Internet Newsletter for Lawyers
November/December 2006, by Delia Venables

The Irish Legal Information Initiative (www.irlii.org ) has developed a further service for those who wish to keep up with legal developments in Ireland. All judgments added to the IRLII index of Irish cases since July 2005 have been allocated to subject areas and assigned with keywords. This enables users to scan quickly through recent cases for issues that interest them and researchers can instantly view cases which relate to any given subject area through links to the full text of the case on BAILII (www.bailii.org ). It is hoped that this initiative will result in easier accessibility of decided cases in Ireland. A RSS feed of recent cases is also available at www.ucc.ie/law/irlii/rss/irliiindex.xml .

In 2001, the IRLII website was established at www.irlii.org , hosted by the Law Faculty, University College Cork. The project is led by Professor John Mee and the website is managed by Micheal O’Dowd. While it is a ‘LII’ like BAILII, AUSTLII (www.austlii.org ) or CanLII (www.canlii.org ), 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.

Given the consolidation of the BAILII website, now maintained by permanent staff led by Joe Ury, the function of IRLII has changed. Now, as well as providing customised access to the BAILII site for Irish users, it offers additional services which go beyond the type offered on the main BAILII site, for example, a searchable index of Irish cases, a searchable index of articles in Irish legal periodicals and a database of Leading Irish Cases classified by subject (along the lines of the Open Law project subsequently initiated by BAILII (www.bailii.org/openlaw ) in relation to UK cases). See also the November/December 2004 issue of this newsletter (BAILII and IRLII: Freeing the Law in Ireland, www.venables.co.uk/n0411freelawireland.htm ). The IRLII website has been funded by the Arthur Cox Foundation, a charitable organisation administered through the Law Society of Ireland, and by the Law Faculty, University College Cork.

Current projects being undertaken by IRLII include attempting to increase the comprehensiveness of the coverage of Irish case law on BAILII. This involves scanning missing judgments at University College Cork with a view to creating, in the first instance, a fully comprehensive “millennium collection” of Irish superior court judgments from 2000 onwards. Although most of the relevant judgments are available on BAILII, there are certain gaps, caused for example by a temporary break in the feed of cases from the courts in 2003. The current collection contains a very substantial body of Irish cases going back to 1997 and so a subsequent target will be to fill in any gaps going further into the past. In addition, we have been undertaking a pilot project in relation to unreported Irish judgments, a significant source of Irish law (particularly in previous decades). These cases can be difficult to access, especially outside Ireland. Thus far, our pilot project has focused on 1988 and 1989 and, at this early stage, there are roughly 50 cases from these years on BAILII (mostly unreported, some leading Irish cases).

Professor John Mee is a member of the Law Faculty at University College Cork and is a trustee director of BAILII. Micheal O’Dowd is a research postgraduate student in the Law Faculty at University College Cork.

Email addresses:j.mee@ucc.ie and m.odowd@ucc.ie.

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