Government Information in Canada/Information gouvernementale au Canada, Number/Numéro 19 (October 1999) Would We be Living in Oz If:
All of the above is happening today in Oz--short for Australia.
AustLII: the Australasian Legal Information Institute Visit www.austlii.edu.au to see what might well be the single best legal information site in the world--the Australasian Legal Information Institute. AustLII is operated jointly by the University of Technology, Sydney, and the University of New South Wales. AustLII has a staff of 10, with a budget of approximately $500,000 per year (some of the staff are students on industrial experience and have a salary of approximately $30,000, and the University of Technology, Sydney provides office space and Internet connections). When AustLII began in 1995, with a grant of $160,000, there were virtually no Australasian primary legal materials available for free on the Internet. Today, AustLII's Website receives approximately 200,000 hits per working day. AustLII now has over 80 databases of statutes, regulations, court and tribunal decisions (more than 400,000 cases), law reform commission reports, and many other holdings, from all across Australia. AustLII is now expanding to include legal databases from New Zealand and countries in the South Pacific such as Vanuatu and Fiji. More databases from these and other South Pacific and Asian countries will be added in the future. AustLII adds a new database of primary legal materials once every two to three weeks. All of the databases can be searched at one time, or you can limit your search to any number of the databases you choose. It should be noted that Canada has a number of important legal Websites, perhaps the most important of which are the Virtual Canadian Law Library created by the LexUM group at the Université de Montréal. This site hosts the Supreme Court of Canada and Federal Court of Canada decisions, the federal Department of Justice Website and thus, the federal statutes and regulations, among other legal information. The Access to Justice Network www.acjnet.org hosts a wide variety of other legal information, with perhaps the best library of public legal education and information materials in Canada. However, neither site comes close to holding as much primary legal information as AustLII on its own site (in large part because Australian governments and courts have been more willing to provide their databases to AustLII than has been the case in Canada), or with providing the same search functionality or development of new search software as the AustLII group has achieved. In addition to its basic objective of providing access to the law for free via the Internet, AustLII is dedicated to technical research to improve means for finding law on the Internet. AustLII is an innovative developer of software for use in legal research. The AustLII site uses its own program for searching the databases (the name of the program is "SINO," which means "Size Is No Object"). In addition, AustLII has written its own software that automatically inserts hyperlinks. Thus, where there is a court decision that refers to various statutory references, the software automatically links to the full text of the section of the statute that is cited in the court decision. There are over 20 million automatically inserted hypertext links in AustLII's one million pages, including links to statutory definitions, other sections and Acts, and cases. In addition, every section in an Act has a "Noteup" button which causes an automatic search for cases, other legislation, or secondary materials that refer to that section.
A Portal to Global Legal Information: The World Law Index AustLII is working with the Asian Development Bank on "Project DIAL" (Development of the Internet for Asian Law) and is assisting Asian countries in making their laws available on the Internet for free. One part of Project DIAL is the creation of what is perhaps the best search engine for world-wide legal information at www.austlii.edu.au/links/World. AustLII's Word Law Index aims to be a major portal to global legal information. AustLII has also developed software to seek out legal information Websites and index the information held on law sites around the world. Graham Greenleaf, Co-director of AustLII, noted in his paper that existing Internet search engines are not very comprehensive--even the best ones search only 16% of Websites, and the proportion of Websites searched by any given search engine is diminishing as the number of Websites escalates. When the search engines search their limited proportion of sites, they search only a small number of the pages on the sites they are searching. In addition to ineffective search engines, another tool that is used for Web searching is catalogs, where individuals select the better sites and classify them to make the better sites easier to find for the user. Again, catalogs are not even remotely comprehensive, are updated rarely, are difficult to maintain and do not provide much information about what is on each of the sites listed. Beyond search engine and catalog problems, Greenleaf's paper details a variety of other problems when searching for law on the Internet. AustLII's solution to these problems is to create catalogs specifically related to law sites, and then have a powerful search engine