WorldLII: Free global law

The World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII) - <http://www.worldlii.org/> aims to provide free, independent and non-profit access to worldwide law. WorldLII is a joint initiative of the following University-based Legal Information Institutes (LIIs):

• Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) - <http://www.austlii.org/> - University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) & University of New South Wales (UNSW)
• British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) - <http://www.bailii.org/> - University of Cork, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) & BAILII Trust
• Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) - <http://www.canlii.org/> - University of Montreal & Federation of Law Societies of Canada
• Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII) - <http://www.hklii.org/> - University of Hong Kong (HKU)
• Legal Information Institute (Cornell) (LII (Cornell)) - <http://www.law.cornell.edu/> - Cornell Law School
• Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute (PacLII) - <http://www.paclii.org/> - University of the South Pacific (USP)

WorldLII also host databases from East Timor, Cambodia, Viet Nam, the Philippines and South Africa (provided by the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS)).

The core idea of WorldLII is to provide consistent and innovative forms of access to all of the high quality legal databases found on WorldLII's participating LIIs, and on WorldLII itself.

WorldLII also provides a systematic and comprehensive approach to accessing the vast quantity of other legal information available via the Internet, through its WorldLII Catalog and Websearch facility, and through translating WorldLII searches to enable easier use of Internet-wide search engines.

WorldLII's 240 databases

WorldLII already has databases from 20 countries in six continents (at present mainly those with a common law tradition): from Australasia (120), Canada (61); Britain and Ireland (27), the Pacific Islands (25), Hong Kong (13) and other countries in Asia and Africa (6). All types of legal databases are included: case law (165), legislation (45), treaties (3), law reform (4), law journals (11), and specialist subject databases. In combination, the LII's accessible through WorldLII include 240 databases from 43 jurisdictions, with over 50 gigabytes of searchable text.

How does WorldLII work?

WorldLII is a flexible and evolving combination of distributed and centralised facilities. WorldLII sends searches out to some of its participating LIIs. With others, it holds copies of their concordances (word occurrence indexes). In other cases, the databases are located on WorldLII. All of these sources are searched, and the results from all are merged and ranked in order of likely relevance for the user.

Special features

There is more to WorldLII than a distributed search engine:

• Searches can be limited by region (eg 'All Asia'), by type of data (eg 'All Legislation' or 'All National Highest Courts'), or by particular databases singly or in combination from different jurisdictions.
• The LIIs in WorldLII already have many millions of internal hypertext links, and are now developing hypertext links between cases and legislation cited by Courts in different countries.
• WorldLII also makes it possible for its participating LII's to develop 'global noteups' which find all cases from many jurisdictions that consider a case or statutory provision.

Ease of use - Quick Guide

WorldLII is easy to use because the contents of its participating LIIs are presented and searched in a consistent way. There is a Quick Guide available on the WorldLII site.

WorldLII Catalog & Websearch

The WorldLII Catalog and web-spider-based search engine (part of WorldLII and some LIIs) adds a global catalog of nearly 15,000 web sites, and another 20GB of searchable law sites. This is the Internet's largest law-specific catalog, covering every country in the world, and over 100 legal subjects.

Searches over WorldLII can be repeated over the WorldLII Catalog and Websearch, and over Google, with no re-keying.

Future developments

The future development of WorldLII will depend largely on which countries' or international organisations' collections of legal information become available in a consistent form suitable for inclusion in WorldLII. We welcome discussion with interested organisations.

The development of multi-lingual interfaces and searching is essential for WorldLII's full development, and participating LIIs are developing enhancements to this aspect.

DIAL Training & DIAL News

WorldLII is the key resource used in the DIAL Training programme, funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which trains lawyers in Asian developing countries to use the Internet for comparative law research. ‘DIAL News’ is a free monthly email update of new WorldLII Databases and WorldLII Catalog additions.

Contacting WorldLII

General contact: feedback@worldlii.org

WorldLII coordination (c/- AustLII)

Associate Professor Andrew Mowbray, andrew@austlii.edu.au

Professor Graham Greenleaf, graham@austlii.edu.au

Philip Chung, AustLII Executive Director, philip@austlii.edu.au

You can also contact any of the LIIs that participate in WorldLII. See their websites listed above for contact details.

Please feel free to duplicate and distribute this brochure. Copies may also be obtained from the WorldLII website.

Version: November 2002

DIAL Training

World Legal Information Institute
http://www.worldlii.org/
email: feedback@worldlii.org

World Legal Information Institute


www.worldlii.org

Free, independent and

non-profit access to

worldwide law