Access to Legal Information

In common law jurisdictions litigants are free to represent themselves in person. A right to self-representation in civil proceedings has been taken for granted as an obvious expression of the right of access to court. Consequently, no attempt has been made to investigate the theoretical justification of self-representation, and mandatory legal representation has never been contemplated. This article identifies three possible reasons for the conflation of the right to litigate in person with the right of access to court: (1) the long history of self-representation, (2) the conceptual perception of procedural rights as necessarily personal, and (3) the empirical belief that litigants in person are typically poor. The article challenges the capacity of these reasons to justify vesting litigants with an unfettered power to decide whether to represent themselves in person or to instruct counsel. It argues that as a matter of principle the right of access to court does not entail a right to self-representation in all circumstances. When a litigant in person lacks the skills and expertise to conduct his or her case competently and imposes a disproportionate strain on court resources, the court should be entitled to require the litigant to obtain legal representation as a prerequisite for proceeding with the case.

Improving the readability of legislation is an important and unresolved problem. Recently, researchers have begun to apply legal informatics to this problem. This paper applies machine learning to predict the readability of sentences from legislation and regulations. A corpus of sentences from the United States Code and US Code of Federal Regulations was created. Each sentence was labelled for language difficulty using results from a large-scale crowdsourced study under- taken during 2014. The corpus was used as training and test data for machine learning. The corpus includes a version tagged using the Stanford parser context free grammar and a version tagged using the Stanford dependency grammar parser. The corpus is described and made available to interested researchers. We investigated whether extending natural language features available as input to machine learning improves the accuracy of prediction. Among features evaluated are those from the context free and dependency grammars. Letter and word ngrams were also studied. We found the addition of such features improves accuracy of prediction on legal language. We also undertake a correlation study of natural language features and language difficulty drawing insights as to the characteristics that may make legal language more difficult. These insights, and those from machine learning, enable us to describe a system for reducing legal language difficulty and to identify a number of suggested heuristics for improving the writing of legislation and regulations.

Il presente contributo rappresenta il primo frutto parziale di un più ampio studio sull'evoluzione del diritto alla difesa del povero negli Stati sabaudi, iniziato nell'anno accademico 2008-2009 con un contratto come ricercatore a tempo determinato presso il Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche ed Economiche della Facoltà di Giurisprudenza dell'Università del Piemonte Orientale "A. Avogadro", dal titolo Inquirere et defendere: gli organi 'rappresentativi delle parti' istituiti presso i Senati sabaudi nei secoli XVIII e XIX. 1 Per un commento dell'attuale normativa nell'ambito del processo civile e amministrativo cfr. G. SCARSELLI, Il nuovo patrocinio a spese dello Stato nei processi civili ed amministrativi, Padova 2003; per il processo penale P. SECHI, Il patrocinio dei non abbienti nei procedimenti penali, Milano 2006; su tutti A. BUZZONI, Il gratuito patrocinio spiegato a mia nonna, Gravellona Toce 2010. 2 Risulta indifferente che si tratti del giudice o del pubblico ministero; cfr. A. BUZ-ZONI, op. cit., p. 51.

Au Québec et au Canada, l'accès à la justice est une préoccupation croissante pour les milieux juridique, politique et universitaire. L'inaccessibilité financière des services juridiques engendre plusieurs problèmes pour un nombre important de justiciables, tout comme l'inaccessibilité cognitive de l'univers juridique. C'est dans ce contexte que les technologies de l'information et de la communication [TIC] occupent une place importante dans les discussions sur les manières de rendre la justice plus accessible. Elles auraient notamment le potentiel de fournir des ressources plus intelligibles et accessibles aux justiciables. Les médias sociaux en particulier pourraient démocratiser l'information juridique dans la mesure où ils sont faciles d'utilisation, rassemblent une diversité de contenus et sont de plus en plus ancrés dans les activités quotidiennes. Malgré l'intérêt que suscitent ces plateformes sur le plan de l'accès à la justice, leurs usages relatifs à l'information juridique restent à explorer pour la recherche en droit. Le présent article s'intéresse à ces plateformes, et en particulier au média social Facebook, qui a pour particularité de mettre en scène des internautes qui sont à la fois créateurs, récepteurs et relayeurs de contenus d'information juridique. Nous proposons finalement une typologie utile à la recherche sur le thème du droit et des médias sociaux.

Access to justice is an increasing concern for the legal, politic and academic spheres in Quebec and in Canada. Many problems are related to the financial inaccessibility of legal services for a considerable number of litigants, but also to the cognitive inaccessibility of the legal universe. In this light, information and communication technologies [ICT] make up an important part of the discussions about ways to make justice more accessible. More specifically, social media could democratize legal information insofar as they are easy to use, gather a diversity of content, and are more and more ingrained in daily activities. Despite the growing interest in these platforms in terms of access to justice, their uses pertaining to legal information are yet to be explored by legal researchers. This article hence focuses on these platforms and more specifically on Facebook, which allows users to simultaneously be creators, receptors and relators of legal information content. We finally introduce a typology useful to research oriented towards law and social media.

