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Assessing BAILII in 2012

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2012

Cynthia S. Fellows ,
Philip Leith  and
Joe Ury
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Abstract

Cynthia Fellows, Philip Leith and Joe Ury report on the survey responses to a usage and attitudinal project carried out in early 2012 by the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII). There were 3,274 survey participants and their responses demonstrate substantial support for BAILII as an open access mechanism, a technically competent dissemination tool and a useful resource for lawyers and non-lawyers alike. Such positive response, we suggest, indicates that BAILII's resources are now threaded through the fabric of UK digital legal information, strengthening the ability of all citizens to access and become better informed about the laws of the land.

Keywords

free legal informationopen accessBAILII
Type
Legal Literature: Unlocking Access
Information
Legal Information Management , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , September 2012 , pp. 158 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2012. Published by British and Irish Association of Law Librarians

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References

Footnotes

1 Kuh, Katrina F. (2008) ‘Electronically Manufactured Law’. Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 22(1), 223–271 at 238Google Scholar.

2 http://www.bailii.org/support/sponsors.html

3 http://www.bailii.org/support/others.html

4 Only rough percentages have been extracted from the survey results as the survey was not designed in such a way as to provide exact numbers.

5 Of these, 43% London, 35.5% elsewhere in urban England, 12% elsewhere in rural England, 4.8% Scotland, 2.7% Wales and 2% Northern Ireland. The remaining 22% of respondents were from Ireland (5.6%), North America (5.1%), Asia (4.4%), elsewhere in Europe (2.9%), Australasia (2.8%), Africa (1%) and South America (.2%).

6 Law students 9.2%; Lawyers based in the UK 5.3%; Lawyers based elsewhere 1.9%

7 West-Knights, Laurie. (1997) ‘The AustLII Paradigm’. Journal of Information, Law & Technology (3)Google Scholar.

8 British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) (1985), ‘National provision for legal information: paper submitted by BIALL to the Library and Information Services Council in October 1984’, Law Librarian 16(2), August 1985, 68–75 at 70Google Scholar.

9 In a recent attempt to secure eight EWCA 2012 judgments that a government body wanted posted on BAILII so that they could be included in their training coursework materials, only one was obtained despite the fact that six of the remaining seven were obtained by Westlaw and Lexis.

10 Leith, Philip and Fellows, Cynthia. (2010) ‘Enabling Free Online Access to UK Law Reports: the copyright problem’. International Journal of Law & Information Technology 18(1), 72–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 http://www.bailii.org/openlaw/introduction.html

12 Palfrey, John (2010) ‘Cornerstones of Law Libraries for an Era of Digital-Plus’, Law Library Journal 102(1), 171–190 at 172Google Scholar.

13 Berring, Bob. (2011) ‘Legal Research Training's End’. Slaw http://www.slaw.ca/2011/10/31/legal-research-training%e2%80%99s-end/

14 Westlaw's Natural Language search option has been with us for some time. But now there is Westlaw/Next and Lexis/Advanced which mimic Google's search scheme as much as possible. This marks a dramatic departure from classic online legal research methodology. For explanation and analysis of WestSearch, Westlaw/Next's search engine, see Wheeler, Ronald E. (2011) ‘Does WestlawNext Really Change Everything?’ The Implications of WestlawNext on Legal Research. 103 Law Library Journal 103(3), 359–378Google Scholar.

15 Palfrey (2010) op.cit., 177.

16 BAILII indexes parallel citations for the various published reports plus the neutral citation. BAILII spells out most acronyms in case titles.

17 Use the tick boxes on Case Law Search and Multidatabase search screens or select a court from the databases list.

18 Some but not all of BAILII's documents are available in PDF.

19 Poulin, Daniel. (2012) Surprising Survey Results. Slaw 10 February 2012. http://www.slaw.ca/2012/02/10/surprising-survey-results/

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21 Ury, Joe. (2011) ‘Ten Years of BAILII’. Internet Newsletter for Lawyers May 2011.

22 http://www.bailii.org/bailii/appeal.html

23 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/25/criminal-justice-uk-digital-database

24 http://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2011/09/26/dont-throw-the-bailii-out-with-the-bath-water/

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26 http://www.worldlii.org/worldlii/declaration/

27 Leiter, Richard. (2010) ‘The 21st Century Law Library Conundrum: Free Law and Paying to Understand it’. http://thelifeofbooks.blogspot.com/2010/02/21st-century-law-library-conundrum-free.html

28 http://freelegalweb.org/

29 Armstrong, Timothy. (2010) Crowdsourcing and Open Access: Collaborative Techniques for Disseminating Legal Materials and Scholarship. Santa Clara Computer & High Technology Law Journal 26(4), 591–630Google Scholar.

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31 Gallacher, Ian. (2008) ‘Aux Armes, Citoyens!: Time for Law Schools to Lead the Movement for Free and Open Access to the Law’ University of Toledo Law Review 40(1), 1–52Google Scholar.

32 Arewa, Olufunmilayo. (2006) ‘Open Access in a Closed Universe: Lexis, Westlaw, Law Schools, the Legal Information Market’. Lewis & Clark Law Review 10(4), 797–840.Google Scholar

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