The Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) is the international movement and organization devoted to providing free online access to legal information such as

case law Case law, also used interchangeably with common law, is law that is based on precedents, that is the judicial decisions from previous cases, rather than law based on constitutions, statutes, or regulations. Case law uses the detailed facts of ...

legislation Legislation is the process or result of enrolling, enacting, or promulgating laws by a legislature, parliament, or analogous governing body. Before an item of legislation becomes law it may be known as a bill, and may be broadly referred to ...

treaties A treaty is a formal, legally binding written agreement between actors in international law. It is usually made by and between sovereign states, but can include international organizations, individuals, business entities, and other legal pers ...

, law reform proposals and legal scholarship. The movement began in 1992 with the creation of the

Legal Information Institute The Legal Information Institute (LII) is a non-profit, public service of Cornell Law School that provides no-cost access to current American and international legal research sources online alaw.cornell.edu The organization is a pioneer in the del ...

(LII) by Thomas R. Bruce and

Peter W. Martin Peter W. Martin has been a law professor since 1972, and Dean from 1980 to 1988, at Cornell Law School. (curriculum vitae). In 1992, together with Thomas R. Bruce Thomas R. "Tom" Bruce co-founded the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law Scho ...

Cornell Law School Cornell Law School is the law school of Cornell University, a private Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York. One of the five Ivy League law schools, it offers four law degree programs, JD, LLM, MSLS and JSD, along with several dual-deg ...

. Some later FALM projects incorporate ''Legal Information Institute'' or ''LII'' in their names, usually prefixed by a national or regional identifier.

Membership

The FALM website lists 63 active members as of July 2017, together with the coverage (geographical area or political grouping) for which each member provides databases, and the year in which it became a member of FALM, as well as links to member websites.

Declaration

In October 2002 the meeting of LIIs in Montreal at the 4th Law via Internet Conference, made the following declaration as a joint statement of their philosophy of access to law. There were some further modifications of the Declaration at the Sydney meeting of LIIs in 2003 and at the Paris meeting in 2004.The amendments were: (i) the words "It also includes legal documents created as a result of public funding." were added to the end of para 2 after 'boards of enquiry': (ii) the words "To provide to the end users of public legal information clear information concerning any conditions of re-use of that information, where this is feasible." were added to the final list of bullet points.

Notes

References

* Galindo, F 'Free Access to the Law in Latin America: Brasil, Argentina, Mexico and Uruguay as Examples' in Peruginelli and Ragona (Eds), 2009 * Greenleaf,
'Legal Information Institutes and the Free Access to Law Movement'
GlobaLex website, February 2008 - This article includes brief histories of all FALM Members to 2008. * Greenleaf
'Free access to legal information, LIIs, and the Free Access to Law Movement'
Chapter in Danner, R and Winterton, J (eds.) IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management. Aldershot, Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2011 - This chapter updates information about some FALM members to 2011, but is not comprehensive. * Peruginelli, G and Ragona, M ''Law via the Internet: Free Access, Quality of Information, Effectiveness of Rights'' (Proc. IX International Conference 'Law via the Internet'), European Press Academic Publishing, Florence, 2009 * Poulin, D (2004

''First Monday'' vol. 9, no 12, 6 December 2004

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Free Access To Law Movement Online law databases Legal research Case law databases

Membership

Declaration

See also

Notes

References

External links