Au même moment où les bénéfices, risques et limites de l’information juridique en ligne sur le plan de l’accès à la justice font l’objet de discussions multiples, la nature et la structure de cette information numérisée évoluent elles-mêmes à travers les mutations d’Internet et l’avènement des médias sociaux.

Ce texte fera ainsi état d’une recherche empirique sur les pratiques informationnelles des personnes ayant des questionnements juridiques à travers une analyse ethnographique de leurs échanges sur deux groupes Facebook d’entraide. Nous verrons que, d’une part, le Web social traduit des réalités émergentes dans la production et l’accès à l’information juridique telles que la mise en commun de l’information et des expériences avec le droit facilitée par l’interactivité, mais aussi la prolifération de la désinformation et des bulles informationnelles, dont les risques sont décuplés au détriment des groupes marginalisés. D’autre part, ces mêmes espaces numériques offrent des espaces de visibilité inédits en mettant à l’avant-scène la parole et les pratiques citoyennes. Les méthodes de recherche en ligne permettent alors d’éclairer des problèmes d’accès à la justice qui précèdent le numérique, mais qui sont difficiles à cartographier pour la recherche en droit, notamment les difficultés d’appropriation de l’information juridique.

Afin de comprendre dans quelle mesure le droit pourrait répondre aux défis du numérique dans toute leur complexité sociotechnique, il convient alors d’appréhender le numérique tant comme un amplificateur qu’un révélateur des inégalités sociales et, à ce chapitre, au prisme de ses possibilités méthodologiques pour la recherche en droit. Autrement dit, serait-il possible d’appréhender les défis et limites du droit par le numérique?

The book presents the results of research on the way the contemporary legislator in the democratic state (such as Poland, Germany, France, etc.) provides information about just created law (the rules of drafting and publishing of normative acts) and how the informations about the law reaches the person seeking for the legal information.

Με την μελέτη αυτή παρουσιάζεται η εφαρμογή του Αναγνωριστικού Ευρωπαϊκής Νομολογίας (ECLI) στην κυπριακή νομολογία, σύμφωνα με τις Συστάσεις του Συμβουλίου. Η υιοθέτηση του ECLI στην Κύπρο συν- δέεται με την ευρύτερη προσπάθεια εκσυγχρονισμού και μεταρρύθμισης του συστήματος απονομής δικαι- οσύνης, διευκολύνοντας την έρευνα επί της νομολογίας, επιτυγχάνοντας ομοιομορφία στις παραπομπές δι- καστικών αποφάσεων και εισάγοντας για πρώτη φορά ένα ολοκληρωμένο σύστημα μεταδεδομένων.

As the national implementation of ECLI is reaching its final stage in Cyprus, which is a mixed jurisdiction with strong common-law characteristics, the University of Cyprus is bringing together a number of experts on information law, legal information, comparative law and legal theory for a conference aimed at evaluating the implementation of ECLI and the potential to alter/improve/fulfill. The Cyprus ECLI Conference will consider how the new digital environment ushered in by ECLI is shaped by-and shapes back in turn-the legal traditions of the Member States, the EU itself and the broader world that interacts with Europe.

The paper presents the technical and legal issues that an electronic legal search services has to face while dealing with the problem of missing, unreliable or quasi-official legal data. Technically the problem requires the sifting of acquired legal texts in terms of importance and reliability, and coming up with user friendly matrices and expressions to present information to the researcher that conveys texts with their accompanying degrees of ambiguities, their varying reliability and their connections to other texts in the "corpus." Ultimately the aim is to formulate and delineate (for the user) the limits of reliability of any given legal electronic information. Moreover the initiatives carried on by the authors' on line legal service (Kanunum) to make more legal texts available electronically in Turkey from the official hand that produced these texts and actions are presented.

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 unavailability 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.

Access to law is as old as the law-making process itself. Similarly, the often quoted adage, ‘ignorance of the law is not an excuse’ assumes an equal access to laws by the citizens and the legal practitioner. Bingham noted that the law must be accessible and so far as possible intelligible, clear and predictable. Free access to legal information aims to provide access to public legal documents which include, for example, court judgments, statutes, bills and government gazettes. Access to ‘judge made law’ cannot be over-emphasised to the legal practitioner; consistently kept decisions of courts are important in common law jurisdictions as they form the legal precedent. The advent of Internet, semantic based technologies and open standards have revolutionised and refined the way online legal information is produced, used and disseminated.  In Zimbabwe, access to public legal documents has been an uneasy terrain for legal practitioners, academics and judiciary due to a constellation of factors. For example, courts have no capacity to mass print all cyclostyled judgements as soon as a decision is handed down. Zimbabwean courts (and Government printers) were reported to be facing challenges in providing print versions of judgements (and statutes). The various changes to the Executive and the Legislature in the past five years, have seen many statutes being promulgated and amended placing a further strain to the Government Printers. The Law Development Commission has produced an electronic database of statutes but the database is not widely available. The reported judgements, The Zimbabwe Law Reports are also lagging behind, with the latest issue of the published law reports 2012. Furthermore, what complicates access to legal information in Zimbabwe is that there is no one single source of law in Zimbabwe, the law is derived from various sources and has various sources and origins.
Free access to legal information in Zimbabwe was made possible by the Southern African Legal Information Institute (SAFLII) and the African Legal Information Institute (ALII) which later coordinated the establishment of the Zimbabwe Legal Information Institute. Through the collective efforts of these initiatives, representing the Free Access to Law Movement in Zimbabwe, online free access to judgments have somewhat improved. There is still a high potential to include other public legal documents.
This paper seeks to discover the impact of the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) amongst the legal practitioners in Zimbabwe. This will be done in order to establish the nature of use of FALM by legal practitioners, to establish their needs and if they are met by the existing free access to legal information, and also how the FALM has impacted on their work. A survey will be carried out to legal practitioners from law firms and also by distributing to online discussion groups for legal practitioners. The survey results will be analysed to establish the impact of the free access to law movement in Zimbabwe and will offer suggestions of improving the already available services and the introduction of new value added services.

