Yale Law School and Cornell Law School are part of a new effort to get free legal information and legal content to academics, researchers and policymakers in developing countries in a bid to strengthen the rule of law around the globe.

The law libraries at both schools are partners in the Global Online Access to Legal Information project (GOALI), which formally launched March 6 in Geneva. The project provides universities, nonprofits, judges and others in 115 low- and middle-income countries access to thousands of law journals, e-books and databases, with a focus on international law, human rights, humanitarian law, and labor law.

“This initiative will make this vital information available to those who, until now, have not had access,” said Deborah Greenfield, deputy director general of the International Labour Initiative, a United Nations agency that is helping to shepherd the new project. “In turn, it will help promote social justice and inclusive societies, which is at the heart of the ILO's mandate.”

GOALI is the latest initiative from a public-private partnership called Research4Life, which already has information-sharing programs centered on health, agriculture, the environment, and innovation. Each program is a collaboration between a different UN agency and Yale and Cornell.

Bits and pieces of legal information and content are already available for free through various open-access initiatives, but GOALI is different, said Teresa Miguel-Stearns, director of Yale's Lillian Goldman Law Library.

“This is the first effort at bringing licensed legal content to institutions in developing countries,” she said.

Yale's role is twofold. Law library staff are reaching out to legal publishers and inviting them to contribute their content to the project for free. They are also responsible for looking through the content that publishers offer and selecting information relevant to GOALI's core issues, and making it available for users, Miguel-Stearns said.

Legal publishers have been very receptive to the idea of getting involved, she added. GOALI currently offers access to more than 10,000 legal titles from 60 different publishers.

“The publishers so far have been incredibly supportive,” Miguel-Stearns said. “They get excited about participating in these initiatives.”

Cornell's law library is focusing on providing training—both virtual and in person—to GOALI users, according to associate dean and law librarian Femi Cadmus.

The initiative, Cadmus said, “will promote access to justice by removing the economic and technological barriers to proprietary legal information in developing economies around the world.”

Students, researchers, judges, librarians, policymakers, and labor groups may request access to GOALI. If they are approved and come from a low-income nation, as defined by the UN, they will get free access to GOALI content. Users from middle-income nations pay a nominal fee.

All of the current GOALI content is in English, but leaders hope to expand into other languages down the line, according to Miguel-Stearns.

“It's important to our mission to bring legal content to people who need it, and to people who can use it to help promote the rule of law and social justice in their communities,” she said.