IMPROVING ACCESS TO LEGAL INFORMATION: HOW DRAFTING SYSTEMS HELP

Abstract

Legal information is found in case law, legislation, doctrine, and other documentary sources. The texts of these documents are stored in a database or several databases. The databases are increasingly accessible viaWeb portals that are maintained by public and private institutions. The legal information is usually searched by means of a full text search, i.e., (almost) every term in the texts of the documents can function as a search key. Users input a query composed of one or several search terms and documents that contain the query terms are retrieved and possibly ranked according to relevance to the query. In addition, the search can be made more effective by selecting documents based on descriptors attached to them called metadata which reflect, for instance, the domain of law, subjects, titles, institutions that issued the document (e.g., court names), dates (e.g., date of enactment of a statute article), and area designators (e.g., application area of a statute). In the databases the legal documents are thus indexed with the terms that occur in their natural language texts and with extra descriptive data. Search engines or information retrieval systems are a primary means for accessing legal information.