Legislation
Legislation.gov.uk: finally up to date?
Most types of primary legislation (eg Acts, Measures, NI Orders in Council) on legislation.gov.uk are intended to be held in “revised” form, meaning that amendments made by subsequent legislation are incorporated into the text. Most types of secondary legislation are not revised and are held only in the form in which they were originally made. […]
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Open law: digital common property
Open law is the idea that public legal information should be freely available to everyone to access, use and republish. The current position in the UK differs completely as between legislation and case law. Legislation In 1996 HMSO started publishing primary and secondary legislation online, “as published” – so only accurate as at the day […]
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Online publishing news
Legislation.gov.uk Following the promotion of John Sheridan to Digital Director at The National Archives, Matthew Bell has been appointed the new Head of Legislation Services. A law graduate from Manchester University, Matt started his career in legal publishing in 1999 when he joined Sweet and Maxwell to help establish Westlaw UK. By the time he […]
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Developments at legislation.gov.uk
Legislation.gov.uk, managed by The National Archives, provides an essential – and free – public service. Millions of people use it to find and access the legislation they need, lawyers and non-lawyers alike. Bringing legislation.gov.uk up to date Quick, easy to navigate and use, with an advanced timeline feature so you can see how legislation has […]
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Big Data for Law
Big data is big news. An estimated 90 per cent of the world’s data was created in the last two years (see www.ibm.com/big-data) and insights gleaned from large datasets are increasingly driving business innovation and economic growth. Underpinning this “big data revolution” is a powerful combination of low cost cloud computing, open source analytics software […]
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Keeping up to date with the law (2)
This is the second in our series on independent publishers providing law update services and their views on BAILII and legislation.gov.uk. In the last issue we covered CaseCheck, Law Brief Publishing and Daniel Barnett. Bath Publishing Bath Publishing was founded in 2004. We currently run two legal update sites: Employment Cases Update on our own […]
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Keeping up to date with the law
BAILII has been providing free access to case law for 14 years and legislation.gov.uk provides advanced (if not yet up to date) open access to all in force legislation. These resources have changed the ground rules for law publishing: smaller publishers are relying on them, adding their own value and developing new update services. We […]
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Bringing the statute book up to date
Since July 2010 we have had a world class official home of UK legislation at legislation.gov.uk delivered by The National Archives (TNA). The sophisticated service provides simple and direct browse access to legislation by type, year and number and simple or advanced searches. Any piece of primary legislation or legislation fragment may be viewed as […]
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Legislation.gov.uk and the myth of Sisyphus
The launch in July 2010 of legislation.gov.uk to little fanfare (there was no marketing budget!) was a significant landmark achievement, both in terms of official legislation and of the whole Berners Lee inspired concept in Government of “linked data” and the semantic web. And, like many aspects of public sector information, it raises enormous issues […]
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The new UK legislation service
Since late July we have a shiny new official home of UK legislation at legislation.gov.uk. In due course this will completely replace the two current legislation services at OPSI and the Statute Law Database. At present some functionality currently available on the Statute Law Database is not yet available on legislation.gov.uk, including full content search, […]
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Improving legislation on the web
In 1996 HMSO started publishing new legislation on its website. Comprehensive coverage was later extended back to 1987 for Acts and 1988 for SIs. Although publication of legislation was timely and presentation competent, we yearned for what had been promised for many years – a comprehensive, up-to-date version of the statute book. Finally it arrived […]
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The Statute Law Database – an update
It is now 4 months since the Statute Law Database was released to the public. In the first couple of weeks following the launch there was a flurry of comment and criticism; but since then, near silence. Is everyone ecstatically happy with it, reserving their judgment or quietly cursing its shortcomings? I set out to […]
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