Free Access to Asian law via the Asian Legal Information Institute (AsianLII)

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Free Access to Asian law via the Asian Legal
Information Institute (AsianLII)

• Graham GreenleafUNSW Faculty of Law
• Co-Director, AustLII AsianLII
  graham_at_austlii.edu.au
• December 2006

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Free Access to Law - a history of increasing
coordination

• 1994 Legal Information Institute (Cornell) - the
  LII name
• 1995 AustLII - first comprehensive national
  system 217 DBs
• 1999-01 AustLII software used to start BAILII,
  CanLII, PacLII and HKLII
• 2001 World Legal Information Institute
  (WorldLII) launched
• Free Access to Law Movement formed - Declaration
• 2002-04 Droit Francophone, SAFLII, CyLaw,
  JuriBurkina, NZLII join others expand coverage -
  now 675 databases
• 2005 CommonLII (droit Anglophone) covers 52
  countries
• 2006 Asian Legal Information Institute launched
  (December)
• Primarily English and French languages so far
  SINO search engine being developed to handle
  Asian languages

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Free access to laws of Asian countries

• Much is available but
• Scattered over dozens of sites
• Numerous formats and search facilities
• Asian Legal Information Institute (AsianLII)
• Funding support from AusAID, ARC, A-Gs
• Supported by LawAsia and APEC SELI
• Includes databases from HKLII and PacLII
• 101 databases from 19/27 countries
• Over 150K full text decisions 15K legislation
  items
• Australian launch 8 December 2006

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AsianLII - purposes

• Provide free and public access to key legal
  documents from all Asian countries
• Laws, cases, treaties, scholarship
• Support the rule of law through transparency
• Assist development of local technical capacity to
  provide free access to law
• AustLIIs incubate and migrate approach works
• Provision of AustLII search engine and other
  tools
• Facilitate comparative Asian legal research
• Time for an AsianLII demonstration

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Assistance needed from supporting organisations

• Assist AsianLII to obtain permissions to
  republish national cases, legislation etc
• Discuss building a national or regional LII that
  will become part of AsianLII
• Assist in building subject-specific Libraries on
  AsianLII
• Assist maintaining a countrys Catalog of links
• Let us republish your law school or association
  Journal in AsianLIIs Law Journals collection