Bailii IT Panel Article 2003

BAILII – easy enough to say, and not so easy to spell. But once you have saved http://www.bailii.org in your Favourites folder you don’t need to remember how to spell it.

BAILII now has 398 House of Lords judgments, 8,420 Court of Appeal (Civil Division) judgments 11,324 Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) judgments, 4,472 Administrative Court judgments and 845 other High Court judgments. The judgments date from 1996.

The major development in the last 12 months has been establishing a formal arrangement whereby all judgments of the Court of Appeal (Civil Division) delivered since 1 January 2003, whether handed down on paper or delivered orally in court, are provided to BAILII for publication on the Internet. Thus a search of the BAILII database provides a reliable means of checking whether a High Court decision given after 1 January 2003 has been the subject of an appeal to the Court of Appeal or House of Lords. In the High Court, the short-hand writer’s copyright continues to restrict the availability of judgments for publication on the Internet.

BAILII now has a growing collection of Law Commission reports, and is currently setting up a database of Employment Appeal Tribunal decisions. When this has been set up, consideration can be given to reporting the decisions of other Tribunals.

The wider use of e-mail in the RCJ has brought benefits to BAILII. Important judgments are often transmitted to BAILII by e-mail within minutes of being handed down, and the automated procedures which BAILII has set up make it possible for the judgment to be downloaded from the Internet within minutes of the electronic copy being received by BAILII.

Individual paragraphs of judgments on the BAILII web site are given their own reference tags. This makes it possible for a copy of a skeleton argument or a seminar hand-out which is being transmitted by e-mail to be hypertext-linked directly to an individual paragraph of a judgment.

Maintaining the database and the hardware on which it resides requires 3 full-time members of staff. BAILII’s only source of income remains voluntary donations, and BAILII much appreciates the donations which have been made by The Bar Council, the Inns of Court, Specialist Bar Associations, sets of chambers, and individual barristers.

Clive Freedman, 3 Verulam Buildings (a Trustee of BAILII)
IT Panel