INTRODUCTION
Legal researchers are driving the demand for readily accessible and authoritative, free legal information. Since legal information became digital, law librarians have been using both free and fee-based information resources and comparing the advantages and disadvantages of online and print resources. Law librarians' expertise is in evaluating legal information resources and knowing which are the most appropriate to answer the legal research questions before them. The need for reliable free legal information is heightened when researching the law of unfamiliar jurisdictions, particularly when commercial resources are not an option. Transactional or ‘per use’ fees or short term agreements if they are available, are often prohibitively expensive and annual subscriptions are not cost effective when there is no need for ongoing use of the information. Since print resources are not usually readily available, researchers must rely on the internet.
AUSTRALIA
English law was received into the penal colony of New South Wales at the time of the European colonisation of Australia. Today, Australia is a federal parliamentary democracy with a common law legal system based on that of English law. In contrast to New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, customary law is not officially recognised except in the Northern Territory.
Australia's Parliament is bicameral. The Constitution establishes the form of the federal government and its power to make laws on national issues such as copyright, marriage and divorce, ‘the influx of criminals’, taxation, defence, immigration, etc. Australia has six states and two territories, which have their own governments with power to make laws except in areas for which the Commonwealth has exclusive powers under the Constitution. When a state law is inconsistent with a Commonwealth law, the latter prevails.
The High Court of Australia is at the apex of the Australian court hierarchy. It has appellate jurisdiction over, and its decisions are binding on, all other courts. It is the ultimate court of appeal. The Federal Court, Federal Circuit Court and the Family Court are all federal courts of limited jurisdiction.
Each state and territory has its own hierarchy of courts consisting of a supreme court with an appeal division, a district court (called a county court in Victoria) and a magistrates court (or local court in Victoria). Tasmania, Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory do not have district courts.
Official law reports in Australia are referred to as ‘authorised reports’. They include the Commonwealth Law Reports (CLR)—the authorised reports of the High Court of Australia—as well as various other federal and state court reporters. Note that in Australia, court rules, known as Practice Notes or Practice Directions, prescribe that authorised judgments are cited to the relevant court.
Research Guides
When embarking on any legal research project, a good legal research guide can provide a valuable overview of the jurisdiction and its legal resources. For almost all Australian jurisdictions there are excellent legal research guides online, most of which are authored by academic, court and other law librarians. They provide background and context that will help the researcher understand the legal system and the print and online legal information sources available. These guides cover Commonwealth (federal) legislation, state and territorial legislation, authorised case reports, unauthorised law report series, unreported judgments and other free online resources. Since legal research guides vary in perspectives, advice and currency, it is worth looking at more than one.
There are 42 law schools in Australia, and many of their affiliated libraries provide research guides and other free legal research information.Footnote 1 For example, the University of Melbourne Law Library offers a range of freely available legal research guides that feature online and print subscriptions in addition to free websites recommended to legal researchers.Footnote 2
The Globalex guides from New York University Law School are excellent, trusted research guides written by expert law librarians about their own jurisdictions.Footnote 3 The Court Librarian of the High Court of Australia provides background information and links to Australian online primary sources of law in, A Guide to Online Research Resources for the Australian Federal Legal System with Some Reference to the State Level.Footnote 4
Globalex guides can be used in conjunction with the Library of Congress's Guide to Law Online Footnote 5 which covers over 180 nations including Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. The Australian guide lists key providers of primary and other legal information under the six headings: Constitution, Executive, Judicial, Legislative, Legal Guides and General Sources.
The Library of Congress also offers a more detailed Legal Research Guide for Australia.Footnote 6 Features include:
• A link to the comprehensive legal abbreviations list maintained by Monash University Law LibraryFootnote 7, which is a good place to check for Australian abbreviations not found in the ever popular Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations.Footnote 8
• Under ‘Official Sources of Law’ there is a list of authorised and unauthorised reports.
In addition, Foreign Law GuideFootnote 9 is an excellent subscription service that provides research information for many jurisdictions and is useful for identifying resources, especially print titles, which may be the only source of some older legal information. Foreign Law Guide, used in conjunction with good free research guides for a jurisdiction, provides an excellent overview of the legal bibliography of a jurisdiction.
Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII)
The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) is a well-established and respected source of free Australian legal information.Footnote 10 AustLII was launched in 1995 with a grant from the Australian Research Council. It is a joint project of the University of New South Wales and University of Technology, Sydney. In addition to access via the website, AustLII iOS and Android apps are also available.
