while selected earlier judgments are also indexed. Where the full text
of a judgment is available online (such as on BAILII) a hyperlink is provided.
Citations to law reports are also provided where applicable. The Index can be
sorted by date or alphabetically.
- As part of a Leading Irish Cases project funded by the Arthur Cox
Foundation, UCC Faculty of Law lecturers have identified more than 200 Irish
cases from over the decades which are of particular importance in a variety of
legal subject areas. IRLII staff have scanned and proofread the relevant cases,
which are grouped on the IRLII site under 22 subject headings. All these cases
have been added to the main BAILII databases but it is only possible to view
them by subject area on IRLII.
- The Periodicals Index is concerned with secondary legal sources, and is
quickly proving to be the most popular IRLII resource. The articles in seventeen
Irish legal periodicals are indexed since 1997 (although some periodicals have
ceased to exist and more have come into being since that date). Due to
copyright restrictions, the full text of each article is not available but the title,
author, citation and keywords relevant to each article are provided. The index
can be searched, either by author and title, or by keyword, or can be browsed
by journal title.
- The Statutory Instruments Index is the only freely available index to Irish
statutory instruments for 2003 and 2004. Although instruments and regulations
up to 2002 are available from the Attorney General's website (see
www.irishstatutebook.ie), there is no comprehensive source of more recent
secondary legislation. IRLII updates the statutory instruments index whenever
new material is notified in Iris Oifigiúil (the Official Journal), and a hyperlink is
provided if the particular piece of legislation is available online on a government
department website or elsewhere (although unfortunately many recent statutory
instruments are not available anywhere on the web).
- IRLII also provides access to HTML versions of recent Irish statutes. These are subsequently uploaded to BAILII.
IRLII is still being developed and expanded. The most recent feature is the 'search by citation' function which allows a user to retrieve a case using the BAILII vendor neutral citation or commercial citations such as those used by the Irish Reports or the Irish Law Reports Monthly.
There would be obvious advantages in integrating the IRLII services into the main BAILII site. However, in its current state of development, the BAILII site is concerned with providing free access to primary legal materials and the more varied services offered by IRLII do not comfortably fit within that model. It is likely that IRLII will continue to exist as a separate site for the foreseeable future but as the BAILII project develops we will continue to explore the possibilities for bringing the two websites closer together.
Dr John Mee is a member of the Law Faculty at University College Cork and is
a trustee director of BAILII.
Email j.mee@ucc.ie
See also the report by Joe Ury in the September/October issue of this Newsletter which concentrates on the UK resources included in BAILII.
Note from Delia: BAILII needs donations from ordinary firms, chambers,
companies and individuals - a donation is not only a financial contribution but
also an indication of support for the project. Please see the BAILII site for how
to donate. I myself donate £1 for each subscription received for this newsletter -
about £1,000 each year - but that does not let YOU off the hook! If you believe
in free access to the law for all, please make a donation now.
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