Global Legal Research: WorldLII and the Future
by Graham Greenleaf
Legal research increasingly has global dimensions such as international trade
and the WTO, the internationalisation of environmental and human rights
issues and the complexities of ever increasing regional agreements and
organisations. There is also the borrowing of successful models between
different legal systems, calls for a more international common law, and for
bridges between the world’s differing legal systems.
Commercial legal publishers have responded to these developments. The largest online legal publishers, LexisNexis and WestLaw, are increasingly global in the range of national legal materials that they offer. Underlying this very useful development (for those who can afford access) is increasingly globalised ownership of national legal publishers.
Those who value free access to legal information are also responding. Over the last 5 years an international ‘free access to law movement’ has emerged, based around independent, often University-based, Legal Information Institutes (LIIs). At their annual meeting in 2003 they agreed on a Declaration of Free Access to Law, including the core statement that ‘Public legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity’. The phrase ‘Public legal information’ describes legal information produced under some duty to produce it: primary legal materials (legislation, case-law, treaties etc) and some secondary materials (law reform reports, travaux préparatoires, investigative commission reports, and perhaps some publicly funded academic legal research).
The LIIs include the Legal Information Institute (LII (Cornell) - 1992) for US federal law, the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII - 1995), the British & Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII - 2000), the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII - 2000), the Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute (PacLII - 2001) covering fourteen island countries of the Pacific, the Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII - 2002), Irish Legal Information Initiative (IRLII – 2001), the Southern African Legal Information Institute (SAFLII – 2003) for South Africa (and potentially other regional countries), the New Zealand Legal Information Institute (NZLII – 2004) and JurBurkina (for Burkina Faso - 2004). Droit Francophone (2003) may include any francophone countries, but initially concentrates on West and Central Africa.
The World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII) and Global Free Access Networks
Although there is free access to significant amounts of public legal information in the most economically developed countries, this is not the case in most developing countries (see survey of the 56 Commonwealth countries). A goal of the free access to law movement is to help create free Internet access to law in developing countries, preventing its publication becoming the monopoly of any organisation (including governments).A second goal of the free access to law movement is for the local LIIs to establish networks which facilitate global legal research, and provide an alternative to the global reach of the multinational commercial legal publishers. All of the abovementioned Legal Information Institutes are now cooperating to provide WorldLII, one hub of the emerging decentralised global free access network (Droit Francophone is another hub).
Management of WorldLII
WorldLII is operated on a day-to-day basis by AustLII, which is a joint facility of the Faculties of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW). AustLII and WorldLII share the same premises, hardware and staff (currently 10). However, WorldLII only functions because of the policy collaboration and technical cooperation of the other LIIs. Funding is primarily from Australian sources at present, particularly the Australian Research Council, and in earlier years from the Asian Development Bank.The technical infrastructure is based on a V880 Sun Fire sever with 64 gigabytes of memory, 8 UltraSPARC III CPUs, and one terabyte raw storage capacity. This is supplemented by a Sun Enterprise 4500 dual processor server plus 210 gigabytes of RAID array storage. Eight blade servers provide load balancing and related purposes.
What, then is WorldLII? It serves five distinct purposes to advance the goals of the global free access to law movement: as an International LII; as an incubator of new LIIs; as an integrator of LII content; as an Interface in English to LII content; and as a platform for global research beyond the LIIs. Each needs a brief explanation.
An Integrator of LII content
The front page states WorldLII’s most noteable feature: it allows ‘440 databases from 55 countries’ to be searched simultaneously, and the number is increasing by 25% per annum as the LII network expands. The search results drawn from all LIIs are combined and presented in relevance ranked order by AustLII’s ranking algorithm.However, the most valuable search feature of WorldLII will often be that it allows narrower searches over particular types of materials, but across a wide range of jurisdictions. For example, from the Advanced Search page, searches can be limited to legislation, case law, law journals, law reform reports or other specified types of databases, to databases from a geographical division (eg All Asian databases), or to any specific selection of databases the user wishes to make. For example, a search over ‘All Legislation Databases’ for ‘ copyright near circumvent*’ finds copyright legislation implementing anti-circumvention provisions from ten countries. For most of the legislation (UK, Ireland, Australia, USA, Hong Kong) the search produces the precise section or sections of the Act or Code prohibiting circumvention of technical protection measures.
In some cases, WorldLII case law databases do not have much historical depth. However, in terms of national breadth of coverage, WorldLII has case-law databases from 37 countries and legislation from 41 countries, which compares quite favourably with Westlaw and LexisNexis. It is already a significant global free access alternative source of recent primary materials.
Searching provides one form of integration of LII content, browsing provides another. Cases and articles often cite cases or legislation from other countries, which may be found on another LII and ideally should link to it. How can this be automated? The hypertext mark-up scripts used by LIIs already often provide links to legislation on other LIIs, and to cases cited by their ‘Court designated’ citations. The LIIs are now developing and sharing comparative citation tables so as to enable case links to cases on their own and other LIIs no matter how the cases are cited.
