Lemyre, Pierre-Paul --- "Availability, Reliability and Usability: Some Thoughts About Free Access To Law" [2005] CompLRes 9 (18 November 2005)

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Availability, Reliability and Usability: Some Thoughts About Free Access to Law

Pierre-Paul Lemyre

For over a decade now, teams scattered around the globe have promoted and implemented Web services aimed at improving public access to various kinds of legal information. On a national scale, each of these teams have contributed to the improvement of public policies, to the re-engineering of the legal information market and, nonetheless, to the strengthening of justice and the rule of law. Altogether, they have showed to the World that with the help of technologies large collections of legal documents can be managed and made openly accessible on a sustainable basis.

In 2002, conscious of this common achievement, the Legal Information Institutes (LII) agreed to an official declaration with the objective of promoting their ideal of accessibility for public legal information. The drafting of the Montreal Declaration also happened to become the leading step toward the creation of a Free Access to Law Movement. With this impulse, the informal alliance of LII interacting without any particular structure gradually evolved in a tighter network of organisations linked together by annual meetings and collective projects. With the ever growing demand from external institutions interested to join in, some members of the Free Access to Law Movement began to promote the idea of pursuing this evolution by formalizing the Movement operation and decision-making into a collective organisation. However, for such an organisation to achieve its full potential, it requires a shared understanding of the goals, characteristics and appropriate behaviours that compose the funding principles of free access to law. New partners ask for guidance while they define their own legal publication strategy. Objective criteria are also mandatory to equitably accept or reject candidates. Fortunately, the last three Law via the Internet conferences (Montreal, Sydney and Paris) provided a forum to discuss these principles.

Initially, the debate relating to the definition of free access in the context of legal information focused on the interpretation of the word “free”. It is without surprise that access to all on a non-profit basis and free of charge was retained as the key element of the Free Access to Law Movement. Essentially, the management of publicly accessible websites hosting collections of legislation, caselaw and/or doctrine is the common denominator of LII in Australia, Burkina Faso, Canada, Cyprus, Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Africa, South Pacific, United Kingdom and the United States. In consequence, “Free as in free beer” is undoubtedly the first and most important principle for the foundation of any collective organisation of LII.

Eventually, the ethical notion implied in the word “free” also made its way into the discussion. While the provision of information without charge is considered essential, it is the absence of restriction on its usage that provides the user with the required flexibility to fully benefit from it. Agreeing on this argument first induced the members of the Free Access to Law Movement to apply non-restrictive terms of use to their legal collections. It also refrained them from implementing technical barriers designed to restrain the reuse of published material. Inspired by the open source software movement, “free as in freedom” became another guiding principle of the Free Access to Law Movement.

Unfortunately, the debate never extended from the interpretation of the word “free” to its complementary concept of “access”. Even if existing guidelines now ease the classification of legal publishers as free or not, no accepted criterion allows to identify those providing sufficient access. While many organisations around the World agree that the publication of legal documents should be achieved freely, not all of them actually get involved in the provision of information in a valuable fashion. Is providing some documents on a Web server enough? Shouldn’t minimal guarantees be given to the users about the origin and the integrity of the information? Shouldn’t the users be provided with the required tools to efficiently use the information?

To secure the long-term viability of any collective organisation of LII, common answers to these questions should be agreed on. Identifying the elements composing adequate access will complete the maturing of the Free Access to Law Movement, thus opening the door for future expansion and greater co-operation.

I.	Access
II.	Availability
III.	Reliability
IV.	Usability
V.	Conclusion: What can be done?