Facilitating Access to Legal Information by Self-Represented Litigants: An Exploratory Case Study of the People’s Law Library of Maryland
In recent years, through the development and implementation of programs specifically designed to assist self-represented litigants (SRLs), courts across the United States have demonstrated a renewed commitment to the principle of equal access to justice. The steady growth in the number of litigants representing themselves presents a challenge; courts, however, are increasingly relying upon technology to meet the needs of this growing population. This article offers an in-depth examination of the People’s Law Library (PLL), a statewide legal information and self-help website maintained by the Maryland State Law Library that seeks to connect SRLs with a wide range of resources to help them better understand the legal issues relevant to their situation as well as the court processes and procedures that must be followed. Based upon data collected through interviews with PLL stakeholders and a review of documents related to the development and implementation of PLL, this case study is guided by two key research questions:1) How does PLL facilitate self-represented litigants’ access to legal information, and 2) What challenges has PLL faced in facilitating this access? The paper then offers several recommendations, based upon findings from this study, for using statewide legal information websites to facilitate improved access to legal information by SRLs in the United States.
Journal of Open Access to Law; Vol. 2 No. 1 (2014)
Free access to online legislation ia a federation: Achievements of Australian Governments and issues remaining
The paper explores the development of government provision of online access to legislation in Australia, including technologies used in the drafting/publishing process. It focuses on the more recent developments such as the use of websites as part of the actual legislative process and the near complete demise of paper products. It looks at the conflicts that arise in balancing continuing demands for traditional print-like products and developing more effecrtive online services, and the elusiveness of more collaborative nationwide approaches.
The Meaning of 'Free Access to Legal Information': A Twenty Year Evolution
Free online access to legal information is approaching maturity in some parts of the world, after two decades of development, but elsewhere is still in its early stages of development. Nowhere has it been realised fully. The main question asked in this paper is “what should 'free access' mean in relation to legal information in order for it to be fully effective?” As with software, we must ask whether free access to law is ‘free as in beer, or free as in speech?’ The six most significant attempts over the last twenty years to answers this question are analysed to show that a substantial degree of international consensus has developed on what ‘free access to legal information’ now means. Of thirty separate identifiable principles, most are found in more than one statement of principles, and many are now relatively common in the practices of both States and providers of free access to legal information (government and NGO). Many concern measure to avoid the development of monopolies in publication of the core legal documents of a jurisdiction. Which principles are essential to the meaning of ‘free access to legal information’, and which are only desirable, is usually clear. Two complementary meanings of ‘free access to legal information’ emerge. The first states the obligations of the State in relation to ensuring free access to legal information – but not necessarily providing it. The key elements concern the right of republication. The second meaning states the conditions under which an organisation can correctly be said to be a provider of free access to legal information. We argue that a better definition is needed than the ‘consensus’ suggests, and propose one based on the avoidance of conflicts with maximisation of the quality and quantity of free access. One use of such a set of principles is to help evaluate the extent to which any particular jurisdiction has implemented free access to legal information. A brief example is given of Australia, a county with a generally good record but some deficiencies. Finally the paper considers what steps should be taken to most effectively realise a reformulated concept of ‘free access to legal information’, by civil society, by States at the national level, and at the international level.
Journal of Open Access to Law; Vol. 1 No. 1 (2013)
Visualizing the law: crisis mapping as an open tool for legal practice
Crisis mapping is a brand new field that has recently emerged as a set of online collaborative practices to source, process, and visualize information and data on events that derive from natural disasters (i.e. earthquakes, floods, tornados, or bushfires), crisis, and conflicts. Generally, the goal of crisis mapping is to provide aid organizations, NGOs, human rights activists, etc. with open, real time, geo-referenced, actionable data to organize a more efficient coordination and response. The mapping of the conflicts in Libya and Syria, to mention two recent examples, has allowed volunteers and technical communities (VTCs) to document human rights violations that can be the basis for legal prosecution of war criminals. Crowdsourced crisis mapping, therefore, opens a new era where global volunteer and technical communities may significantly contribute to transform international law by bringing into the picture a new humanitarianism based on practices, emerging norms, and both global and local capacities. This paper makes a case for including crisis mapping as part of the curriculum and studies programs in law schools and providing lawyers with state-of-the art tools to expand their legal skills in a global community
Opportunities and challenges to free access to law in a changing world: a case of Zimbabwe Legal Information Institute (ZimLII)
The wave of free access to law movement hit Zimbabwe leading to the establishment of the Zimbabwe Legal Information Institute (ZimLII). This was started with the help of African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII) which sourced funds to kick start the project and then held training workshops to equip the people who will be working with the administrator. There is a steering committee which comprises of academics, lawyers, publishers, information technologists and librarians from various organisations. This board is chaired by the Director of Legal Resources Foundation. This led to the creation of a website and content has been uploaded to populate the site. The website is up and running and an administrator was employed to oversee the day to day running of the website and its maintenance. This paper is an account of the opportunities and challenges that has been faced by the institute. The major challenge was the issue of sustainability in terms of non availability of funds to continuously support the project. The ZimLII project can be regarded as one of the successful initiative towards the availability of legal information to the general public since there are plans to make it a one stop shop for those looking for such information.
