Google Law – the beginnings

It was only a matter of time before Google turned its attention to the law. So we now have Legal Opinions on Google Scholar and everybody is all aTwitter about it.

Legal Opinions on Google Scholar opens up access to full text legal opinions from US federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts and via a Cited By feature links to other cases and articles on Scholar that cite them. (Though court opinions in the US are not protected by copyright they wre hitherto only readily available for comprehensive searching via services such as Lexis and Westlaw.)

For a good primer on its features, see Don Cruse on the Supreme Court of Texas Blog (hat tip Jason Wilson).

You can also use Google Scholar / Legal Opinions to follow up citations of judgments that are not themselves indexed in full text, including those from other jurisdictions. For example, one will readily find citations of leading cases such as Hedley Byrne and Donoghue v Stevenson, and more recent cases of course.

So it’s going to be useful for (US) legal research, though it will be some time before it challenges the likes of Wexis. Calm … down, says Jason Wilson.

The development is hyped by Anurag Acharya, the Distinguished Engineer (sic) behind the development, on the Official Google Blog, saying:

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. … we were struck by how readable and accessible these opinions are. Court opinions don’t just describe a decision but also present the reasons that support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations.

I don’t buy this empowerment argument. It’s absolutely right that citizens should have access to the laws that bind them and any initiative that makes them more accessible is to be welcomed. But to empower the average citizen you have to go the extra mile, explaining the law. Lawyers and legal researchers have spent years learning the law and acquiring the skills that enable them to navigate and reliably interpret primary law and precedent.

Free legal information – the Berring strait

Bob Berring is an eminent Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley who has won significant recognition for teaching and law librarianship.

In his time he’s consulted for West. How closely associated he is I do not know; he plays West up substantially in this YouTube clip. (See also this post and the comments thereto on Thomson Reuters blog Legal Current.)

Bob kicks off his vid by saying “I do believe in the market system”. So, he’s not a commie. But what does he mean by “the market system” – it soon becomes clear.

He believes that government efforts in the provision of free legal information have failed because there are no incentives; and that “volunteer efforts”, worthy as they may be, are unlikely to be sustained. He rightly says that legal information is not easily packaged: we need a map and a compass to navigate it; it needs to be organised and value added. I think we all agree with that. But his conclusion appears to be that only Wexis have sufficient incentive and only they can mobilise the necessary army to add sufficient value for it to be useful. That’s clearly preposterous – the talk of someone living in the past.

For Bob the free legal information that’s out there is “a bunch of goo” and the only thing that can sort out the mess is “the market system”. Well I have to tell Bob that it’s more nuanced than that. Sure, people need incentives, but those incentives are not only to turn a profit for shareholders. We live in a mixed economy Bob and we live by differing values:

• government has an incentive to make legal information more accessible
• the legal profession has an incentive to make legal information more accessible
• various non-profits have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
• citizens have an incentive to make legal information more accessible
• and there are many private enterprises short of Wexis who have an incentive to make legal information more accessible

All these are players in the development of better legal information; all these are making a difference.

More commentary on Slaw.

Open government data site

The Digital Engagement team are inviting developers to show government how to get the (forthcoming) UK government data site right. For now you need to apply to preview and contribute ideas via a Google Group.

With over 1000 existing data sets, from 7 departments (brought together in re-useable form for the first time) and community resources, we want developers to work with us to use the data to create great applications; give us feedback on the early operational community; and tell us how to develop what we have into a single point of access for government-held public data.

Down Under data.australia.gov.au has just launched.