AustLII's ‘5 pillars of free access content’ are:
• Legislation.
Note, though, that researchers are strongly advised to consult the relevant provider of state or federal legislation for the most official and current information.
• Case law.
Records for cases include a ‘Noteup’ feature that generates a search for references to the judgment currently being viewed.
• Australian Treaties
All Australian treaties (including those currently under negotiation) are available on AustLII and can be used in tandem with the Australian Treaties DatabaseFootnote 11 from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
• Law Reform Reports
• Open Access legal scholarship
The courts, legislatures and other bodies responsible for producing primary legal materials serve as the actual repositories for these materials, and AustLII views its role as republishing them.
According to AustLII,Footnote 12 the audience of Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) is lawyers, courts, government and members of the public. Users are categorised as coming from the following sectors:
• Commercial – 45%
• Government – 27%
• Education – 27%
• the Community – 1%
In addition to providing current material, AustLII has received research funding to expand its offerings of historical legal materials currently found in the Australasian Colonial History Library section of the website.Footnote 13 AustLII's goal is to eventually offer all Australian legislation as enacted, reported cases, and cases that can be ‘found’ or recovered from newspaper reports from each of the original colonies.
Other Digitisation Projects
Other Australian legal digitisation projects that have increased access to free, historical legal information involve the legislative offices of Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia, the State Library of Victoria (i.e., for the Victorian Government Gazette), and university-based projects such as the digitisation of South Australian sessional acts.
In addition, Ozcase Queensland Historical Legal Collection (QHLC), hosted by the Queensland University of Technology, contains digitised versions of primarily Queensland legislation (with some for New South Wales and the Commonwealth), ranging in date from 1793 to 1936.Footnote 14 Materials include lands legislation, the Queensland Criminal Code Act 1899 (with preparatory and extrinsic materials), Letters Patent establishing the boundaries of Queensland, and public and corporate legislation.
LawCite
In 2008, AustLII developed a unique case citator called LawCite.Footnote 15 LawCite functions as a worldwide citator mining the content of all the sister Legal Information Institutes including NZLII and PacLII (which are introduced later in this paper). It provides links to the full text of cases whenever possible. LawCite has more recently included journal article citations (but not the full text) from commercial publishers, including Hein Online, Westlaw, LexisNexis, Cambridge University Press, etc. LawCite users can find subsequent cases, law reform reports, and journal articles that cite the case they are researching. The citation results can be conveniently sorted by court, jurisdiction, date and ‘popularity’. Note that LawCite searches on party names, citation details, and legislation considered, but not catchwords nor the full text of the judgments.
Jade
JadeFootnote 16 (an acronym of Judgments and Decisions Enhanced) and is a sophisticated free site produced by BarNet (a group of Sydney barristers). Jade provides easy, up-to-date access to the full text of over 200,000 online decisions from Australian courts and tribunals. A relatively new service, Jade strives to provide comprehensive coverage of new cases. Earlier coverage can be patchy, particularly before 1999, but historical content is being added retrospectively. Jade has some very useful features including the capability to bookmark and annotate cases. RSS digests and email alerts allow researchers to easily set up notification for new judgments. The Jade Research Blog includes entertaining videos on legal research. Jade Professional, a subscription based premium service, offers features such as graphical visualisations of cases and the capability of generating a citation report for an uploaded document, which flags citation errors.
CaseTrace is Jade's case citator which provides subsequent citations of a judgment pinpointed to the paragraph. Other handy features include Commonwealth legislation citations within cases that open pop-up boxes displaying the text of the relevant sections. The legislation is reproduced by Jade and therefore not an official source of legislation.
High Court of Australia (HCA)
The High Court of Australia website offers useful judgment summaries, available on the day a judgment is released.Footnote 17 HCA judgments tend to be lengthy so the summaries provide an excellent overview of the decisions. Anyone can sign up for RSS feeds or email alerts for judgment summaries. The HCA Library also produces a monthly HCA Bulletin when the Court is sitting. It records cases that are awaiting hearing, recently decided, reserved for judgment, granted special leave to appeal, etc.Footnote 18 Bulletins are on the court's website (2011–) and AustLII (1996-).Footnote 19 Video recordings of full Court hearings in Canberra since October 2013 can be viewed on the HCA website.
