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It is customary for a site to contain links to other sites; quite a few will be found on this page. However, it is not my intention simply to provide a list of other sites which I find interesting or useful; I intend to set out why I consider it right to include them. Although for the impatient I will include a full list of Legal Links at the end. The use of the internet has been growing at an astonishing rate over the last few years. When I first obtained an account in 1992 the number of other people with personal internet accounts (as opposed to those with access to it from Universities, the civil service and large companies) was in the low hundreds -- I think I was Demon Internet's 198th customer; they now have over 80,000 customers. At that time there was very little legal information freely available in the United Kingdom in any form, let alone on the internet. Across the Atlantic, however, information has been made available reasonably freely for some time. The reason for this distinction is, I think, to some extent cultural. In America the view seems always to have been taken that matters to which the public had access should be made available to them free of charge, while in this country the view seems to have been "if you want it enough, you can afford to pay for it". So far as law is concerned this difference is apparent in the fact that in America copyright protection is not available for any work of the United States Government (17 USC Sec. 105 (01/24/94)). In the United Kingdom, and most other Commonwealth countries, the tradition has been that the Crown retains copyright in Government publications and that it has the right to charge for the use of this copyright material -- see "Crown Copyright in the United Kingdom and Other Commonwealth Counties" by J.A.L. Sterling, a paper delivered at a Conference on the subject held in Montreal. The fact that there were no copyright or other problems enabled sites such as that at Cornell University to set up large collections of legal materials together with links to others. The most significant of these is perhaps that which relates to the Supreme Court Judgments. In 1990 the Supreme Court introduced a scheme called "Project Hermes" under which its Judgments were distributed free of charge to a number of publishers, and also to Case Western Reserve University. CWRU stores these Judgments in their original format using file names based on the original "docket numbers", such as "92-1168.ZS.filt". Although this system is no doubt easy for a machine to read, it is not exactly user friendly. In an Article called "The internet and legal information: projects and prospects" Tom Bruce of Cornell Law School explains how Cornell provides a hypertext front-end (including searching facilities) to the cases: the front-end is on Cornell's machine, but the cases themselves remain at CWRU from where they are retrieved as necessary by the Cornell software. As a result of considerable pressure (including that of very senior judges who took the view that if ignorance of the law was no excuse, it was wrong that you had to pay an arm and a leg to discover what it was), the position in the United Kingdom is now changing: Statutes, Statutory Instruments and House of Lords Reports are now available on the internet. Unfortunately the reports of Judgments of the Court of Appeal and lower courts are not as yet available. This is due to contractual, rather than copyright reasons. It has been the practice for many years for the Lord Chancellor's Department to contract out the reporting of these cases and the contractor is entitled to sell transcripts for what it can get for them; it is naturally unwilling to make them freely available on the internet. This position must change in the not too distant future: it is somewhat illogical that while judgments of the highest court in the country can be obtained free of charge on the internet or for £5 for a printed copy, it costs many times that sum to obtain a transcript of a judgment of the Court of Appeal. The delay in putting those items that are now available onto the internet did have some advantages: in particular it meant that the documents have been prepared for reading on the Web, that is to say, they are coded in HTML. However as yet no "hooks" for the use of third parties have been included into the code. By this I mean that there are no links included in the code which would enable a front-end of the sort used at Cornell to jump to a particular line in the document. In preparing "The New Land Law", which is a commentary in the Trusts of Land and Appointment of Trustees Act 1996, I had to add such links into the text of the Act myself, and it would clearly have been wrong to expect that the person who translated the text of the Act into HTML should have incorporated them for me. But it might be sensible if, for example, a House of Lords report included code which "numbered" the paragraphs and the cases referred to. This would enable third parties to produce tables, indexes and headnotes to the cases which the reader could use to pinpoint the place in the text where the indexed item is to be found. At the moment it is only possible to produce a fairly general index. To show what I mean by this, here is an Index of Cases referred to in the Reports that appear on the House of Lords site. (Further tables and indexes will appear shortly.) It will be seen that the current index only links to the Report, not to the exact point in the Report where the case is referred to. Indeed, the reference is to the first "page" of each Report, even if the Report is broken down into three or more separate files. It may be said that a decent search engine is better than specific indexes. I have doubts about this. In an Article which appeared in the Public-Access Computer Systems Review a few years ago Yasar Tonta showed that the "hit" rate of some search engines was remarkably low. The internet versions of the Reports, Statutes and Statutory Instruments have all been provided "as is", that is to say, they are not cross-referenced to later documents which modify or amend their effect, or to earlier documents which they themselves modify or amend. This is most noticeable in the Data Protection Act 1984 which is provided in the form in which it was originally enacted, even though substantial amendments have since been made to it. So far as Statutes are concerned a solution has been found to this problem. This is the Statute Law Database. I first came across a mention of the Statute Law Database in an article published in the mid-80s. It described how all statutes were being coded in SGML (the parent of HTML, the language of the Web). Since then a vast amount of work has been done and it is intended that the database will include all current Statutes of the United Kingdom. But not only will it be able to show what the law is at the current time: it will be able to show what the law was at any particular time in the past, and will have hypertext links to other acts and statutory instruments. The Statute law Database ("SLD") will be extremely useful to everyone. For the first time it will be possible to see on screen what the law is at any time. There is, however, a problem. In a Press Release issued in February 1996 Mr Roger Freeman said that -- Copyright and charging policy on the Statute Law Database, a value-added electronic version of the whole Statute Book, now in preparation by the Statutory Publications Office, will be decided nearer the time of implementation in 1997. More recently it has been said that commercial publishers are showing an interest in the SLD, and this is not surprising: no doubt the Government could sell it for a substantial amount. The question that arises, however, is whether it should. I believe that selling it would be a disaster. Ignorance of the law is no excuse: for the first time it has become possible to let people discover for themselves what the law is. A SLD terminal should be in every public library, on the bench in front of every judge, and in front of every advocate. The statutes of this Country should be available to everyone free of charge. If the SLD is sold to a commercial company, or a commercial company takes a stake in it, this will not happen. What might happen can be seen by looking at what has happened to the the Inland Revenue Taxation Manuals. An electronic version of these is now available. It is published by a commercial publisher. The annual subscription is £850 plus VAT. Back to the top of the page This is a short list of links to some of the legal sites in Britain and elsewhere that I find of interest (or in a few cases, would find of interest if they actually existed...). Your favourite site may well be omitted. No barrister is modest and so I have included a couple of references to other files on this site. House of Lords -- The HMSO version
Bannister Appellant v SGB plc & Ors Respondent Lower Courts [one only] -- Pitman Training Ltd & Anr v Nominet UK & Anr David Swarbrick's Database of Cases
Legislation and Quasi-Legislation
1997 Measures of the General Synod of the Church of England 1996 Statutory Instruments (3 only)
Bills before Parliament
Government Information
Legal Journals
Textbooks
Crown Copyright
Taxation
Overseas Sites
Miscellaneous
Search Engines
Other Lawyers' Sites
Roger Horne 11 New Square Lincoln's Inn London WC2A 3QB |