Title: FreeLegalWeb

Source/Sponsoring Agency: FreeLegalWeb CIC

URL: http://freelegalweb.org/

Date Checked: 9/30/2011      Status: Active

Date Annotated: 9/8/2011

Topics: Legal Education; Legal Profession

Other keywords: Court decisions; Legal Research; Legislation; Law (Great Britain)

Contents: FreeLegalWeb is the newest kid on the free legal Internet block, and it hopes to add its own unique contribution to the free access to law movement. It is a UK-based project that seeks to join up the multitude of separate and unorganized free legal resources currently residing on the web, including legislation, judgments, guides and articles. FreeLegalWeb’s goal is to create a service that facilitates access to free resources through modern technologies and networking tools that capture user-generated content and combine it with existing materials already available on the Internet. Initiated by Nick Homes of infolaw, the project is supported by many who are invested in the publishing of legal materials, including attorneys, law students, and legal information specialists. Among its many aspirations, the project plans to link its articles to primary law resources (author profiles will be provided), maintain a comprehensive citations database that is automatically updated from free resources, and provide a Citator. The FreeLegalWeb site currently focuses on two main areas: Discover and Create. The Discover tab allows for browsing and searching of the site’s contents. Primary materials are organized by source and articles are organized by subject. The simple search engine functions well, and an advanced search feature provides further options to narrow one’s query by title, category, series, type, and/or year. The Create tab provides a means by which to contribute articles and commentary to the site. FreeLegalWeb is clearly a nascent service, a beta site in fact, that is still in the process of building its contents; however, it has every indication of becoming an excellent resource that provides a new, more practical, layer to the free legal Internet.

Author of Annotation: A. Emerson