1. Anita Jowitt Director PacLII Contact jowitt_a@vanuatu.usp.ac.fj
BRIDGING THE GAPS BETWEEN PUBLISHING LAW, ACADEMIC RESEARCH AND COMMUNITY LEGAL LITERACY: THE POTENTIAL PLACE OF PACLII
Anita Jowitt
Director PacLII
Contact

2. PacLII’s Core Business
Promoting access to justice via free access to law
Publishing primary legal material
Editorial team is sent or collects material, formats material, uploads material, checks material

3. Underlying principles
Free access to the law is an important aspect of access to justice and supports the rule of law
Free access to the law should be a core responsibility of governments
As part of sovereignty independent countries should take as much control as they can/want to in ensuring free access to the law

4. Taking more control: stages
Supply content to PacLII and have PacLII do everything
Supply content to PacLII, have PacLII format and upload, and then content producers check the uploaded content
Format documents in the PacLII templates, then have PacLII staff upload and check the uploaded content
Format documents in the PacLII templates, then have PacLII staff upload, then content producers check the uploaded content
Format document in the PacLII templates, and upload material via remote upload, then PacLII staff check the uploads
Format document in the PacLII templates, upload material via remote upload, check the uploads, with PacLII as back-up if help is needed

5. Publishing questions for PacLII & Content Generators
Are there more things that countries can do for themselves, with PacLII as central infrastructure & helpdesk provider?
Preparing documents for upload
Uploading documents
Checking uploaded documents
Would countries prefer to pay PacLII to do everything for them?
Answer may vary by jurisdiction
Which is more cost & resource efficient?

6. Is publishing laws enough?
Law Via The Internet Conference 2016
Conference of Global Free Access to Law Movement
Access to “raw data” is not the same as “meaningful access”
Too much material, even for lawyers
Cf traditional law reporting: head notes; digests
Cf traditional legislation publishing: consolidations; annotations
For non-lawyers it is hard to understand the “raw data”
Legal literacy material

7. CanLII Connects: Blog for summaries & commentaries
Approved community of users (lawyers)
No particular control over what cases get commented on/who comments
Some editorial oversight
Main oversight is that other users can flag inappropriate material
Linked to the CanLII case/legislation

9. CanLII content

10. CanLII Connects & PacLII
Possible way of:
Generating headnotes
Generating legislation summaries
Publishing user generated unofficial consolidations …

11. AustLII Communities: Wiki for building content
Approved community of users
Specific project based (ie NT Law Handbook)
More coordination – sections defined and assigned
Some ongoing commitment for updating sections
Can be exported for printing

13. AustLII Communities & PacLII
Possible way of:
Generating SoL Handbooks
Transferring SoL course material into public domain legal literacy material
Creating collaborative textbooks
Creating collaborative legal literacy material…

14. HKLII CLIC: Virtual community legal centres
Website with static information
More traditional project team
Possible to build in place for public to ask questions if there are people as “service back-up”

16. HKLII & PacLII Possible way of Building virtual community legal centre
Collating & publishing existing legal literacy material…

17. What else could be done?
User communities’ imagination & commitment is the limit
PacLII can help to develop, host and coordinate ideas
Committed user communities need to help by producing the content
Take a pilot project approach
Try things and see; some might not work & that is ok

18. Example pilot: PCN
Pacific Constitutions Research Network hosted on PacLII
A community to increase academic research & outputs on Pacific constitutions
Built website
User interface via facebook
A possible community to
Create a digest of constitutional cases?
Create briefs for policy makers?
Create legal literacy material?

19. Visualisations? http://ravellaw.com/

20. Other accessibility issues?
Visually impaired users?
Html overlaid pdf being developed by CanLII
Poor internet connections?
SaFLII Pocket:
SaFLII saved to datastick
Access from datastick exactly like accessing website
Whenever person is in an area with good internet the content is updated
Converting scanned documents to html?

21. Next steps?
If you are not on PacLII Net newsletter & would like to be leave on sign-up sheet at back
Should there be a Vanuatu PacLII users group established to develop initiatives?
Are there particular projects people think
PacLII should do?