Overview of Legal Information Institutes and the Free Access to Law Movement

GlobaLex, an online research collection at the New York University School of Law, has just published an article entitled Legal Information Institutes and the Free Access to Law Movement.

Written by Graham Greenleaf, Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales in Australia, it describes the origins and evolution of the growing international movement to make legal information freely accessible:

"Part I of this article surveys the group of free access providers of legal information known as ‘the Legal Information Institutes’ (‘LII’s) or ‘the Free Access to Law Movement’. It is not therefore about free access to law generally, but rather about a particular group of its providers who collaborate. Part II gives a brief description of each legal information institute, and references for further reading."

The article deals with a number of Canadian participants in the free access to law movement, including the LexUM lab at the University of Montreal (they publish the judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada on the Internet) and CanLII (Canadian Legal Information Institute).

Greenleaf himself is the co-director of AustLII, the Australasian Legal Information Institute.