The Society for Computers and Law (SCL) has called on the Government to make all case law and legislation available for free on the Internet, as part of its robust response to the Lord Chancellor's Department (LCD) consultation paper on IT and the law.
In its official reply to Civil.justice: Resolving and Avoiding Disputes in the Information Age, the SCL also said it wanted a publicly accessible full-text search tool for any future case law and legislation databases, and hypertext links between judgments and relevant pieces of legislation.
The SCL said such changes would improve justice and foster "greater public confidence in the justice system". Under SCL proposals, legal publishers would still be able to make money from legal information services that offered "editorial and/or functional enhancements".
An LCD spokesman said most responses from legal bodies to civil.justice had included demands for free access to the law, but no decision had been taken by the Government.
The SCL also repeated its call for the Government to move its almost completed Statute Law Database (SLD) into the public domain. But the LCD spokesman said the Government had not yet considered the future of the SLD.
One option is for the Government to sell the database to a third party.