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Nice, but I have to ask how does it compare with https://austlii.edu.au/ https://austlii.edu.au/, especially for completeness? The Australasian Legal Informati
by emmelaich 3y ago
Nice, but I have to ask how does it compare with https://austlii.edu.au/ https://austlii.edu.au/, especially for completeness?
The Australasian Legal Information Institute is a great resource and yet seems strangely unknown (to the wider public at least.)
Trivia, the only reason I found out about it was when I did some work for an Aus govt agency and found out that they shared their web site with austlii! This was back in the early 2000s.
- ubutler 3y agoSo AustLII and Jade are what I was referring to when I say "While there were certainly a few free-to-access legal databases, none were truly open ...". They are free but not open in the sense of being licensed under an open source licence and being free to download in a raw format. Whereas everything in my corpus except decisions from the Federal Court of Australia is licensed under CC BY 4.0. And even decisions from the FCA are under a licence that permits both non-commerical and commerical usage. In terms of completeness, however, AustLII and Jade win out. They seem to have almost everything if not everything. Their data is also much richer than mine. I must give props to AustLII for how they're able to hyperlink terms defined within legislation to their definition. I think they're an invaluable resource for members of the public. The audience of my database was more so those who want to play around with raw legal data and want to feel secure that they are not breaching any laws in the process. The fact that it is stored in plain text is also beneficial for anyone trying to build ML models that only accept raw text.