FreeLegalWeb
Don’t dream it … be it
Ignorance of the law
Posted by Nick Holmes on November 15, 2008
I referred earlier to Lord Justice Toulson’s comments in R v Chambers [2008] EWCA Crim 2467 which I felt highlighted the need for FreeLegalWeb. His comments in full:
24. … It is a maxim that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but it is profoundly unsatisfactory if the law itself is not practically accessible. To a worryingly large extent, statutory law is not practically accessible today, even to the courts whose constitutional duty it is to interpret and enforce it. There are four principal reasons.
25. First, the majority of legislation is secondary legislation.
26. Secondly, the volume of legislation has increased very greatly over the last 40 years …
27. Thirdly, on many subjects the legislation cannot be found in a single place, but in a patchwork of primary and secondary legislation.
28. Fourthly, there is no comprehensive statute law database with hyperlinks which would enable an intelligent person, by using a search engine, to find out all the legislation on a particular topic. This means that the courts are in many cases unable to discover what the law is, or was at the date with which the court is concerned, and are entirely dependent on the parties for being able to inform them what were the relevant statutory provisions which the court has to apply. This lamentable state of affairs has been raised by responsible bodies on many occasions, including the House of Lords Committee on the Merits of Secondary Legislation. In its Report on Post-Legislative Scrutiny BAILII: [2006] EWLC 302, under the heading “Access to legislation and consolidation”, the Law Commission stated:
“4.11. One theme related to delegated legislation, on which a number of consultees commented, was access to legislation. The joint response of the Children’s Legal Centre and National Children’s Bureau addressed the problem that despite their familiarity with the broader legal framework, they still found access to be a real problem:
‘The lack of access to statutes with appropriate links to the regulations and guidance which are currently in force must be a cause of serious inconvenience to anyone who does not have access to specialist services. We are concerned when information so fundamental to a democracy is difficult to identify, obtain and understand, and is frequently out of date. It is frequently the case that secondary legislation and guidance are overlooked in the process of scrutiny, although their impact on the day-to-day operation of the law is as significant as the primary statute.’
4.12. The joint response stated that experience of practice in childcare suggests that many injustices are the result not of failure to comply with the statute, but of failure to know about, understand or access secondary legislation.”
29. The problem is not confined to secondary legislation relating to childcare. It affects many other areas of law of great impact on the ordinary citizen, such as social security benefits.
30. The Law Commission concluded this section of its report as follows:
“4.15. It is also important that all related statutory provisions, whether primary or secondary, should be capable of being readily accessed together. We are aware of the work being undertaken on the Statute Law Database and recognise that public access to that resource is a step in the right direction. We recommend that steps should be taken to ensure that the related provisions of primary and secondary legislation should be capable of being accessed in a coherent fashion by a straightforward and freely available electronic search.”
31. The Government’s response to that recommendation was presented to Parliament in March 2008, CM 7320. It stated as follows:
“35. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO) and the Statutory Publications Office (SPO), which produces the Statute Law Database, are to work together to create a single, powerful and free to access online legislation service. The launch of the SLD has been a milestone in government’s online legislation publishing.
36. Over the last two years HMSO, via the OPSI website (www.opsi.gov.uk) has embarked on wide ranging improvements to how legislation is published online, taking account of key usability features for layout and navigation. This work is being undertaken as part of ‘The Transforming Legislation Publishing Programme’. The aim has been to present legislation in the most accessible and usable way [my emphasis], whilst maintaining the traditional strengths of immediacy and accuracy. One of the benefits is that it affords the opportunity to provide links to related information. Initially these links will be to the Explanatory Note for Acts or the Explanatory Memorandum for Statutory Instruments. Alongside this is also published an ATOM feed for the piece of legislation. This provides visitors with an easy way to keep up to date with subsequent additions to the website, like the addition of Explanatory Notes for an Act, and also the enacting or making of other related legislation such as Commencement Orders or, longer term, amending legislation. In future HMSO will be adding explicit links to Commencement Orders, and where legislation implements an EU Directive, a link also to that Directive.
