It is now more than 800 years since the Magna Carta of 1215, soon after which English law started to document its history. In some ex-colonies of the British Empire, the common law has been part of their legal history for over 200 years. This presentation sets out the background to the...

This chapter considers how a country's legal scholarship can become a major resource on a free access legal information institute (LII). It commences with an analysis of the attractions of global legal scholarship facilities (e.g. SSRN's Legal Scholarship Network (LSN) and Google Scholar) to...

The enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI) as a source of solutions to problems is not new. In law, from the early 1980s until at least the early 2000s, considerable work was done on developing ‘legal expert systems.' As the DataLex project, we participated in those developments, through...

The draft working paper, 'Cracking the Code: Rulemaking for humans and machines' (OECD, May 2020), published by the OECD's Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI), is intended to act as a 'primer', a resource for public servants across OECD Member States, to help them understand and...

This article analyses the complexities involved in providing free public online access to the ‘public legal information’ of the Indian legal system. It starts with some of the causes of the complexity of Indian legal information, then describes the considerable progress that has previously...

Those who value free access to law need to respond to the increasingly global nature of legal research, and the fact that most countries still do not have effective facilities for free access to law. The free access to law movement, centred around University-based Legal Information Institutes...

Some special features of the legal domain which affect the development of expert systems are examined, including: why ‘ready made rules’ are a problem, not an answer; the relationship between prescriptive laws and legal source materials; ‘rules’ of interpretation of statutes are not...