Stokes, Michael --- "Editorial" [1997] JlLawInfoSci 9; (1997) 8(2) Journal of Law, Information and Science 175

• Editorial

Editorial

Much of this issue is devoted to issues arising from the use of IT, especially the Internet, by lawyers and courts to make information about the law freely available to the profession and the public, to facilitate legal research and to improve the efficiency with which trials are conducted.

The article by Messrs Daniel Poulin, Alain Lavoie and Guy Huard and that by Professor David Thomas deal with the difficulties in making legal information available to members of the profession and to the public by way of the Internet. Messrs Poulin, Lavoie and Huard have been working on a project to give the public free access to reports of the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada. Their article describes the scope of the information which they are making available before discussing the technical difficulties which they faced in providing it in a form which is easy to access and the software which they used to overcome these difficulties. Prof Thomas’s paper deals with a different problem, that of giving the profession and the public access to and the ability to search land title records by way of the Internet. The article concentrates on the public policy and legal issues arising from this use of the Internet rather than the technology used to make the records available.

The articles by Ms Ruth Bohill and Mr Colin Fong concentrate on one issue arising from the availability of legal materials on the Internet and from other electronic sources, that of the need to develop uniform rules for the citation of such electronic materials and the need to make those rules consistent with the rules governing the citation of paper-based documents. Mr Fong’s article discusses some of the problems involved in developing a uniform standard for the citation of electronic legal materials which is both succinct and informative, while Ms Bohill’s paper describes the guide for the citation of electronic materials developed by the Law Department of the University of New England for use by its students and discusses the principles on which that guide is based.

The issue also contains two papers on the use of IT to assist the courts deal with cases more quickly and cheaply. The first, an article by Ms Allison Stanfield, is a survey of some of the ways in which courts are beginning to use the Internet to allow for the electronic filing of documents, including appeal books, to carry out research, to develop virtual court rooms, to make evidence and information available to the court and to the parties both inside and outside the court room and to give the public legal information and assistance, especially in preparing and lodging documents in areas such as divorce, small claims, landlord and tenant and the enforcement of judgments. The paper also looks at some of the issues to which the use of the Internet has given rise, including issues of privacy, the right of the public to free access to legal materials and the need for uniform rules for citing electronic and paper-based legal sources. The second is an edited version of a report prepared for the Australian Council of Chief Justices (CCJ) on the Electronic Appeals Project, a project set up by the CCJ to examine the use of electronic material in appeals cases in Australian courts. Among other matters, it considers a conceptual model of a possible future electronic appeals process, discusses strategies for moving from paper-based to electronic appeals including a proposal to test an electronic appeals book system and examines some of the technical and policy issues arising from these proposals.

A common problem faced by law firms with branch offices or courts which go on circuit is that of making resources on CD-Roms stored in a central facility available to persons working at other sites. Mr Tony de la Fosse’s paper considers one cheap but effective solution which has been used successfully by the High Court of Australia, that of using ‘thin client’ technology.

Finally, the article by Mr John Trone provides a country by country survey of Asian legal materials available on the Internet, with some commentary on the material available at each site.

Michael Stokes

Editor