search those sites. By eliminating non-law sites from the searches, the quality of search results increases significantly. AustLII refers to this combination as a "targeted" Web spider (the "spider" seeks out the targets: law sites specified by the indexer for indexing) and the resulting search tool as a "limited area search engine." (An example of a "limited area legal search engine" is Jurist, which searches home pages of law professors. Jurist Canada is at jurist.law.utoronto.ca/.) One of the problems with Internet law searches is that some sites do not permit search engines to enter their Websites to index their information, because too much activity from search engines can create problems for server performance. AustLII is hopeful that major law sites will permit AustLII's targeted search on a request basis because it will not expose those law sites to indexing and searches from an unwieldy number of search engines. In addition to targeted limited searches, the AustLII catalog contains "embedded" or "stored" searches. These are sophisticated search queries that have been prepared by experts in particular subject areas designed to extract the best information from the databases. Some examples can be found at: beta.austlii.edu.au/links/World/Subject_Index/Intellectual_Property/ Stored_Searches/index.html. Embedded searches can significantly assist the user who might be unfamiliar with more sophisticated searching features (e.g.: how to construct good Boolean searches), or the user who does not know about or forgets important synonyms for the topic being searched (e.g.: a search for "confidential information" will not search for "breach of confidence"). AustLII's indexers locate legal Websites around the world and determine which sites should be indexed by the web spider. AustLII has approximately 4,000 law sites indexed in the catalog at present. The various sites are divided into "libraries." There is a library for every country in the world (on their World Countries page). There is a legislation library with legislation from more than 60 countries accessible directly from the World Legislation page. Each link goes directly to the "Legislation" sub-node of that country's page. Similar structures exist for the other libraries. Other libraries include Law Reform, Law Journals, International Agreements, Courts and Case Law, Indigenous Law, Industrial Law, and Privacy Law. There are individual "law indexes" to find more detailed information about the laws in any particular country. The search options are quite sophisticated. A search from the "World" page will search all of the indexed pages. A search from the "World Law Reform" page will search all Websites listed under Law Reform, and any pages which are sub-categories or cross-references from the Law Reform page. Alternatively, no matter where a person is in the catalog, it is possible to select "all world law" to search everything that is indexed. In addition, there is a "search this site" feature which permits the user, who has found a list of sites that respond to an initial query, to then search in-depth any one of the sites found. This function allows three important benefits: (1) searching of Websites that do not have search engines of their own, (2) searching using the familiar AustLII search engine (SINO) rather than the perhaps unfamiliar search engines at different Websites, and (3) using the search features offered by AustLII's search engine that might not be available with other search engines, even where a site is using a search engine that is familiar to the user. In addition, all pages in World Law have a translate button that takes the user to Alta Vista's Systran page, which provides instant but crude translations of the information on the screen in a variety of languages. (See babelfish.altavista.digital.com.)
A Call for International Assistance
The idea of a free, non-commercial portal to global legal
information is one that deserves everyone's support. However, in order to
make such a portal a truly effective and efficient search tool, the
collaboration of partners from around the world, with skills in various
languages and subject areas, is essential. Technical tools are not enough
to ensure high quality Internet searching. Greenleaf explains in his
paper:
If this kind of collaboration between international
subject area experts can be created, then there will truly be a great
potential for maximizing the benefits of putting law on the
Internet. The Importance of Law on the Internet for Developing
Countries AustLII is also concerned about helping developing
countries take advantage of Internet technology. Greenleaf wrote in his
paper:
Beyond AustLII: Other Australian Innovations in Access
to the Law It is not just AustLII that is making Australia a world
leader in providing access to legal information. Here are highlights from
some of the other iniatives that are happening in Australia's efforts to
provide their citizens with better access to their laws. "Point in Time" Legislative
Searching and a Full Tax Database The Tasmanian government uses software called
"EnAct" which is a legislative drafting, management, and
delivery system (go to: www.thelaw.tas.gov.au). One of its
main features is that it allows users to search and browse the
consolidated database as it existed at any time since February 1, 1997.
