Free Access to Law Movement

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The Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) is the international organization devoted to providing free online access to legal information such as case law, legislation, treaties, law reform proposals and legal scholarship. The movement began in 1992 with the creation of the Legal Information Institute (LII) by Thomas R. Bruce and Peter W. Martin at Cornell Law School. [1] Some later FALM projects incorporate Legal Information Institute or LII in their names, usually prefixed by a national or regional identifier.

Contents

Membership

The FALM website lists 63 active members as of July 2017, together with the coverage (geographical area or political grouping) for which each member provides databases, and the year in which it became a member of FALM, as well as links to member websites. [2]

Declaration

In October 2002 the meeting of LIIs in Montreal at the 4th Law via Internet Conference, made the following declaration [3] as a joint statement of their philosophy of access to law. There were some further modifications of the Declaration at the Sydney meeting of LIIs in 2003 [4] and at the Paris meeting in 2004. [5]

Legal information institutes of the world, meeting in Montreal, declare that,

Public legal information means legal information produced by public bodies that have a duty to produce law and make it public. It includes primary sources of law, such as legislation, case law and treaties, as well as various secondary (interpretative) public sources, such as reports on preparatory work and law reform, and resulting from boards of inquiry. It also includes legal documents created as a result of public funding.

A legal information institute,

All legal information institutes are encouraged to participate in regional or global free access to law networks.

Therefore, the legal information institutes agree,

See also

Notes

  1. Myers, Linda (27 April 2000). "CU Law Institute Web Site has Latest Legal Information". Cornell Chronicle. Retrieved 7 July 2015.
  2. "Members of the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM)".
  3. See WorldlII
  4. The amendments were: (i) in the title of the Declaration, 'public' was changed to 'free'; (ii) the words 'where possible' were deleted from the second bullet point 'where possible, free of charge'; (iii) addition of the description of a legal information institute and the encouragement to participate in networks; and (iv) addition of the final bullet point about an annual meeting to the list of areas of agreed cooperation.
  5. The amendments were: (i) the words "It also includes legal documents created as a result of public funding." were added to the end of para 2 after 'boards of enquiry': (ii) the words "To provide to the end users of public legal information clear information concerning any conditions of re-use of that information, where this is feasible." were added to the final list of bullet points.

References