ComLaw
ComLaw is the official site for Commonwealth legislation, namely acts, regulations, and other legislative instruments.Footnote 20 Here the author and publisher are the same entity. New users should refer to the ‘Explore the Law’ section, which demystifies legislative language and offers a two page handout on how to search the site. ComLaw's useful explanatory information assists the estimated one to two thirds of ComLaw users who are ordinary citizens. ‘Hot’ new acts and recently amended laws are listed on the home page.
Since 2010, all new Commonwealth legislation on ComLaw is deemed authoritative. Official versions of law are designated by a map of Australia with a red check mark symbol. A highly valued feature of ComLaw is being able to view acts at various points in time. If authoritative documents are found to be in error, ComLaw will correct the mistake and add a rectification note to the document. In addition, there are legal protections for people who have relied on incorrect material published on ComLaw. Subscribers to ComLaw's free ‘notify me when’ service receive email updates whenever new content on ComLaw matches their search criteria.
Lawlex
LawlexFootnote 21 is a portal to all Australian Commonwealth and State legislation and provides access to bills, statutes and extrinsic material where available online. It is useful for browsing legislation by subject – for single or multiple jurisdictions. Lawlex points to the official versions of documents on relevant government websites. Lawlex also has a subscription component called ‘Premium research’ which provides commencement tables for legislation, history of amendments, pending amendments and an email update service for bill tracking.
Legify
Legify is a snappy finding tool – a search aggregator that links to the current, authoritative version of almost 14,000 Australian Acts and Regulations on Commonwealth, State and Territory websites. Legify searches only the titles of acts and regulations, not the full text of the legislation – so the results appear as you type. Unlike Google, Legify will only return the current version of the legislation from the primary online source such as ComLaw. You can filter search results by state or territory and choose whether to view acts or regulations. Legify was developed by a former lawyer, now legal researcher, psychologist and PhD candidate, who describes developing websites as, “an excellent form of procrastination.”Footnote 22
Foolkit
Foolkit (the name is a contraction of ‘Free legal toolkit’) grew out of a South Australian law practitioner's intranet pages listing handy links for his staff. The information is divided between information ‘for lawyers’ and ‘for the public.’ A search under the ‘for the public’ tab retrieves explanations about a variety of areas of law with the expected disclaimers about not using information on the site as legal advice.
Foolkit offers guided searching of AustLII via the AustLII EasySearch screen. Commonwealth and State acts are listed by title with options for selecting the AustLII version or a PDF or Word document from the relevant legislative website. The site offers easy access to court schedules, court rules and other websites of interest to practising lawyers.
Multi-jurisdictional compilations
Finally, websites that compile the laws of many jurisdictions related to a particular theme may prove useful, especially when readily available sources of law are difficult to find (e.g. New Zealand and Papua New Guinean law below). An important caveat though, is that these sites are not necessarily up-to-date; additional verification of the current state of the law is necessary. Some examples of compilations that include legislation and other legal information from Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea are:
• ECOLEXFootnote 23: includes international and national laws, policies and judicial decisions related to environmental law. Project of the Food and Agriculture Organization, United Nations Environment Programme and the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Documents are reproduced within ECOLEX.
• FAOLEXFootnote 24: national laws and regulations on food, agriculture and renewable natural resources. Documents are reproduced within FAOLEX.
• NATLEXFootnote 25 and NORMLEXFootnote 26 from the International Labour Organization: records of laws related to employment, labour codes, migration, human rights, etc. with links to the legislation on outside websites if available.
• RefworldFootnote 27: national laws related to human rights, migration and refugees compiled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Legislation is reproduced on the website.
• WIPO LexFootnote 28: national laws and treaties on intellectual property. The text of the legislation is reproduced within WIPOlex.
NEW ZEALAND
The Treaty of Waitangi is an agreement made between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840. It is New Zealand's foundation document and ceded the sovereignty of New Zealand to the Crown. New Zealand is now a parliamentary democratic monarchy with a common law legal system based on the English model. The Constitution Act 1986 describes the system of government and the judiciary. New Zealand has a unicameral Parliament.
New Zealand's Supreme Court is the ultimate appeal court. There are 3 other levels of courts: the Court of Appeal, the High Court and district courts, as well as specialty courts with limited jurisdiction such as the Maori Land Court.