These consolidations are generated automatically, without human
intervention after the legislation is drafted (except to amend the draft
of course). This dramatically reduces the cost of delivering this level of
service. The importance of "point in time" searching should not
be underestimated, both for the application of the law in specific
lawsuits and also as an essential tool for archiving electronic copies of
the laws. Another feature of EnAct is the method of creating
amendment legislation. Rather than trying to construct the wording of the
new consolidation and the amendment that achieves it simultaneously (the
way drafters drafted in the past), EnAct splits this into two phases. In
the first phase, drafters mark changes on a consolidation using
strike-through and underline (they can view the new consolidation without
these markings with the simple click of a button as well). When they are
satisfied with the new consolidation, they save the set of
changes. These changes can be used in a number of different
ways. The first, and most important, is that they can be
automatically turned into amendment legislation. This saves a great deal
of work for drafters and provides for more consistent wording for similar
amendment operations. Drafters can modify the generated wording in a
number of ways, by grouping provisions in different ways, and even
explicitly overriding the generated wording for each change. This second phase of amendment drafting ensures that the
drafters concentrate only on the wording describing changes once they have
determined what those changes should be. In many cases they simply accept
the system defaults, but they have complete control to override those
defaults when necessary. The changes can also be applied to different
consolidations to check whether the bill needs to be commenced in a
particular time range, or to allow it to be modified to take account of
different commencement times. Once enacted, the changes can be automatically applied to
the "point-in-time" repository to update that
repository. This software was developed by the Multimedia Database
Systems (MDS) Group at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
(RMIT). The MDS Group also supports the Australian Taxation Office
Website, which has an extensive legal database that includes the
legislation, case summaries, case judgments, tax office rulings, and so on
(go to: www.ato.gov.au). The Canadian
Government does not yet publish an electronic copy of its own Income
Tax Act, let alone offer case summaries and judgments interpreting the
Income Tax Act. Compared to EnAct in Tasmania, SCALEplus (go to: scaleplus.law.gov.au) offers a
similar but cruder functionality. (SCALEplus is the legal information
retrieval system owned by the Australian Attorney General's Department.
SCALEplus has approximately 45 separate databases of legislative,
regulatory, Parliamentary, judicial, and tribunal information. Compare
this to Canada where Parliamentary information is on one Website, federal
legislation on another, the Supreme Court and Federal Court decisions on
another, and tribunal decisions on various other sites.) As new
consolidations of legislation are added, the "old" copy is
archived in historical databases on SCALEplus, so a user can review the
holdings and then select a piece of legislation at a particular
time. Structured Court Decisions Judicial decisions in New South Wales are now published
using a template that captures certain elements that appear in all court
decisions (names of parties, judge, dates, etc.) onto a template so that
some of the information can be stored in fields and searched by fields.
This greatly enhances the ability to search and find relevant court
decisions. The search options that are available include searching by
party name, judge, legislation cited, or key words. Users can specify the
databases they want to search, can specify whether they want to search
civil and criminal together, just criminal or just civil cases, and can
instruct the search engine to return hits by order of (a) relevance; (b)
most recent cases first; or (c) oldest cases first. Users can also limit
the searches to a particular year and to finding exact matches of the key
words. See www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/search/
judgsearch2.nsf/fieldsearch.
The key to making these searches possible is the template that is used
when the judgments are first written. Canadian courts do not use templates
for their decisions. For another example of "field" or
"zone" searches, see the options offered by SCALEplus (which has
Verity Inc.'s SEARCH'97 sitting behind it). SCALEplus has
"zoned" its documents since its inception in 1976, so, for
example, searches of caselaw can be targeted at catchwords or headnotes to
achieve more accurate and useful search results. See the wide variety of
search options at the Advanced Search screen (scaleplus.law.gov.au/cgi-bin/qs.pl)
to see how it works. Mark Burdack, Manager of Electronic Services at the New
South Wales Attorney General's Department, explained in his paper to the
conference why the templates and fields are important. He noted that it is
likely that within 10 years there will be approximately 30,000 decisions
from various New South Wales Courts.
The need for standards for court decisions is becoming
widely accepted, in Australia and in Canada. For example, in Canada, we
now have standards for applying paragraph numbering to court decisions (to
avoid having to cite different page numbers, a practice that is not
"medium-neutral"--page numbers assume a paper-based medium) and
standards for citing court decisions that do not rely on citations to law
report series published on paper. (See the Neutral Citation for Case Law
developed by the Canadian Citation Committee: www.droit.umontreal.ca/citation/en.) The next step for standards for court decisions, I would
suggest, would be to follow the lead set by the New South Wales courts and
have courts adopt templates that captures key information into fields.
However, the challenge is to select the best assortment of fields. Court,
party names, judge, and date are all obvious fields. Note that the Supreme
Court of Canada already writes its judgments in a format that is
essentially a template: facts (background); relevant legislative
provisions; judgments below; issues; analysis; conclusion and
disposition. In my view, to get the maximum benefit out of field
searching, it would be invaluable if the template ensured that separate
fields existed to clearly state:
Old Case Law on the Internet An important issue with respect to law via the Internet is
paying attention to older court decisions. In Australia, the High Court
decisions are available to 1947, compared to Canada's Supreme Court
decisions, which are available only to 1989 (at time of writing) and all
Charter of Rights and Freedoms decisions (the Charter was
adopted in 1982). Australia is not simply focused on the law of its current
courts, it is also working hard to bring historical cases to the Internet.
