Free Access to Legal Information from Africa

Mariya Badeva-BrightAfricanLII Project Directormariyab@africanlii.org

• No reliable, consistent and up-to-date access to the law of African countries

Affected, among others:• the cost of doing legal research in Africa,

including for academics and students• the settlement of legal cases and completion

of transactions for SMEs • investment climate for larger businesses• regional integration

Access to African Law

African Legal Information Institute

Successes• Unprecedented number of African judgments

and legislation openly available via the Internet

• Built a solid network of legal information correspondents in Africa

• Standards adopted to ensure comprehensiveness and completeness of available open law

• Partnerships established between justice sector stakeholders nationally and regionally

Some statistics• Usage growth between 3% and 150% over

the past year• Estimated over 250,000 unique visitors per

month to all African LIIs• Over 150,000 documents available online

(started with 700)• Visitors from South Africa and the Region, as

well as international: United States, the Netherlands, Australia, China, Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Canada, Israel, etc.

Legal InformaticsLegal informatics is an area within information science. Erdelez and O’Hare (1997) define legal informatics as follows:The American Library Association defines informatics as “the study of the structure and properties of information, as well as the application of technology to the organization, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information.” Legal informatics therefore, pertains to the application of informatics within the context of the legal environment and as such involves law-related organizations (e.g., law offices, courts, and law schools) and users of information and information technologies within these organizations.

(Quoted in Paliwala, History of Legal Informatics http://ejlt.org/article/view/21/38)

Legal Informatics @ AfricanLII

• Digitize information• Process and store information specialized legal information

• Disseminate information• Search

Background• Analogue medium, lack of consistent

analogue or digital archives• Poor IT skills at content source• Lack of strong software development and

maintenance skills in Africa• Lack of fast and accessible links to the

Internet• Perceived high cost of development and

maintenance• User information retrieval literacy

Digitization

If we are lucky … http://www.sierralii.org/files/sl/legislation/act/1974/21/1974_21_pdf_20098.pdf

● OCR software● Heavy on human input ● Advocacy and working with governement can

address

Process information● Indigo Legislation Platform Indigo is an open source web platform for the consolidation and publication of legislation.

Make it easier to capture & publish well structured legislation to facilitate free access to law.

From Analogue to AkomaNtoso XML

From XML to This

Greg Kempe Code4SAhttp://www.slideshare.net/longhotsummer/the-indigo-legislation-platform

Store and DisseminateLegal Information Institute (LII) in a Box

The LII-in-a-Box provides: 1. Consumers of free legal information with a satisfactory and predictable

user experience on desktop and mobile devices, based on industry standards for legal information publishing

2. System administrators with an easy and quick to set-up and maintain, no-cost, Drupal distribution for legal information publishing

3. Content editors of free and open access to law websites with a convenient editing back office interface that provides a set of custom-developed features that enable efficient upload and management of legal information.

LII-in-a-BoxLaw is hierarchical and time-sensitive, so LII-in-a-Box accounts for

• The arrangement of legal documents within national and international hierarchies;

• The deletion, amendment and related temporal representation of legal documents within a national hierarchy, e.g. through the availability of current and historical versions of legislation;

• The interconnection between sources of legal norms, cases, legislation, etc., and the practical implementation through cross-linking;

• Referring to legal information in a standard way to ensure ease of re-use within documents of all kinds, but most importantly in other legal documents;

• Retrieving legal information using fielded and full text searches.

LII-in-a-Box - System design1. It must contain defined content types - judgment, consolidated legislation,

sessional laws, parliamentary debates, bills, government gazette, journal, etc.- which are common across countries and legal systems, albeit subject to localized customizations;

2. It must allow for content negotiation, i.e. to facilitate the output of legal information in a wide range of formats;

3. The content must be captured using a metadata model, incorporating current recognized standards, all with the aim of enabling advanced version control and output of descriptive metadata;

4. It will employ a PRESTO architecture, which we currently strive to implement, and which is a combined use of Permanent URIs, Representational State Transfer (REST), and object-oriented design and modelling

5. It is mobile-ready.

LII-in-a-Box: Information Retrieval

• Browsability • Search (user-centric, but for both old-

fashioned and experienced users)oGoogle-like oMetadata advanced searchoTaxonomies for indexesoMulti-site (federated?) search

• Data re-use(Functional Spec: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xZ71uNyBHUAD3ip5npgK6Yd5TrawVr8SpYkKoR9MYlA/edit?usp=sharing )

Off-line Dissemination: Freedom Toaster for Law

Off-line Dissemination: Pocket Law

www.africanlii.orgwww.saflii.org @AfricanLII@SAFLII

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Thank you!