Research Guides
The original 2005 Globalex guide for New Zealand and its 2011 update are very thorough compilations created by highly-regarded law librarians from New Zealand. They are an excellent starting point to be used in conjunction with other research guides available from university libraries in the region.
In addition to its general guide on New Zealand, the Library of Congress has a guide devoted to Maori Customary Law,Footnote 29 which should be taken into account when studying New Zealand law.
New Zealand Case Law (and more)
The New Zealand Legal Information Institute (NZLII) provides comprehensive legislation, court and tribunal decisions and full text articles from major New Zealand law school reviews.Footnote 30 NZLII is a joint project of the University of Otago Faculty of Law, the University of Canterbury and AustLII, with the assistance of the Law School, Victoria University of Wellington.
New Zealand Judicial Decisions OnlineFootnote 31 is a searchable database of judgments from the following New Zealand Courts (with availability subject to statutory prohibition, suppression orders, etc.):
• Supreme Court (all)
• Court of Appeal (cases from 2003)
• High Court (cases from 2005)
A separate site called Judicial Decisions of Public Interest, maintained by the Courts of New Zealand, hosts selected recent judgments from the Supreme Court, High Court and Court of Appeal.Footnote 32
The University of Waikato Library Directory of Decisions is a very useful site that compiles information about the courts, tribunals, statutory bodies and other bodies in New Zealand which make legal or quasi-legal decisions.Footnote 33 The site indicates where the decisions are available in both free and subscription print and online resources.
New Zealand Legislation
The official New Zealand Legislation governmental website provides access to all acts, bills and regulations.Footnote 34 The site is designed to easily show if a given act has amended or is otherwise related to previous acts. The published legislation is updated and consolidated to the previous year.
PDF versions of acts and legislative instruments published online via the Legislation website and that display the New Zealand Coat of Arms on their first page are deemed to be official. Hard copies reproduced from those PDFs are also official.Footnote 35
PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia in 1975. The country is now a parliamentary democratic monarchy (with the British monarch as head of state). Papua New Guinea has a mixed legal system consisting of the Constitution, the ‘underlying law’ based on the English common law system, and customary law. Statutes have largely been adapted from Australian and English statutes.
Papua New Guinea has a unicameral Parliament. It adopted the Constitution at independence. From August 2011 to fresh elections in July 2012, Papua New Guinea experienced a period of political and legal uncertainty when Peter O'Neill and Sir Michael Somare both claimed to hold the office of Prime Minister.
The Supreme Court is the highest court in Papua New Guinea. It acts as an appeal court and the court of last resort. The National Court is the nation's superior trial court. Subordinate courts consist of district, village or magistrates courts, and juvenile courts.
Primary sources of law from Papua New Guinea are not systematically available and updated online. Melbourne Law School Library's Papua New Guinea guide refers researchers to the Foreign Law Guide subscription database and the Library of Congress Guide to Law Online for Papua New Guinea. At the time of writing, the parliamentary and government websites have been effectively taken down, leaving PacLII as the only available source of online legislation.
The website of the Supreme and National Courts of Papua New Guinea contains limited information about the judiciary, court rules, and other documents.Footnote 36
PacLII
The Pacific Legal Information Institute (PacLII) was launched in 2001 and is based at the University of the South Pacific Faculty of Law in Vanuatu. It hosts legal information for 20 South Pacific countries.Footnote 37 AustLII helped develop PacLII, which relies on donated funds. The automated insertion of hypertext links by PacLII means that links will not be comprehensive or accurate in all cases.Footnote 38 Additionally, information is selected by the contributing court or tribunal, and therefore significant delays in adding cases can occur.Footnote 39
CONCLUSION
Australia and New Zealand have well developed, maintained and authoritative free legal research resources. Papua New Guinea is still developing the infrastructure, resources and stability necessary for providing comprehensive coverage of online legislation and case law. In this ever-changing world of law and legal publishing, research guides provide an excellent starting point to navigate the legal information landscape of a jurisdiction. The regional law librarians who compile them are knowledgeable and vigilant scavengers of information, products and developments. Enjoy exploring and using these selected guides and websites and keep contributing your expertise to local research guides to assist your colleagues abroad.
SUMMARY OF RESOURCES
Research guides
Multi-jurisdictional compilations (selected sources)
Sources of legal information for Australia
Official sources of legislation for Australian states and territories
Sources of legal information for New Zealand
Sources of legal information for Papua New Guinea