Law Professor Bruce Kercher of Macquarie University is heading a project
to find and report on cases decided before 1900 in New South Wales. There
are very few formal law reports from those years. Professor Kercher is
relying primarily on various newspaper accounts, and then preparing
reports of those cases based on those sources. More than 600 cases have
been reported due to this project since then. The cases are at www.law.mq.edu.au/scnsw and at
AustLII at www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/nswsc/pre1900.
This work started with a large grant provided by the Australian Research
Council in 1986 and has being going on continuously since then. Professor
Kercher has applied for a new grant to carry this work on for another 15
years, "but even if we do that, we will still be about a decade short
of 1863 when something like adequate law reporting began in New South
Wales. We will not have touched the period before 1824, when the social
and political questions were just as compelling even if the legal
authority was much weaker. ... In my most ambitious fantasies, I
imagine similar projects in other jurisdictions" (including
Canada). "Notify me when," "Synonyms"
Searching, and Review of Unsuccessful Searches One of the most popular features of SCALEplus (go to: scaleplus.law.gov.au) and of
AusInfo (go to: www.ausinfo.gov.au) is the
"notify me when" system. (AusInfo is the agency that provides
access to Commonwealth information, including legal information). Recall
from above that SCALEplus has approximately 45 separate databases of
legislative, regulatory, Parliamentary, judicial, and tribunal
information. In the "notify me when" system, users can send
email to the Website and ask to be notified when new data that responds
to the user's search query has been added. Each day, new data is added to
the system, and the software runs the subscriber's search query against
the new data. When a match is found, the subscriber is notified by email.
This process is entirely automated. In addition, both AusInfo and
SCALEplus use a simple feedback mechanism that is unique (so far as I am
aware). Whenever someone enters a search for an item at either site but
the search engine says there are no documents that respond to the query,
the people who run these systems automatically get an email telling them
about these failed searches. They study these searches to see if they can
identify subjects that should be more clearly identified on the Web page
(for example, in subject-matter listings). They also look to see if adding
synonyms to key words on the site would produce better results. At
AustLII, AusInfo and SCALEplus, the people who run the systems create
these value-added searches by adding synonyms to frequently requested
search terms so that the query will search not only the requested key
word, but also its synonyms. "Expert" Systems Softlaw is an Australian software company that has
developed a number of expert systems currently being used by Australian
government agencies (expert systems are also sometimes called
"rule-bases"). Essentially, the software prompts users to answer
various questions. The answer given to one question determines what the
next question will be, and so on, until the software makes a determination
of whether the person is eligible for a benefit or not. Of course, it is
not the software that makes the determination, it is the law, whose
provisions are translated by humans into a decision tree, and then the
decision tree is turned into software. As explained by Surend Dayal, one
of the principals of Softlaw, in his paper to the AustLII conference:
The Australian Department of Veterans' Affairs (DVA) has
been at the forefront of using "expert" systems to determine and
calculate veterans' benefits and to deliver services, and the Military
Compensation and Rehabilitation Service has also been an early user of
expert systems. These Departments first deployed expert systems to improve
the quality of internal decision-making, and then realised that they could
provide very high quality service to the public by providing access to
these systems. The first examples of publicly available systems should
appear in the next few weeks, but more are expected to follow quickly. The
Department of Veterans' Affairs, in particular, is planning several
additional systems of this type, covering the most common and troublesome
aspects of their administration of disability pensions. The Compensation Claims Processing System (CCPS) has been
used by the Department of Veterans' Affairs since 1994. It has been
extremely successful, leading to very large productivity increases and
improvements in the quality of decision making. CCPS is based on the
Veterans' Entitlements Act, and incorporates vast numbers of rules
from a piece of delegated legislation under that Act, the Statements of
Principle. The very detailed policy rules that lie behind the system are
available over the Web at the DVA site: www.dva.gov.au. (This is also the site
from which several examples of expert systems should be available in the
near future.) The Department of Veterans' Affairs has built on the
success of CCPS, developing expert systems in a number of additional
areas:
Each of these modules is based on the Veterans'
Entitlements Act 1986, and the last also covers the overlap between
that Act and the Military Compensation Act 1994. While these systems are not publicly available today, they
are used by selected staff in ex-service organisations (servicemen's clubs
and so on), and have been for some time. DVA is very keen on making the
systems available for these primary contact points, which have staff to
assist veterans in the preparation of claims. SoftLaw has also built substantial systems for the
