A New Dawn for Case Law
Considering that the UK is supposed to be a Western democracy premised on the idea of open justice, it can be remarkably difficult to get your hands on case law. If you are a student or a lawyer then you might have access to a law library or a commercial provider like WestLaw. However an ordinary member of the public is often reliant on BAILII, a website that would have looked out of date in 1994.
This is no slight on BAILII that provides a wonderful service but is hampered by its dependency on charitable donations and limited funding from the Ministry of Justice. Now that this has been brought ‘in-house’ to the National Archives there is amazing potential for this to become a vital research tool.
Starting from scratch has allowed those working at the National Archives to re-think the way that cases are recorded. Instead of just publishing the judgments as a block of text, thought has gone in to other pieces of metadata, namely:
Neutral citation
Court / Chamber
Party Names
Judges Name
Date
This use of LegalDocML makes research a lot easier. In the most recent edition of my podcast I talk about legal trends in judgments from the Supreme Court under its current president, Lord Reed. In the future it is likely that this sort of analysis will be much easier because generating searches and datasets is not only possible but also effective. Even at this Alpha stage I was able to isolate judgments from the Supreme Court that Lord Reed was involved in (link).
There has been some criticism in legal circles about the service at its launch but I think that is mostly misconceived. It has taken a decent amount of time to get to this point but, with something like this, it is important to get the foundation right and then build out from that. The National Archives is also responsible for legislation.gov.uk and that now leads the way in terms of open access to statute law in the UK and across the world.
Despite some sentimental attachment to BAILII, case law is finally being brought into the 21st Century.
As mentioned above, this week in the podcast we did not look at a specific case but rather took the opportunity to take a step back and look at how the Reed court is performing. Is it more hostile to human rights? Does it prop up the actions of the executive?
In this episode we answer those questions and more:
Episode link: http://uklawweekly.com/analysing-the-reed-court/
Make a difference today,
Marcus