Improving stability and performance of an international network of free access legal information systems

Abstract High quality legal research must increasingly be global and comparative. This is hindered by the limited range of countries' laws covered by the centralized systems of the multinational commercial legal publishers and by the costs of accessing their materials. Networking of online legal information by commercial legal publishers goes back to the 1970s. Over the last decade a global decentralised network of Legal Information Institutes (or LIIs) has emerged, providing free access to legal information which is comparable with and sometimes better than the commercial providers. Australia's LII--AustLII, has been a lead player, and created and runs the World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII), the principal interface into the shared LII legal data. The ad-hoc nature of the technical networking between the dozen existing LIIs means that the effective utilisation of this shared infrastructure has previously been sub-optimal and increasingly fragile. This has been exacerbated by the network's constant expansion. This paper outlines an initiative funded by the Australian Research Council's E-Research programme to address these problems by building a flexible generic set of tools to support and enhance access to WorldLII and more generally, any network of geographically distributed set of web-based systems. Keywords Legal research, legal information, networks, free access, commercial providers 1. The need for global legal research Legal research increasingly has global dimensions. International trade and the WTO, the internationalisation of environmental and human rights issues, and the complexities of the growing numbers of regional agreements and organisations are some obvious examples. There is also a growing need for law reform (including the legislative implementation of treaty obligations) to have regard for successful models from different legal systems. There are calls for a more international common law and for bridges between the world's differing legal systems (eg Lord Cooke 1996; Poulin 2003; Greenleaf, Mowbray & Chung 2004). Whether we look from the perspective of a commercial lawyer, a government law reformer or negotiator, a legal academic, or a NGO concerned with issues of global impact, there is a need for facilities which allow legal research to have a regional or even a global dimension, 2. Commercial legal publishers and their networks The largest commercial legal publishers, particularly LexisNexis and WestLaw, operate globally in the range of national legal materials offered by their international portals, thus facilitating internationally-oriented legal research. The world's dominant legal publishing groups (Reed-Elsevier, Thomson, and Wolters-Kluwer) now own the major legal publishing houses in a large number of countries and are rapidly expanding their holdings in other countries. Despite these developments, the range of countries their content covers is still relatively small and confined largely to countries with mature markets. When did legal information systems first contain significant content from multiple countries? By the early1980s Lexis (now LexisNexis) had added UK and French content to its dial-up service. EURONET Diane also contained legal database from a number of countries (Bing 1984). By the mid-80s other European content, New Zealand and Australia were available on LexisNexis. Today, this has expanded to cover content from 19 countries, under the LexisNexis 'Global Legal' section (previously less politely named 'Non-US'). Thirteen are Commonwealth countries, and 'Commonwealth' is the only multi-country search provided. Provision of caselaw and legislation varies. Caselaw and legislation cannot be searched together. A fortiori, it is impossible to simultaneously search the whole of the LexisNexis international site. Westlaw International has gradually expanded since 2000 to cover caselaw and legislation from six jurisdictions: the United States, United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, Hong Kong, and Canada (Westlaw 2007). …