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Law Belongs to the People: Access to Law and Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2016

Abstract

This paper written by Ginevra Peruginelli is devoted to a discussion of the issues concerning the provision of free access to law in our global society and investigates the effects and benefits of freely available information to the legal profession, citizens and governments. The knowledge of rights, responsibilities and policies allows people and institutions to know what is expected of them and which protections they enjoy. In particular, the paper focuses on the main actors, namely the Legal Information Institutes, involved in the free access to law all around the world. These institutions publish legal information from more than one source for free, and mutually collaborate both politically and technically through membership.

Type
Current Issues
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2016. Published by British and Irish Association of Law Librarians 

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References

Footnotes

1 Gordillo, Augustin. (2014) Access to justice, legal certainty and economic rationality. Il Diritto dell'economia, 27(1), 4354Google Scholar.

2 van Caenegem, Raoul C. (1991) I signori del diritto: giudici, legislatori e professori nella storia europea. Milan, Giuffrè. 139–140.

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4 Suber, Peter. (2004) Open Access Overview Focusing on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints. http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.

5 Bentham, Jeremy (1843) The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. IV, Edinburgh, William Tait.

6 Currie, Albert. (2004) Riding the Third Wave: Rethinking Criminal Legal Aid within an Access to Justice Framework. Department of Justice of Canada research report Series http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/ccs-ajc/rr03_5/rr03_5.pdf.

7 Galanter, Marc. (1985) The Legal Malaise: Or, Justice Observed. Law and Society Review 19, 537545CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Greenleaf, Graham, Mowbray, Andrew, Philip Chung (2013) The Meaning of “Free Access to Legal Information”: A Twenty Year Evolution. Journal of Open Access Law 1(1) https://ojs.law.cornell.edu/index.php/joal/article/view/11/14.

10 Greenleaf, Graham. (2010) The Global Development of Free Access to legal Information. European Journal of Law and Technology” 1(1).

12 www.lexum.org/fr/index.html. Since April 2010 Lexum is a private company called Lexum informatique juridique.

13 The information system gives access to case law of the Supreme Court since its creation in 1875: csc.lexum.org/decisia-scc-csc/scc-csc/fr/nav.do.

16 Greenleaf, Graham, Mowbray, Andrew, Chung, Philip. (2011) AustLII: Thinking Locally, Acting Globally. Australian Law Librarian, 101–116, UNSW Law Research Paper No. 2011-41. ssrn.com/abstract=1960878.

17 Poulin, Daniel Mowbray, Andrew, Lemyre, Pierre Paul.(2007) Free Access to Law and Open Source Software in K. St. Amant, B. Still (eds.) Handbook of Research on Open Source Software Information Science Reference”, New York, Hershey, 375–376.

21 The last meeting was organized in February 2012 in Brussels jointly by the Hague Conference on Private International Law and the European Commission.

23 Among the projects involved in linking legal open data it is worth mentioning the European Project BO-ECLI: Building on ECLI. (http://www.bo-ecli.eu/bo-ecli/at-a-glance).