37. HMSO/OPSI and SPO will continue to work together and with government’s online legislation visitors, to improve the service and ensure that UK legislation is available in a high quality and straight forward terms, with a freely available and powerful search.”
32. The aim is laudable, indeed imperative, but there is a long way to go and meanwhile the volume of legislation advances apace. It is a serious state of affairs when the relevant legislation is not accessible, the Government’s own public information website (OPSI) is incomplete and the prosecution in an excise case unintentionally misleads the court as to the relevant Regulations in force. Although the problem has in this case arisen in an excise context, it is part of a wider problem of substantial constitutional importance.
Now you may say this is a problem for Parliament to resolve via legislative reform. I’d go with that, but it won’t happen soon enough and wouldn’t have retrospective effect. Or you may say it is for Government to resolve by extending the SLD consolidation work to cover secondary legislation. I say, pigs might fly: it’s not on the cards and, if it were, would optimistically take another ten years, or - more likely - never be finished. So, in practical terms, we are left with OPSI improving access to the relevant as-enacted secondary legislation. OPSI is working hard to improve matters. But it doesn’t have all the answers, and it know this. The Power of Information agenda acknowledges that government shouldn’t try to be Big Brother, but provide better access to government information which will encourage innovative services to be developed which support the government’s own efforts. In respect of better access to the law, FreeLegalWeb has stepped forward and our award in the ShowUsABetterWay competition is recognition that - with support and encouragement - we can make a difference. There is no magic bullet that will solve the burgeoning secondary legislation problem, but we’ll be working with OPSI and the POI Task Force to improve matters substantially.
Posted in Data access | Tagged: Legislation | No Comments »
More accessible consultation papers
Posted by Nick Holmes on November 12, 2008
Props to Harry Metcalfe for bending Lord Norton’s ear:
In a recent post, I identified problems with ensuring that government consultations are accessible to interested members of the public. Consultation papers are sent to established groups on a Department’s mailing list but otherwise often just placed on the Department’s website as a means of reaching the public.
As a result of the post, I received some extremely helpful responses, not least from MJ Ray, Dave Briggs and Harry Metcalfe. I have since had a very useful meeting with Harry Metcalfe, who is responsible for the tellthemwhatyouthink.org website. I now have a much clearer idea of what Government should be undertaking in order to make its consultation papers more accessible to the public. I shall be tabling some parliamentary questions this week in order to pursue the issue.
… this blog has certainly proved its worth.
Posted in Data access | Tagged: consultations | No Comments »
FreeLegalWeb is ABetterWay
Posted by Nick Holmes on November 6, 2008
I have it from the horse’s mouth at the Cabinet Office that we have won something in the POI Task Force’s ShowUsABetterWay competition. Not sure yet what this means, but we can certainly count on Task Force support in some form to develop the idea to the next stage.
According to this morning’s Guardian Technology article, five ideas have won hard cash: Can I Recycle It?, UK Cycling, School Catchment Areas, Location of Postboxes and Loofinder - the overall winner to be announced on Saturday.
We’ve been selected as one of five other ideas to “improve/mock up”: naturally FreeLegalWeb is not as self-defining an idea as Loofinder or any of the other cash winners.
Four other ideas submitted are already “fully working”.
The 5 winners
Can I Recycle It?
