The Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) is the international organization devoted to providing
free online access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...
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
Thomas R. "Tom" Bruce is an American academic and former software engineer who co-founded the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School with Peter Martin (Law Professor), Peter Martin in 1992.
Education
Bruce earned a Bachelor of Arts ...
and
Peter W. Martin at
Cornell Law School
Cornell Law School is the law school of Cornell University, a private university, private, Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York.
One of the five Ivy League law schools, Cornell Law School offers four degree programs (Juris Doctor, JD, Maste ...
.
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
*
Comparative law wiki A comparative law wiki is a wiki that allows users to create empirical cross-reference datasets for the analysis of the world's myriad legal systems.
Examples
Over the past decade, there have been several attempts to create a global legal wiki, t ...
*
Legal awareness
Legal awareness, sometimes called public legal education or legal literacy, is the empowerment
Empowerment is the degree of autonomy and self-determination in people and in communities. This enables them to represent their interests in a respons ...
*
Ravel Law
Ravel Law is a startup which offers free access to computer-assisted legal research. The firm has funded a major scanning project at the Harvard Law School library known as "Free the Law". The project aims to have the full collection of 40 million ...
*
Free Law Project
Free Law Project is a United States federal 501(c)(3) Oakland-based nonprofit that provides free access to primary legal materials, develops legal research tools, and supports academic research on legal corpora. Free Law Project has several init ...
*
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
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Free Access To Law Movement
Online law databases
Legal research
Case law databases