Free the Law: Initiative needed to have indlii.org
I was recently searching for some legal material and landed at http://www.austlii.edu.au/ - the website of Australasian Legal Information Institute. The website allows _free_ access to most of the Australian legal resources, including legislation and decisions of the High Court of Australia [the Highest court in Australia]. They have devised standard notation for citing case law that is uniformly followed througout Australia, with most of the Courts sending in the judgements and transcripts of proceedings to austlii in standard formats. Legislation is reported to the site by the attorneys who represent the state.
Austlii has also led initiatives in England that led to www.bailii.org
Free access is available to all to the legal resources at austlii
In India, NIC has taken several initiatives, and a wealth of information relating to legislation and case-law are available, but not everything is free. AFAIK, there are no standard notations that enable citing case-law published at the NIC servers before the courts. Again, AFAIK, many proprietary software tools are used in India, in sharp contrast to Austlii that uses GNU C and has created its own in-house software to index information. [ http://www2.austlii.edu.au/%7Egraham/Slides/London/technical.html ] [ http://causelists.nic.in ]
Austlii also has a worldlii site to provide access to legal information in other jurisdictions. An initiative to have a site named indlii on the lines of austlii may help to standardise reporting of legal information on the internet.
Details about how the austlii project was created, funded and works is available at: http://www.lawonline.cc/accesslawright.htm under the title "Free the Law"
Having free and easy access to legal information would be the first serious step in e-governance efforts. Probably, FSF-India, and a few law universities in India could take the initiative to move NIC to create indlii on the lines of austlii, possibly by teaming up together along with austlii.
Regards, Ramanraj.