UK Cycling
School Catchment Areas
Location of Postboxes in Rural Area
Loofinder
Another 5 to “improve/mock up”
Road Works API
Oldienet
Free Legal Web
Allotment Manager
Where Does My Money Go
And 4 “fully working” already
UK Schools Map | site
SchoolGuru | site
Where’s the Path | site
Wreck Map | site
Posted in Vision | Tagged: awards, press, ShowUsaBetterWay | 3 Comments »
A lamentable state of affairs
Posted by Nick Holmes on November 4, 2008
Marcel Berlins in The Guardian , 3 November:
Last week, an obscure case on a technical legal point exposed an alarming failure to meet the condition that the law must be accessible to all. Moreover, as an angry and worried appeal court judge, Lord Justice Toulson, made clear, the problem was not confined to the narrow area of law in that particular case. It raised a far wider issue. …
To put it bluntly, it was almost impossible to find out exactly what the law said. Lord Justice Toulson pointed out that most of our law today is not contained in acts of parliament but in secondary legislation, regulations and the like. On many subjects the law can’t be found in one place, but in a patchwork. “There is no comprehensive statute law database with hyperlinks which would enable an intelligent person, by using a search engine, to find out all the legislation on a particular topic.”
He went on: “It is profoundly unsatisfactory if the law itself is not practically accessible … even to the courts whose constitutional duty it is to interpret and enforce it.”
What particularly concerns Toulson is that this “lamentable state of affairs” affects many areas of law which have great impact on the ordinary citizen, including sensitive childcare issues and social security benefits. There is a laudable government project to create a single, free, online legislation service which would bring together all the bits and pieces of a particular law. The trouble is that progress has been slow, it’s costing a lot of money and in the meantime new legislation is proliferating at unprecedented speed.
Props to Lord Justice Toulson for highlighting the need for the FreeLegalWeb - “a single, free, online … service which would bring together all the bits and pieces of a particular law”.
[The case in question was R v Chambers [2008] EWCA Crim 2467]
Posted in Vision | Tagged: Legislation, SLD | 1 Comment »
Help Free Our Bills
Posted by Nick Holmes on November 4, 2008
Tom Steinberg and all the mySociety team are asking you nicely to write to your MP to help Free Our Bills:
Today we just want you to do one thing to help TheyWorkForYou’s campaign to get Parliament to publish bills in a better way, if you’d be so kind.
Please go to WriteToThem and ask your MP to sign Early Day Motion (EDM) 2141.
The more MPs that sign the more the house authorities will realise how this is an issue of wide public interest, and that there are thousands of people behind Free Our Bills.
Thanks very much, and do let us know if your MP replies with anything interesting!
All to the good of the FreeLegalWeb too of course. So I’ve written; you write too.
Posted in Data access | Tagged: Bills, FreeOurBills, Parliament | No Comments »
Google Group
Posted by Nick Holmes on October 20, 2008
I’ve set up a FreeLegalWeb Google Group for development discussion. This is a private group, so you need to be invited to join. Initially only BarCampers and those who wanted to attend but could not have been invited. You’re welcome to request an invitation if you genuinely want to contribute rather than just spectate.
The blog remains the platform for posting news and public discussion.
Posted in Blog admin, Organisation | Tagged: discussion | No Comments »
Who owns the law?
Posted by Nick Holmes on October 16, 2008
In Who Owns the Law? in the New York Times, Noam Cohen investigates why, though US laws and judicial opinions are public domain, a variety of organisations — from trade groups and legal publishers to the government itself — claim copyright in it by virtue of the “accoutrements” surrounding the public material. “So while the laws and court decisions themselves may be in the public domain, the same is not necessarily true for the organizational system that renders them intelligible or the supporting materials that put them into context.”
The position is similar here. Legislation and judgments are Crown copyright, though OPSI licences their use on a generous open basis via its Click-Use licence. But if a private publisher or the government itself adds some value, whether just presentational, that added value is the copyright of the secondary publisher.
We had that argument over the Statute Law Database where the government’s position was initially that its consolidation and annotation of the legislation was a value-added service. In the end - hurrah - it was nevertheless declared “open”. But don’t expect LexisNexis or Thomson or ICLR or TSO, or even BAILII, to follow suit with respect to their added value.
If the government publish the information in the most open way possible, no-one will have a stranglehold over the law. The government now embraces this argument … and here we are to make the most of it.
Posted in Data access | Tagged: copyright, PSI | No Comments »
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