Department of Defence (Military Compensation and Rehabilitation Service)
and Comcare (which looks after workers' compensation for most Commonwealth
employees). Both of these agencies administers workers' compensation
schemes that are based on complicated legislation. SoftLaw has built three separate modules for Defence,
covering the three most complex questions in workers' compensation law:
determination of liability to pay compensation for a particular injury,
calculation of any weekly payments for loss of income, and calculation of
lump sum payments for permanent impairment. In each case, the systems must
cover multiple pieces of legislation, multiple versions of that
legislation, and very detailed administrative policy. The major pieces of legislation covered are the Safety,
Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1988, the 1971 and 1930
forerunners of that Act (completely different legislative schemes), and
the Military Compensation Act, 1994. It is imperative that the
system covers all versions of all these pieces of legislation, as the
legislation that applies is often that in force at the time of the injury,
which can be years or decades old. The software deals with policies relating to
superannuation entitlements under various superannuation schemes, as well
as internal Departmental policy on workers' compensation issues. These
systems are a good example of expert systems simplifying and making
reliable an extremely complex web of various pieces of legislation,
various versions applying at different times, transitional provisions, and
policy. For Comcare, SoftLaw built a system dealing with
determination of liability to pay compensation, incorporating a vast
amount of very detailed policy on particular medical conditions. This is
based on the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1988, and
detailed administrative rules. The MCRS and Comcare systems have been in place and used
for one to two years. The systems have been a major success in both
Defence and Comcare, leading to efficiency improvements and also to very
large, audited improvements in the quality and consistency of decisions.
The Military Compensation and Rehabilitation Service (Defence) is working
towards provision of self-service facilities for clients to use this type
of system, so that people can work out their own entitlements. For a demonstration of a different expert system, see the
Gateways to Justice Project at the Fund for the City of New York www.fcny.org/gateways/, which has
demonstrations of potentially important expert systems that would give
advice to the public for the following topics:
(There is another project on the site that explains to
people what their options are when they face eviction from their
apartments, and that helps them fill out the needed court forms if they
plan to fight the eviction.) Expert systems take the concept of "access to the
law" beyond access to the raw legal text by translating the text into
a series of questions that make it possible for any member of the public
to have direct access to the services, programs, or benefits that the law
was designed to provide. In my view, this is the best way to provide the
public with genuine access to the law, although it will always be
critically important to have access to the raw legal texts and court
decisions that interpret them, and to the rules and coding that underlie
the expert systems that are making decisions about a person's
eligibility. Public Legal Information, Plain Language and the Law,
Free Answers to Public Questions About the Law There is an innovative Australian site dedicated to
providing legal information in plain language www.law4u.com.au. Law4u is a commercial
site and operates on a business model where information to the public is
provided free of charge, and legal services (e.g. lawyers, conveyancing
companies, trustee companies, mediation services, do-it-yourself
companies, etc.) pay to be listed on the site. Could this be a new and
improved model for public legal information? AustLII itself has a Community Legal Information page that
provides access to a wide variety of information written in plain language
about the law, information that is contributed from various sources, such
as the Legal Information Access Centre www.slnsw.gov.au/liac/, a joint
initiative of the Law Foundation of New South Wales and the New South
Wales State Library. The AustLII Community Legal Education pages were
started with a grant from the New South Wales Community Legal Centre's
Secretariat. (It should be mentioned that Canada has done reasonably well
in making community legal information available on the Internet through
such projects as the Access to Justice Network www.acjnet.org and the School Net Law
Room www.uottawa.ca/hrrec/lawroom/lawroom.html.) Another innovative site is "Lawstuff," which is
designed to give legal information to young persons: www.lawstuff.org.au. An important
way to provide legal information is for government agencies to hire people
to answer questions from the public. (For example, the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency www.epa.gov has two
dozen librarians answering as many as 1,500 email questions each month.)
At Lawstuff, people are invited to submit their legal questions. The
notice reads: "The solicitors will try to reply to your message
within 10 days, although a reply within that time is not guaranteed.
Unfortunately, due to limited resources, assistance cannot be provided for
school projects or research." The users can choose whether the reply
will be by email, postal mail, telephone call or through a trusted person.
The LawMail answers are provided by two solicitors employed at the
National Children's and Youth Law Centre and by law graduate volunteers.
