20 Years of the Public Internet: Assessing Online Developments in Good Law

& Better Regulation

LVI2013 Free Access to Law in a Changing World: 26 September 2013

Christopher T. MarsdenProfessor of Media Law, University of Sussex

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/law/people/peoplelists/person/319200

20 Years of the WWW• NCSA Mozilla browser launched 28

Sept1993o Version 1.0 released on November 11, 1993, beta v0.6 on 28

September: ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Windows/Archive/MosaicHistory.html

• Internet has grown to reach 5 billion citizenso Many restricted by o low bandwidth, o high charges and o mobile rip-offs

• Even now, statute and case law – and even property records – are not fully online,

• but a great deal has been achieved.

Developing big online legal data: BOLD

• Free Access to Law movement (FALM)o online case law via BAILII in the UKo Legal Information Institutes (AustLII, Cornell etc.)

• #GoodLaw online statuteso expanded rapidly o stage of attempts at crowdsourcing ideas for #goodlaw

• Online legal education and research o BILETA since 1985o Electronic Law Journals project at Warwick, o International Journal of Communications Law and Policy

in 1998 with Noveck and others, o publishing books via Creative Commons: Marsden 2010

4 Check against delivery participants only

Book launched February 2010

100,000 downloads first 2 months

Greenleaf et al (2011, 2012)

identify six historic attempts to

achieve FALM 1. Example set by the LII (Cornell) and LexuM in early 90s 2. AustLII’s 1995 formulation: obligations of official

publishers3. 2002 Declaration on Free Access to Law 4. ‘Guiding Principles’ for States formulated by 2008

expert meeting convened by Hague Conference on Private International Law

5. ‘Law.Gov principles’ developed by Public Resources.org in 2010; and

6. draft Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act recommended in 2011 by US National Conference of Commissioners of Uniform State Laws

Is Ministry of Justice ready for revolution?

• #Goodlaw – radical crowd-sourced legislative approach

• Open Data Institute – Sir Nigel Shadbolto Better than my ‘Data Mashing Workshop’ work!

• BAILII and Supreme Court reforms• Society for Computers and Law trying hard

o Computers and Law is entirely open – it can be done

• Maybe…• But what we really need is pan-European

approach• DG Justice ready?

Punctuated equilibrium models

Why can’t we build a smartphone app for

lawyers?• Already done using open case law, statute,

articles• Where? Austria• Why not here? Why not everywhere?

OR

Institution Name

UVAmsterdam Prof. Radboud G.F. Winkels

Prof. Mireille van EechoudSussex Prof. Chris MarsdenLSE Dr. Paolo Dini

Dr. Shenja van der GraafDr. Antonella Passani

ALP Giulio Marcon

Gianluigi AlbericiSUAS Prof. Thomas Heistracher

DI (FH) Thomas Lampoltshammer

BYW Dr. Clemens Wass, MBL, MBA

Mapping Open LawMapping of stakeholders, • processes in legal information production and consumption

(at various levels of regulatory instruments), • and flows of content, rights, and value. Production of a series of country case studies,

o examining legal publishing systems, o social use of legal publishing (audience and authorship models)

and o technology developments towards the open access model

• (at micro-legal and macro-societal levels).

Case study 1: European institutions' provision of free access to European Union law,

o cases, legislation, regulatory instruments and academic-expert analysis.

Analysis of social, legal and market

requirements• specifying the main stakeholders and working practices

o consumption, creation, use and exploitation of legal data.

• mapping of stakeholders’ strategies and operations, • key use cases for re-use and consumption of legal

data. • Maps data flows resulting from legal/social/market

rules • identifies potential flows of value in the same context. • E.g. transformation of information from private to

public • link between open and closed business models.

Country case studies• Review of the existing information systems and legal

databases already in use o produce a specification of the requirements of the system

• Case studies are the UK, Austria and the Netherlands. • The findings will be informed by key informant

interviews and form a working assumption,o supported by the literature review, and the insights of workshops.

• The breadth of stakeholders interviewed in each case will be broad and include experts from:

• academia, Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPB), trading funds, private entrepreneurs, corporations, standards bodies, NGOs and government policy officials with both domestic and international responsibilities.

Comparative political economy analysis of stakeholders, legal content,

and services • Environment (institutions, policies and legal

community) in which open access models flourish?

• publication of draft case studies and final report • dissemination and feedback mechanisms

o on- (open access websites, promotion via social media and comment promotion via Wiki

o offline (via workshops and conferences)

• create expert panel: o constructive critique for future iterations of the reports

• final synthesis report draws out existing barriers, best practices and institutional path dependence.

OpenLaws.eu - foster access to justice

1. Expanding the concept of open innovation to the legal field.2. Introducing the concept of mass-customization to the legal field.3. Proposing a comprehensive European “Big Open Legal Data” (BOLD) Vision 2020 for incremental implementation, built on top of existing EU and national systems and content (e.g. EUR-Lex, e-Justice System, e-Codex).

Developing initial BOLD ICT Platform

Launch of:a. dedicated legal EU social networks.b. a hub for open access legal journals. Promote open data, open access publications, and open standards • (e.g. ELI, ECLI) in the legal field.Contribute research for the Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group (OISPG).