The rise of the internet and its impact on the openness of the justice system in mainland China: improvements and limitations
The justice system of mainland China is characterised by secrecy to some extent, although it has been gradually reduced. The widespread availability and usage of the internet has brought a dramatic information flow in mainland China, which could be an opportunity for better access to law and the justice system and increased openness. However, the picture is rather mixed, which will be discussed this paper. Any information which might diminish public confidence on the justice system is still likely to be censored by various means, and public access to information on sensitive cases is still strictly controlled, although the difficulty of doing so is increased by the internet. Therefore, this paper concludes that the rise of the internet cannot definitely lead to more openness of and better access to the justice system without a reform of the system itself.
A Right to Access Implies A Right to Know: An Open Online Platform for Research on the Readability of Law
The widespread availability of legal materials online has opened the law to a new and greatly expanded readership. These new readers need the law to be readable by them when they encounter it. However, the available empirical research supports a conclusion that legislation is difficult to read if not incomprehensible to most citizens. We review approaches that have been used to measure the readability of text including readability metrics, cloze testing and application of machine learning. We report the creation and testing of an open online platform for readability research. This platform is made available to researchers interested in undertaking research on the readability of legal materials. To demonstrate the capabilities ofthe platform, we report its initial application to a corpus of legislation. Linguistic characteristics are extracted using the platform and then used as input features for machine learning using the Weka package. Wide divergences are found between sentences in a corpus of legislation and those in a corpus of graded reading material or in the Brown corpus (a balanced corpus of English written genres). Readability metrics are found to be of little value in classifying sentences by grade reading level (noting that such metrics were not designed to be used with isolated sentences).
Social Media and the Tyranny of Distance - Pacific Access to Legal Information
The track assumes that the use of social media is widespread and can advance theprofessional and public need to understand or engage with the law. Is this apresumption that underpins the context of the ‘developing’ world? PacLII is the Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute. Its work started in the mid 90’s and it became a LII in 2003. In the 15 years of its activity, PacLII has begun to host legal material from 20 jurisdictions with common and civil law backgrounds. All could be labelled ‘developing countries’. PacLII’s work covers a vast geographic area and is hostage to the tyrannies of literal distance. PacLII’s work has been underpinned by great strides in the spread of internet access and a growing commitment to free access to online legal information. Yet we do not use social media. Is PacLII exhibiting Luddite tendencies in our thinking – are we missing out on a new revolution in communication? Perhaps the audience can challenge our presumptions on the ineffectiveness of social media. We therefore seek to ask the following questions in the hope of stimulating discussion of whether and how social media could promote a further commitment to online legal information in the developing world: ? How would we use it and to what end? ? What would be the challenge / benefit ratio to our users? ? How does it improve upon other communication tools such as newsletters and emails?
Legivoc – connecting laws in a changing world
On the Internet, legal information is a sum of national laws. Even in a changing world, law is culturally specific (nation-specific most of the time) and legal concepts only become meaningful when put in the context of a particular legal system. Legivoc aims to be a semantic interface between the subject of law of a State and the other spaces of legal information that it will be led to use. This project will consist of setting up a server of multilingual legal vocabularies from the European Union Member States legal systems, which will be freely available, for other uses via an application programming interface (API).
This study uses simple statistical and functional analysis in conjunction with network analysis algorithms to examine the network of Canadian caselaw using data supplied by the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII). The analysis reveals that indegree centrality and PageRank scores of caselaw within the network are effective predictors of the frequency with which those cases will be viewed on CanLII's website. Further, statistical and functional analysis of network rankings of each case over time suggest that cases typically cease to be cited in 3 to 15 years, depending on the jurisdiction, with the exception of Supreme Court of Canada decisions, which persist for 50 years. The study concludes that roughly 19% of Canada Supreme Court cases remain important despite the passage of time, whereas in all other jurisdiction, less than 3% of cases continue to be cited regularly over time.