The Design and Implementation of a Legal Text Database

We describe the design and implementation of a legal text database. The database of provides a number of Greek Council of State decisions in the form of a computer-accessible medium (CD-ROM). A graphical front-end is provided which allows the rapid retrieval of cases based on arbitrary keywords combined using boolean operators. The database was populated by automatically converting the word-processor files into a random text retrieval data structure. The system has been designed and implemented with goals of wide availability, accessibility, extensibility, and user-friendliness.