US Data.gov launched in May. Its goal is nicely put:

A primary goal of Data.gov is to improve access to Federal data and expand creative use of those data beyond the walls of government by encouraging innovative ideas (e.g., web applications). Data.gov strives to make government more transparent and is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. The openness derived from Data.gov will strengthen our Nation’s democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

OPSI releases legislation API

OPSI is some way down the road in developing a new Single Legislation Service (SLS) which will combine legislation from the OPSI website and the SLD. As I understand it the SLS will effectively combine and integrate the following legislation data resources:

• the “as enacted” versions of legislation from OPSI, immediately on enactment
• the revised versions of legislation from the SLD, as and when available, complete with all versioning and annotation information
• the tables of effects data maintained by the SLD which will link past legislative provisions to relevant amending provisions
• the explanatory notes, integrated with the relevant legislative provisions

Key to the utility of the service and opening up the information has been the development of a permanent URI scheme for addressing legislation, legislation fragments, versions and related resources on the new site. Say Goodbye to link rot and Hello to an intuitive format with which any external individual or website can reliably construct an address to any legislative resource. This is not just a technical nicety, but a fundamental improvement that will open up UK legislation for public consumption.

The API is now documented on the site www.legislation.gov.uk.

Pilot Project development under way

I’m pleased to report that last week we received our first funding commitment – from OPSI – sufficient to proceed in earnest with the first phase of development of the FreeLegalWeb Pilot Project.

At the core of FLW will be what we call the Citator – essentially linked data tables identifying and connecting everything we know about the law: both primary resources such as legislation, cases and other official documents, and secondary law resources such as publications and articles. Using the Citator we will be able to request data both internally from FLW and externally from the web via an API which will be made publicly available so that any external website can leverage that information.

In the UK OPSI is the key facilitator of public sector information policy, setting standards and providing a practical framework of best practice for opening up and encouraging the use of PSI. It also has direct responsibility for the publication (inter alia) of legislation and is advanced in its development of a new legislation website which will provide an API enabling direct addressing of legislation data and resources. Via the Citator FLW will both exploit the facilities the new legislation website offers and also help contribute to OPSI’s PSI policy agenda. On this basis OPSI is part-financing the development of the Citator.

A big thanks to John Sheridan at OPSI who has been a leading FLW supporter from the outset. Indeed it was he who first encouraged me to go public with the initiative last autumn.

We have some way to go in securing sufficient funds to commit to development of the full Pilot Project but are nevertheless proceeding with other aspects of development in the expectation that some of our other current funding prospects will come good.

Digital Engagement Report

Gov 2.0 is now officially “Digital Engagement”. Guided by Minister Tom Watson, the Digital Engagement team at the Cabinet Office is now headed by Director Andrew Stott who is charged with taking forward the Power of Information agenda.

The Digital Engament team will “work across Government departments to encourage, support and challenge them in moving from communicating to citizens on the web to conversing and collaborating with them through digital technology.”

Its debut is the Government response to the Power of Information Task Force Report – available via the new Digital Engagement blog. The POI principles are substantailly accepted by government: they are “no longer just recommendations in a report but will be core to the future development and implementation of government policy.”

Progress

A small group has been actively progressing the FreeLegalWeb agenda. Here’s an update on our progress:

Active people:

• With me, Robert Casalis de Pury and Harry Metcalfe are now jointly managing the project.
• Francis Davey is actively contributing to the development of the spec and content.
• Rudi Moffit is helping us develop and deliver our funding pitch.
• On the government side, Richard Stirling (Cabinet Office) and John Sheridan (OPSI) are facilitating the project via the POI agenda and have provided Rudi’s services.
• Thanks to William Flack, Nearly Legal, Joe Ury and Stephen Moore for their input as to content.
• Thanks also to all others who have contributed comments here and on the Google Group.

Development status:

A set of about pages and some pre-prototype visuals have been prepared to illustrate and prove concepts and help us develop the spec. Citator development is under way.

Data and content provision:

• The OPSI legislation API is near final.
• BAILII will be providing the judgments metadata we require.
• Stephen Moore of CaseCheck has agreed in principle to us syndicating all case summaries from CaseCheck (which are licensed on a CC by-nc-sa basis). Currently CaseCheck publishes about 4,000 (Scottish/UK) case summaries; these are to be complemented in April by about another 5,000 (E&W/UK) sourced from Law Brief Update.
• Francis Davey, Nearly Legal and William Flack are already involved re content for the Housing pilot. I will be pursuing others in this and other areas once we’ve finalised our pitch.

