Title: World Legal Information Institute

Source/Sponsoring Agency: World Legal Information Institute

URL: http://www.worldlii.org/

Date Checked: 12/16/2002      Status: Active

Date Annotated: 12/9/2002

Topics: Foreign Law; International Law

Other keywords: Court Decisions; Law (Australia); Law (Canada); Law of the Sea; Legal Research; Search Engines; World Trade Organization, Court Decisions

Contents: Officially launched in November 2002, the World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII) is a "free, independent and non-profit global legal research facility" affiliated with several academic legal information institutes, among them Cornell's Legal Information Institute and others from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, South Africa, Britain and Ireland, and the University of the South Pacific School of Law. WorldLII provides a single search facility for over 270 databases from 48 jurisdictions in 20 countries. The user may select a resource area, among which are: legislation, case law, superior or high court decisions, journals, treaties, law reform, domain name decisions, and secondary materials. Alternatively, a jurisdiction or geographic region may be selected, with an emphasis on Pacific and Commonwealth countries (for the United States only Supreme Court decisions are included). The site can be translated into Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. Among recent additions to the website are World Trade Organization panel decisions, Tuvalu domain name decisions, and materials from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. For searching advice, click on the Help link at the bottom of the home page; this produces a Quick (but superbly thorough) Guide in RTF, PDF or HTML versions which provides all the assistance the user will need. While the content of the WorldLII is fairly limited at this time, its ease of use is admirable.

Author of Annotation: A. Carson