An Experimental Hypermedia Tool for Legal Documentation

1. Legal Documentation and its Sources Legal documentation seems to be particularly suitable for hypertext applications because it deals with texts which by their very nature are highly correlated, both explicitly and implicitly: legislation refer to other legislation, court decisions interpret legislation or refer to other decisions, legal authority comments both case law and legislation. Therefore, hypertext systems become precious tools for acquiring complete legal information [Di Giorgi, Nannucci, 1991]. The reference sources for integrated legal documentation fall into the following categories: Legislation: international conventions, treaties and agreements; European Community legislation (directives, regulations, etc.); national legislation (central government, regional, provincial and municipal legislative measures) that specifically regulate the matter or a different matter which is nevertheless pertinent to the subject being dealt with (for example, in environmental law, regulations regarding town and country planning, public health and health and safety). Case law: decisions made by the Constitutional Court, the Council of State, Regional Administrative Tribunals, the Supreme Court, the lower courts, etc. Legal authority: text books, treatises, monographs, commentaries, collective works and proceedings of conferences, encyclopaedias, journals. This type of documentation may also include the codes, repertories and case note reports and bibliographies, namely collections of legislation, case law and legal authority, respectively. If the assistance offered by hypertext systems makes them the ideal tool for consulting legal documents in general, which are so rich in notes, citations and references, this is even more so in the case of legislation, where this feature is so accentuated that often a single section of a law becomes incomprehensible unless it is read together with other sections and/or other texts. Sometimes, it is even impossible to understand the subject of the legislation we are reading about if we do not resort to this kind of cross-referencing [Agosti et al., 1989] [Wilson, 1992].