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Webwatch: AustLII launches two new services

Wed Dec 03 2008

AustLII has announced the launch of two new services, which it has developed during 2008:

>> Free access to the English Reports, 1220-1873; and >> LawCite, a free access international citator.

The English Reports

The English Reports� are located on the Commonwealth Legal Information Institute (CommonLII). The data has kindly been provided by Justis�as part of its cooperation with AustLII in an Australian Research Council Linkage grant.

The English Reports database contains 124,882 cases from 1220-1873. The full text of the Reports are searchable. Users are then provided with the original image of a case when it appears in the search results, sorted in likely order of relevance (date ranking may also be used). The cases are may also be browsed by year or alphabetically.

The English Reports are searchable either as a separate database or in combination with all of the other databases from common law jurisdictions available via CommonLII (in cooperation with other legal information institutes in the Free Access to Law Movement).

All reports have been given an additional citation of the style '[1869] EngR 69' in addition to their original ER and nominate reports citations.

The English Reports have not previously been available for free online access.

The LawCite citator

A�test version of�LawCite has been released for trial public use. Feedback is welcome. There are over two million cases for which LawCite holds citation records at present. This number is expected to increase very significantly as LawCite develops.

LawCite is constructed by purely automated means, by the extraction of citation information from the content of AsutLII and from other legal information institute data available through the cooperation of the Free Access to Law Movement. It therefore includes numerous citations of Australian cases by overseas courts.

LawCite also provides citation records for many cases decided by overseas courts. It is an international citator. LawCite data will be available to other LIIs to republish on their systems if they wish to.

Lawcite does not include editorial judgments of whether a case was distinguished, reversed, etc by subsequent cases. It concentrates on demonstrating the patterns of case citation, and also provides parallel citations for cases.

No free access citator has previously been available in Australia.

Both databases were developed as part of an Australian Research Council Linkage grant concerning improvements to online case law involving seven industry partners including four courts and tribunals and two legal publishers.

3 December 2008

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