An International LII
WorldLII is a Legal Information Institute in its own right, with a growing collection of databases. The best example is the International Courts and Tribunals Project on WorldLII, which provides over 20.000 decisions of twenty international Courts and Tribunals (ICTs) searchable from the one location. In most cases the decisions are available back to the inception of the Court. This is the first time that decisions of multiple ICTs have been able to be searched jointly. Wherever possible, databases of regional ICTs are located on the most appropriate ‘local’ LII (eg databases in French on Droit Francophone, EU databases on BAILII).An Incubator of LIIs
The second major source of databases ‘hosted on WorldLII’ are those which are not intended to reside permanently on WorldLII, but rather are being developed there as the first step toward ‘incubating’ a new Legal Information Institute.AustLII assisted the development of BAILII, PacLII and HKLII, and ran the initial implementations of those systems on its servers in Sydney for a year or two while our local partners (in the UK, Vanuatu or Hong Kong) obtained the necessary administrative, financial and technical infrastructure to set up local servers and take over day-to-day system operations (with the AustLII server still sometimes serving a backup function). This technology transfer has resulted in systems now independent of AustLII, though still using our software. This ‘migration’ process is now occurring with SAFLII and NZLII.
WorldLII now provides a more flexible and incremental way to assist developing countries, a structure in which we can host databases from any country as part of the network. WorldLII at present includes substantial databases from countries such as Indonesia, Cambodia and Timor-Leste, which may in due course become part of separate LIIs.
LexUM at the University of Montreal is also developing an equivalent platform for the francophonie with Droit Francophone. This work has already ‘incubated’ an independent LII, JuriBurkina.
An Interface in English to LII Content
WorldLII is primarily an English language interface to all LII content, and we expect it will stay that way. Interfaces in other languages to the whole collection of content shared by the network of LIIs will better emerge elsewhere, and are already doing so (eg for French via Droit Francophone; HKLII has a Chinese language search engine). A Spanish language hub for LII content is the major omission. WorldLII is not the apex of all the LIIs, it is rather one possible apex – the one with a primarily English language interface.However, it is often not yet possible to place some non-English databases needed for WorldLII projects on a more appropriate regional or linguistic hub, so WorldLII will inevitable host some databases in a variety of languages, at least temporarily.
A Platform for Global Research Beyond the LIIs
WorldLII is intended to be a platform for users to take their research beyond the databases provided by the LIIs, tools that assist comprehensive global legal research. The three tools that WorldLII has developed to go beyond LII content are: the WorldLII Catalog; WorldLII Websearch and ‘Law on Google’. The WorldLII Catalog (access from bottom left front page) may be the largest law-specific catalog on the Internet, with links to over 18,000 websites categorised under more than 6,000 categories. It lists law-related websites for every country in the world (Countries). The Subject Index has over 100 subject categories, and there are other notable sections such as Law Journals and Law Reform. The Catalog is primarily in English and is maintained by two full-time indexers on WorldLII’s staff, with assistance from Contributing Editors around the world.The Catalog is also used to target WorldLII’s own web-spider (to those sites that can be spidered), creating a search facility for sites listed in the Catalog ('WorldLII websearch'), making it one of the very few web spider-based law-specific search engines. The first three entries in the WorldLII search results show the most relevant catalog entries, with an option to view more. Search results give an option to repeat the search over the sites in the Catalog.
WorldLII provides a ‘Law on Google’ option as a ‘repeat this search’ option with search results, and as a search option on each page of the Catalog. Before it sends the user’s search to Google, it is translated from SINO search syntax into the syntax required by Google searches and it attempts to limit the Google search results to law-related materials, by adding law-related search terms.
Global Free Access Research in Ten Years
It is about ten years since the LII (Cornell) and then AustLII started to provide free large-scale Internet access to law. It is only five years since AustLII’s SINO search engine became the main technical device to increase the global spread of free access to law through new LIIs, and only about three years since these LIIs formed the free access to law movement and endorsed WorldLII as one means of coordinating their efforts. During that time the number of high quality legal databases that have now become accessible on a globally organized basis through WorldLII and Droit Francophone has grown consistently and the LIIs have developed increased technical sophistication, decentralization, cooperation, and financial sustainability. These are good indicators for the next ten years. The free access to law movement is part of the more general movement to develop and protect ‘commons’ or ‘free culture’, most famously exemplified in the free and open source software movements. It is a realistic goal of the free access to law movement to provide an alternative coordinated global means of publication of public legal information, and one which presents its content in ways which are as technically sophisticated as the global commercial legal publishers. To do so it will need to form alliances with many existing organizations that share its goals and include them in its networks, and to assist the establishment of LIIs in more countries. Success will never be a foregone conclusion, but will remain a continuing struggle in all countries to free the law and keep it free.Graham Greenleaf is a Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales, where he teaches and researches in various aspects of the relationships between IT and law, including privacy, copyright, and computerisation of law. He is a Co-Director of AustLII and WorldLII, and Co-Director of the Baker & McKenzie Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre at UNSW.
Email graham@austlii.edu.au.
This article draws on a much longer article to be published in the new Journal of Electronic Resources in Law Libraries.
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