When the history of public
access to legal information comes to be written, high honours must be given to Graham Greenleaf, Andrew Mowbray and Philip Chung, whose vision has inspired Canlii and Bailii too.
Not exact matches
The significance of the offer by Maritime Law Book of free
access to its collection of over 215,000 cases under the name «Raw Judgments» has not yet been given the attention it deserves in the world of Canadian
legal information as a portent of things
to come.
Here the real issue is the pain that
comes with the loss of
access to valued sources of
legal information by the
legal research community and from the loss of purpose that
comes from law libraries being unable
to provide
access to legal information that is the reason for their existence.
This is my hundredth Slaw posting and rather than post on
legal information, research and the Technologies of
access and knowledge analysis, I'd like
to think about slaw as a community of knowledge and where we've
come from since those trans - mondial postings about taxonomies of
legal knowledge back in June en route
to India.
However you interpret them, the answers given by the respondents reveal that CanLII tops the market when it
comes to accessing primary
legal information.
The website of the Ministry of the Attorney General for Ontario includes an interesting discussion of publication bans in Ontario, but really misses the point when it
comes to the distribution of court judgments and publication bans in the era of online distribution and
access to legal information.
The invitation
to participate in the survey was found on Lexum's Supreme Court of Canada's decisions web site (scc.lexum.org/en) and sent through the related e-mail distribution list, so it could be that the respondents
come out of a group more interested in free
access to law than the general body of
legal information users.