Free Access to Foreign Law

A campaign to make all the world’s legal information more widely available is gathering steam.

The Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) is an ambitious program devoted to making legal information available online at no cost. In its Declaration on Free Access to Law, the group holds that legal information “is part of the common heritage of humanity. Maximising access to this information promotes justice and the rule of law”, and further, “Public legal information is digital common property and should be accessible to all on a non-profit basis and free of charge.”

The movement started in 1992 with the creation of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell, which offered free access to U.S. primary law. Since then, the FALM has grown to encompass nearly 60 supporting organizations.

Many of these are themselves legal information institutes, or LII’s. Some of them are country-specific, such as the Zimbabwe Legal Information Institute (ZimLII), while others cover larger regions (like SAFLII, the Southern African Legal Information Institute) or even legal systems (like CommonLII, which includes many of common-law jurisdictions). At one time most of the institutes were devoted to English-language information, but increasingly sites are offering materials in French, Spanish and other languages.

A complete list of the LII’s and other organizations is found here.