The Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) is the international organization devoted to providing
free online access to legal information such as
case law
Case law, also used interchangeably with common law, is a law that is based on precedents, that is the judicial decisions from previous cases, rather than law based on constitutions, statutes, or regulations. Case law uses the detailed facts of ...
,
legislation
Legislation is the process or result of enrolling, enacting, or promulgating laws by a legislature, parliament, or analogous governing body. Before an item of legislation becomes law it may be known as a bill, and may be broadly referred ...
,
treaties
A treaty is a formal, legally binding written agreement between sovereign states and/or international organizations that is governed by international law. A treaty may also be known as an international agreement, protocol, covenant, convention ...
, law reform proposals and legal scholarship. The movement began in 1992 with the creation of the
Legal Information Institute
The Legal Information Institute (LII) is a non-profit public service of Cornell Law School that provides no-cost access to current American and international legal research sources online. Founded in 1992 by Peter Martin and Tom Bruce, LII ...
(LII) by
Thomas R. Bruce and
Peter W. Martin at
Cornell Law School.
Some later FALM projects incorporate ''Legal Information Institute'' or ''LII'' in their names, usually prefixed by a national or regional identifier.
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.
Declaration
In October 2002 the meeting of LIIs in Montreal at the 4th Law via Internet Conference, made the following declaration 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 and at the Paris meeting in 2004.
[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.]
See also
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Comparative law wiki
*
Legal awareness
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Ravel Law
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Free Law Project
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Notes
References
* Galindo, F 'Free Access to the Law in Latin America: Brasil, Argentina, Mexico and Uruguay as Examples' in Peruginelli and Ragona (Eds), 2009
* Greenleaf,
'Legal Information Institutes and the Free Access to Law Movement' GlobaLex website, February 2008 - This article includes brief histories of all FALM Members to 2008.
* Greenleaf
'Free access to legal information, LIIs, and the Free Access to Law Movement' Chapter in Danner, R and Winterton, J (eds.) IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management. Aldershot, Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2011 - This chapter updates information about some FALM members to 2011, but is not comprehensive.
* Peruginelli, G and Ragona, M ''Law via the Internet: Free Access, Quality of Information, Effectiveness of Rights'' (Proc. IX International Conference 'Law via the Internet'), European Press Academic Publishing, Florence, 2009
* Poulin, D (2004
''First Monday'' vol. 9, no 12, 6 December 2004
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Free Access To Law Movement
Online law databases
Legal research
Case law databases