BAILII, Legal Education and Open Access to Law

The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) entered the online legal information landscape in 2001 with charitable status 3 as a provider of UK and European judgments, and has over the past decade or so moved from a system quickly put together with any materials which could be found, to a system which provides a core resource to professionals in law. In this article we provide an overview for the law teacher of the system’s first years and we then look at whether usage in law schools has matched that of the professional, how the JISC funded Open Law project enabled development for law students, and where we might go in the future as part of the Legal Information Institute collective which operates under the ‘Free Access to Law’ banner. 4 As members of the Open Law team who sought funding, carried out the research and implemented the project, it seems to us that the project was generally successful. Our indications were that prior to Open Law the use of BAILII by students was low – it was not readily found or discussed by lecturers, was difficult to use, and generally less user friendly than it could have been. The changes implemented by Open Law appear to have changed that position 1 Queen’s University of Belfast. BAILII Trustee. 2 Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. 3 The formal statement to the Charity Commission on the role of BAILII is: “For the public benefit: (1) to promote the sound administration and development of the law by:(a) the provision of one or more searchable and regularly-updated internet sites on which accurately-recorded case law, primary and secondary legislation and treaties from or affecting the jurisdictions of the United Kingdom and the republic of Ireland and associated jurisdictions are maintained together with commentary analysis and the maintenance of links to similar sources in other jurisdictions and (b) such other means of providing free or inexpensive public access to legal texts and commentaries of all kinds as the trustees shall from time to time determine; and (2) to advance legal education by promoting and encouraging research in the field of legal information systems and dissemination of the useful results thereof.” www.charitycommission.gov.uk 4 See the collection, Peruginelli, G. & Ragona, M., "Law via the Internet: Free Access, Quality of Information, Effectiveness of Rights", (Proc. IX International Conference "Law via the Internet'), European Press Academic Publishing, Florence, 2009 and Greenleaf G., "Free access to legal information, LIIs, and the Free Access to Law Movement', in Danner, R and Winterton, J (eds.) IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management. Aldershot, Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2011.