Crowdsourced law

About 14-15 years ago, the notion of “the law” being freely and easily available to all was a pretty innovative idea. A huge amount of work was done in that area and the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) was incorporated as a charity in December 2000.

The BAILII web site is probably the most important UK centric free legal resource. It now contains the key common law databases of all of the decisions of the Privy Council, many decisions of the House of Lords and the Court of Appeal, important courts such as the Scottish Court of Session, the Irish Supreme Court, European Court of Human Rights and European Court of Justice and tribunals, and legislation from three jurisdictions (e.g. Northern Irish legislation goes back to 1495). It also contains recent reports and consultation papers from the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Reform Commission, in addition to the Irish Law Reform Commission materials which have been on the site for some time.

It is in short a group of individuals trying to bring primary sources of law together in one place. However the law is not linear. To gain a full understanding of the applicable law, the relevant principles need to be considered and the way in which those principles have been applied in different circumstances understood. Paid for library resources such as PLC and Westlaw are excellent, but expensive. They are aimed at the corporate user rather then members of the public.

So, why not take the BAILII website and use crowdsourcing techniques to build a resource that allows users to discover “the law” (as in the answer to their question) and not just the primary sources?

Two websites focusing on US law are taking the first steps in that direction. They approach it in slightly different ways. Casetext is based on case law and uses crowdsourcing to enhance it with references and annotations. With Mootus users ask questions and the crowd answers them with relevant cases and arguments.

For example, on Mootus there is a question: Does the “filed tariff doctrine” preclude the filing of any judicial challenge to the terms of a filed tariff? There are (at the time of writing) six cases suggested as being of assistance in answering the question. Other users can flag those cases as “On point” or “Off base”. In that way the answer can be found, and the underlying argument developed.

On Casetext it is the other way round. Individual cases are categorised and tagged. Search results can then be filtered to achieve a more refined search result.

If BAILII could add the functionality of Mootus and Casetext to the data that it holds, then all it would need would be a team of willing volunteers. What about judges? Rather than repeat statements of the law, they could refer to or copy the relevant pages on BAILII. If they considered that the statement on BAILII was not correct or needed explaining then they could do so on BAILII. As the overall editors could identify who was making changes and this could be shown on the page itself the provenance of the statements of the law can be established.

Supporting the judges would be all of those individuals who have an interest in, and expertise in, different areas of law. Again, as they would be registered users, and they would be identified as the authors of statements of law, the provenance of the statements can be established. Of course this is only one part of the legal process, but it would be a significant step toward access to the law for all.

Would chaos ensue? I suspect there would be different sorts of challenges. But at the moment trying to find authoritative statements of the law is both time consuming and expensive. With a properly constructed crowdsourcing platform, I suspect that users would be able to quickly source law and understand whether what has been written can be considered an authoritative statement of law.