Current priorities are:

• Incorporate a Community Interest Company
• Complete the Funding Proposal
• Complete the Functional Spec

We should in the next few weeks be in a position to seriously tout for some funding and move this on.

Legal informatics – a big world

Tom Bruce, co-founder and director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School posts an interesting piece on the big new world of legal informatics, concluding:

We need to make informed choices between inexpensive automated approaches that work by brute force and the hand-crafted, highly-accurate approaches of legal bibliography that are not always scalable or affordable. We need to recalibrate what we mean by “authority”, and begin to think about measures of quality and reliability for legal text that avoid the creation of unnatural monopolies in legal information.

As a step in that direction LII has started a guest blog, VoxPopuLII, which will include big ideas from “folks in all different tribes in all different places on the intellectual and global map”.

We’ll be in touch, Tom.

(Hat tip to Joe Ury)

POI Task Force report

The Power of Information Task Force has just published its final report describing the key actions that government can take in the short to medium term significantly to improve its use of digital technologies.

Of particular relevance to FreeLegalWeb is the section on modernising data publishing and reuse.

Improving access to legislation

I’ll refer again to Lord Justice Toulson’s comments (at [2008] EWCA Crim 2467) that:

It is a serious state of affairs when the relevant legislation is not accessible, the Government’s own public information website (OPSI) is incomplete and the [court is unintentionally misled] as to the relevant Regulations in force. [This is a] problem of substantial constitutional importance.

He was echoing – and specifically referred to – the Law Commission’s recommendations in its 2006 report on Post-Legislative Scrutiny (Law Com 302,  at para 4.11):

We are concerned when information so fundamental to a democracy is difficult to identify, obtain and understand, and is frequently out of date.

How do we fix this?

There are three ways to address the problem – and all three need to be pursued with equal vigour.

Firstly, let’s improve access to existing legislation. This is the task OPSI have and it is one which FreeLegalWeb is addressing. But this is applying sticking plaster to the wounds.

So, let’s improve legislation via new legislation! The Leader of the House of Commons is on the case, describing the several ways in which the Government is simplifying and consolidating legislation. But that does not address the huge corpus of remaining existing fragmented legislation.

The third way we can improve access to legislation will be by far the most effective and it does not appear yet to have attracted any public discussion – and that is to improve the legislative drafting process.

Legislation is drafted by the Office of Parliamentary Counsel and it is therefore to the OPC that we should look for the answer. To do their job in preparing amending legislation OPC need to work from a consolidated version of the current legislation. Why cannot that be made available to us? (Do LexisNexis own it?!) And if, in drafting amending legislation, they are updating existing legislation, why cannot they apply technology to automate the process?

In 2004 Tim Arnold-Moore of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology published an excellent paper on Automating consolidation of amendments to legislation in common law and civil jurisdictions which gives a full background to drafting practices in commonwealth jurisdictions and discusses the reasons for extending the traditional role of the official drafting office to the management of the legislative repository:

They have historically maintained consolidations of legislation for their own use to facilitate the drafting of amending legislation. Rather than duplicating the effort to consolidate the amendments, the public resources used to maintain this repository should be for the benefit of all users of legislative material. If these versions are considered authoritative enough to be used as the basis for amending legislation, they should be considered sufficiently reliable for the government to endorse as authoritative. The cost of delivering these consolidations in a timely fashion to the public is a small proportion of the cost of manually maintaining these consolidations and there is no excuse for governments failing in this respect. Providing older consolidations is simply a matter of retaining old versions and providing a suitable mechanism to search and browse them.

The article also describes how the “redlining” of amendments on the consolidated master version of the legislation can be used automatically to generate the amending legislation. This stuff is happening down under.

Tasmania, with its automated consolidation system, usually has consolidated legislation available on the day the amendments commence if not before. Contrast this with the vast resources of the US Congress where updated versions of the US Code are made available as long as 2 years after the amendment becomes law.

Sadly the UK lags even further behind, with the SLD only substantially up to date to 2002.

See also AustLII’s Point-in-Time legislation system: A generic PiT system for presenting legislation.