Internet Newsletter for Lawyers
January/February 2006, by Delia Venables

Now BAILII is Seeking Historic Data
by Joe Ury

Past methods of getting judgments transcribed and published at little or no cost to the courts has left much of our common law legal heritage locked up in a copyright confusion. The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) is trying to wrest the right to publish a selection of important historical judgments from the various entities that have copyright in them. To this end, BAILII, www.bailii.org, is working closely with a body called JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee. JISC is a committee of the UK further and higher education funding bodies responsible for supporting the innovative use of information and communication technology to support learning, teaching, and research.

This project, called the JISC/BAILII Open Law Project, aims to build a database of historic legal resources to be openly available to all. The project will last 3 years and will digitise thousands of core legal judgments and law reports, making them freely and openly available for the first time. BAILII will be greatly enhanced by being able to provide access not only to judgments in cases decided in the last 10 years, but also the most important judgments from the past. This will be of particular benefit to law faculties and students. It will also be of benefit to other users of BAILII such as Legal Advice Centres, Citizens Advice Bureaux, voluntary organisations and overseas users, many of whom are not in a position to subscribe to the Law Reports or to commercial databases.

The project aims to provide access to the most important judgments needed for teaching and studying law at all levels. Other areas will be covered to some extent so that staff and students dealing with legal issues on non-law courses will also benefit. The project will digitise a total of over 40,000 pages. This includes 2,000 judgments of the most cited English and Scottish and Northern Ireland judgments on the core areas of legal study, 400 judgments on non-core areas, 15 research reports in the core areas and 10 research reports in non-core areas.

The project also aims to improve and enhance the BAILII system interface to make it more user-friendly, to make improvements to the search engine and to add facilities that are particularly useful to UK legislation and materials.

Continuing work at BAILII

A visit to our site will show how much we have achieved in our first 38 months of existence. The number of users has doubled over the last year and there are now around 65,000 requests a day, split roughly evenly between solicitors and barristers. 70% of these users visit us at least once a week.

We now aim to increase the numbers of High Court judgments and to continue adding to the list of leading appeal tribunals whose decisions we publish. We are actively exploring ways to increase our coverage of material from Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland. If, as we hope, we can secure access to the majority of these legal materials, BAILII will be an even more notable resource for practitioners, litigants, academics, and students and a major utility in providing the public with a resource to help increase their knowledge of our legal system.

With the continued support of our sponsors we can continue to make BAILII an even more valuable resource for an even larger audience.

Joe Ury is Executive Director of BAILII, www.bailii.org.
Email Joe.Ury@sas.ac.uk.

See also the earlier article by Joe Ury on BAILII from September/October 2004 Where we are now (or here with full web address).

Note from Delia:

BAILII needs funds! There is a £50,000 gap between stable promised donations and the money needed to run the project each year, which makes planning very difficult. If BAILII is important to you, either as a resource you use personally or as a philosophical ideal (or both) then please provide a small piece of the funding. I donate £1 for every subscriber to this newsletter - £1,000 for each of the last 4 years. Surely your firm or chambers - or even you personally - could contribute as well? If you can help, please contact Joe Ury as above.

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