Legal Hypertext Systems

_{Created and written by Vanessa}

An example of a legal hypertext system is Austlii (The Australasian Legal Information Institute) which provides free access to legal materials (primary and secondary) on the internet. Austlii utilises hypertext extensively, and the creation of hypertexts are automated.

Sources of legal material may include predecessors who provided such material (like the government) or primary creators of data, eg: Courts. When legal documents are obtained from the original creator, the data needs to be extracted. For example, we need to know definitions of terms and where the different sections of an Act are. The English language is complex and can be ambiguous. Definitions for the same word may vary from section to section. In some circumstances, the context must be understood to fully appreciate the meaning of a sentence.

There are 3 main ways to process and extract data from legal materials and to create a legal hypertext system:

• Primary sources asked to put tags on terms which are defined terms and the computer can search for these markers instead of words.
• This is an ideal solution as it is easier and faster to do this while creating documents than to re-create documents

• reasonably accurate (although not completely) as a computer needs to understand meanings and concepts in order to be able to distinguish between two instances of the same word that have different meanings.
• quality may depend on quality of documents from legal material providers

• Expensive approach, costs can be reduced by not hiring legal professionals.
• Computers are still used, but human editors check that the computer hasn’t made errors
• May need to take into account humans make errors too, particularly those who are not trained in this area

As a free legal materials provider, Austlii adopts the 2nd approach of automatic markup. There are over 30 million automatically inserted hypertext links in Austlii’s 4 million pages, including links to statutory definitions, other sections and cases. In practise, web publishers may use a combination of these approaches. Legal publishers who opt for the 3rd approach may use a combination of automated and human processing for creating hypertexts.

Austlii Overview

Russell Allen's LAWS1032 Course Materials under Hypertext

CanLII