Free Access to Law – Is It Here to Stay?

The Cornell University Law School blog VoxPopuLII has published a post entitled Reaching Sustainability of Free Access to Law Initiatives that discusses the "Free Access to Law – Is It Here to Stay?" research project.

That project is being conducted by the Université de Montréal's Chair in Legal Information:

"In May of this year, one of us wrote a post discussing two research projects being conducted at the University of Montreal’s Chair in Legal Information. One of those projects, known by its team as the 'Free Access to Law – Is It Here to Stay?' Project, has just concluded. This co-authored post is about that project, the stories we heard throughout conducting the research, and what we can learn from those stories about sustaining legal information institutes (LIIs) ..."

"The first section of this post — written by Isabelle Moncion of Lexum — is about the 'Free Access to Law – Is It Here to Stay?' project as a whole, and the second portion, written by AfricanLII co-founder Mariya Badeva-Bright, focuses on lessons learned as applied to The African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII)."

"First, a few words about the methodology of the 'Free Access to Law – Is It Here to Stay?' project. In 11 countries and regions –- Burkina Faso, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Niger, the Philippines, South Africa, and Uganda –- researchers under the coordination of the Chair in Legal Information, AfricanLII, and the Centre for Internet and Society interviewed users of Free Access to Law (FAL) services, and practitioners who create and maintain those services, for purposes of building case studies on one FAL initiative per country. The research was guided by the Local Researcher’s Methodology Guide, which among other things asked the question, 'What determines the sustainability of operations of Free Access to Law initiatives?' Along with the case studies (...), a Good Practices Handbook (humbly renamed 'Good' rather than 'Best,' as stories from the FAL initiative showed that unfortunately, but not surprisingly, an always-successful series of practices does not exist) was written based on the results found in the case studies. The handbook will be online soon."