This chapter outlines some of the key developments regarding publication and communication of legal rules and standards (i.e. legal information) to show that dissemination of legal information is reliant on how we design the entire model of its publication. In doing so, it analyses paradigmatic models of publication as they appeared in the prehistorical, historical, and hyperhistorical stages of human evolution. These models demonstrate how legal information was delivered to its intended addressees, i.e. to those who were expected to obey the published laws. It also demonstrates that the progress regarding these publication models was driven by efficiency and sustainability considerations. The currently prevailing model of publication is, however, inefficient and unsustainable due to an unnecessary multiplication of intermediaries facilitating communication of legal information. This problem is even more apparent in the context of increasing digitalisation of legal information and emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs). The chapter argues that, in this light, it is appropriate to consider revising the entire publication model and not only some aspects of it. An addressee-centric publication model is outlined as a potential solution to the problem. The proposed model requires active delivery of a relevant subset of digitalised legal information to its intended addressee in a similar way as targeted online advertising. Unlike the existing research that promotes personalisation of law (personalised legal information), this chapter advocates personalisation of the publication model.

Information Technologies on the Polish legal services market: results of a survey.

The report is the results of the survey research carried out before the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Europe from September 25 to December 25, 2019 (general public online survey). The questionnaire was addressed to lawyers all over the country (Poland), thanks to the help and support of bar associations and legal advisers.

The main purpose of the research was to examine the current state of IT use and changes taking place in the legal services market in Poland. In the first questions (Q1 - Q3), I examined the level of usage of selected IT tools. In the part of the questionnaire (Q4 - Q7), I focused on the changes taking place in the legal services market in Poland, asking about prices and new phenomena (trends) and business models.

To obtain an up-to-date picture of the legal services market in Poland, I invited attorneys and legal advisers to take part in the research, which allowed me to gather 451 completed questionnaires.

“La Propiedad Industrial es una rama o categoría jurídica clave para la economía del conocimiento, la fuente de riqueza más sustentable del siglo XXI. Hubiera sido deseable incorporar la PI como categoría específica, porque su importancia social y económica así lo reclama… La omisión de la PI como categoría autónoma me parece un error, subsanable. La PI es piedra basal de la sociedad de la información y economía del conocimiento. Como tal merece un lugar en el DJA.”

“Ésta no es la única omisión importante, extraña también el olvido del derecho agrario como categoría independiente en un país (aún) eminentemente agroexportador.”

“El artículo 7 de la Ley Nº 26.939, que aprueba el texto definitivo del DJA, enumera las categorías en las que se clasifica al derecho argentino. Éstas son 31 y van desde ADM hasta la Z. Ninguna de ellas refiere específicamente a la PI.”

“En el derecho foráneo se destaca la importancia de la PI como categoría autónoma.”

“No son pocas las normas que caerían en una eventual letra "PI". Luego de una breve (no exhaustiva) búsqueda he logrado identificar 34 normas. El número no es menor, hay categorías en el DJA que tienen aún menos (por ejemplo la letra G - Comunitario - contiene 17 normas).”

“…sería deseable que se aproveche el plazo de 180 días, estipulado por el artículo 20 de la ley que sanciona el DJA, para incluir una nueva categoría específica que contemple expresamente a la PI (quizás con una denominación más innovadora, pero en cualquier caso apropiada), entre otras ramas jurídicas olvidadas en la primera redacción y que pudieran ser merecedoras de una categoría ad hoc.”

“…sería aconsejable instrumentar un mecanismo para que la Comisión Bicameral Permanente del Digesto Jurídico Argentino pueda aprovechar el poder de la diversidad de opiniones de los juristas ajenos a la misma, para la constante mejora del derecho nacional.”

... Monica Palmirani and Raffaella Brighi ... affects the able to determine the status of the normative system applicable to a concrete case; – the eGovernment applications based on the legal knowledge (eg, one-shop-stop) are severely affected by this undefined situation (several ...

... PAPs have been demonstrated to increase patients' control over their life (Searle, Mahon, Iso-Ahola, Sdrolias, Adams and Van Dyke, 1995; Kennedy et al., 2004), and improve long-term health outcomes (Lieu et al., 1997; Ruffin, Wilson, Southcott, Smith and Adams, 1999). ...