The service can provide only basic advice, information, and referrals. The
LawMail service was started in October 1988 and, to July 1999, there have
been approximately 800 enquiries received. See also the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre (www.fl.asn.au/iarc/) which provides
free advice on immigration questions. The Centre is funded by the State
and Federal governments through the Community Legal Centre Funding
Program, administered by the Legal Aid Commission of NSW. IARC currently
receives some funding from the Department of Immigration and Multicultural
Affairs through the Immigration Advice and Application Assistance Scheme
(IAAAS). The Centre is also self-funded to some extent through its
training and publication activities. The Centre also accepts donations,
which are tax deductible. The Centre's Website is supported by funding
from the Law Foundation of New South Wales. Much of the information in this section of the paper was
taken from the paper presented to the AustLII conference by Sue Scott,
Director, Online Legal Access Project, Law Foundation of NSW. Her paper is
at www.lawfoundation.net.au/olap/
austlii.html.
(See also the Best practice guidelines for legal Websites on the web at www.lawfoundation.net.au/lisc/recommend/
bpguide.html
and for more information about what the Law Foundation's Online Legal
Access Project is doing, see www.lawfoundation.net.au/olap.) Of course, the cause of plain language is also advanced
when drafting organizations commit to using plain English style(s). Both
the Commonwealth Office of Parliamentary Counsel (which drafts Acts) and
the Office of Legislative Drafting (subordinate legislation) do
so. The First Law Reform Study of Technology
and the Law The Law Reform Committee of the Australian state of
Victoria released its report on Technology and the Law at the end of May,
1999. It stated in a press release: "The Inquiry is the first of its
kind in the world and has examined world's best practices in a range of
disciplines to formulate innovative solutions for the Victorian legal
system." Among the recommendations were that the state government
should provide ongoing funding support to AustLII as the primary resource
for publishing Victorian legal information, that the Department of Justice
should be mandated to provide the best possible IT systems for justice,
including the courts, and especially to provide for electronic filing of
documents. The report also contained recommendations on artificial
intelligence and the law, public access to legal information and advice
and the need for a clearinghouse on technology and the law to keep abreast
of best practice solutions around the world that would be applicable to
the Australian justice system. The report and other information on the
inquiry can be found at www.lawreform.org.au/tech. * * * * *
There were many other demonstrations and papers presented
at the AustLII conference, but the above represent what I consider to be
the best examples of technologies and approaches that are (1) available to
the public, (2) free, (3) currently in use in Australia, and (4) not
available here in Canada. The question is, why do Canadians have less
access to their laws than Australians, and what should the Department of
Justice (and other agencies) do about improving public access to the law
for Canadians? What should these agencies do about contributing to the
development of a free portal to global legal information, about
contributing French content to the world law index, and about assisting
developing countries in the Commonwealth, Francophonie and Latin America
benefit from putting their laws on the Internet? Can we expect governments to embrace expert systems to
make statutes and administrative procedures more consistent and directly
available to the public? Can we expect governments to produce legislation
that can be searched as it exists at any point in time? Can we expect
courts to produce their decisions in a format that uses "fields"
or "zones" to improve searching? Can we expect to see older case
law added to these databases? Can we expect to see a Canadian Legal
Information Institute that ensures that all of Canada's legislation, court
decisions, law reform reports, and other publicly produced legal
information can be searched at one time? Who is willing to take the
leadership role in developing this institute? Notes [1] May be cited as/On peut citer comme suit: Tom McMahon. "Access to the Law in the Land of
Oz." Government Information in Canada/Information
gouvernementale au Canada No. 19
(October 1999).
[http://www.usask.ca/library/gic/19/mcmahon.html] On July 22 and 23, 1999, the Australasian Legal
Information Institute held its second "Law via the Internet
Conference" in Sydney, Australia. Tom McMahon, Past President of the
Canadian Society for the Advancement of Legal Technology was invited to
present a paper. Justice Canada's Access to the Law Committee, of which
McMahon is a member, sent him to the conference. This is McMahon's
report on the Conference. The paper that McMahon presented at the Conference was "Improving
Access to the Law in Canada With Digital Media" Government Information in
Canada/Information gouvernementale au Canada No. 16 (March 1999)
[http://www.usask.ca/library/gic/16/mcmahon.html].
The program for the "Law via the Internet Conference" is
available at:
http://www.austlii.edu.au/austlii/conference/programme.html.
McMahon is also author of "Access to Government Information: A New
Instrument for Public Accountability" Government Information in
Canada/Information gouvernementale au Canada 3, no. 1 (1996).
[http://www.usask.ca/library/gic/v3n1/mcmahon/mcmahon.html]
Back to text. [2] Tom McMahon The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and are not
to be attributed to his employer.
|