‘Over the past five years, an international “free access to law movement” has emerged, based around independent, often University-based, Legal Information Institutes (LIIs). They give links to primary legal materials – legislation, case-law, treaties etc., and some secondary materials.

Here’s a list of the LIIs with the dates when they were founded :

LII (Cornell) (I didn’t realize that was one of them, least of all the earliest)
AustLII 1995
BAILII 2000
CanLII 2000
PacLII 2001
HKLII 2002
IRLII 2001
SAFLII 2003
NZLII 2004
Jurburkina 2004
Droit ‘Francophone (2003 – ‘may include any francophone countries, but initially concetrates on West and Central Africa.

Via an article by Graham Greenleaf, ‘Global Law Research: WorldLII and the Future’, in Delia Venables’ latest Internet newsletter (subscription £40)

To console anyone who wanted French rather than African sites, here is something completely different: a French language portal with links to all sort of things. Lexilogos has links on first names, last names, quotes, etymology, slang, keyboards, flags and anthems, French tourism, song texts and much more. Here’s My Way in the original – well, they changed that, as can be seen from the English, German and Spanish versions:

El fin
Muy cerca esta
Lo afrontaré
Serenamente

Ya ves
Yo he sido asi
Te lo diré
Sinceramente

Vivi
La intensidad
Y no encontré
Jamas fronteras

Jugué
Sin descanzar
Y a mi manera

(Thanks to Rainer Langenhan in email – and Languagehat has already blogged this).

Gail Armstrong at Open Brackets, writing on plagiarism, mentions a work unknown to me: Charles Reznikoff’s ‘Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative’, which ‘consists of hundreds of stories taken from law reports’ (to quote Mark Ford) and rendered as free verse.

Languagehat takes this up too. Steve obviously knows Reznikoff, and he gives a longer quote from Ford and more links. From Wikipedia I gather that Testimonies was a kind of found poem. From an interview with Reznikoff:

bq. INT: When you were working in the law book company, did you come across the records that enabled you to write Testimony?

bq. CR: No, but working in the law book company I learned many interesting facts about the law. As a matter of fact, Dreiser’s novel, An American Tragedy, was based completely on a case, but he went into great detail there. It occurred to me that I should go through all the case books. I might go through a volume of a thousand pages and find just one case from which to take the facts and rearrange them so as to be interesting. Now Testimony: 1885-1890 covers every state in the union. I don’t know how many thousands of volumes I went through, and all I could manage to get out of it were these poems. And in looking through the book I might throw out some of them.

He leaves a dog, Daisy. Spiegel Online
English page with photo

TouchGraph GoogleBrowser is fun. Enter a URL online and see a graphic representation of related sites.

(Via Boing Boing)

Spiegel Online reports (January 13th):

bq. Ein Witz hat zwei Männern im US-Bundesstaat New York eine Anzeige eingebracht. Die beiden hatten sich vor einem Gerichtsgebäude über Anwälte lustig gemacht – sehr zum Unmut eines mithörenden Juristen.

bq. Two men in New York State have been reported to the police for telling a joke. They were telling lawyer jokes outside a courthouse, much to the disgust of a listening lawyer.

Harvey Kash and Carl Lanzisera, the founders of Americans for Legal Reform, are said to be defendants in a lawsuit beginning in February. Outside the Long Island court office, Kash asked Lanzisera, ‘How do you know a lawyer is lying?’, and Lanzisera answered, ‘His lips move’. A lawyer in the queue asked them to stop talking, but they continued and he reported them.

It looks as if Spiegel Online, which gives no references or links, has got its facts wrong again. Americans for Legal Reform have a huge van and loudspeaker for telling lawyer jokes outside courthouses and have got into trouble for this before now. The following article appeared in June 2002:

bq. Americans for Legal Reform, in Huntington Station, is among the court’s most visible detractors. The group’s truck, with its 12-foot- high billboard that reads “Stop the Lawyer Disease” is occasionally spotted in the parking lots of Long Island courts.

bq. Some critics call them loudmouths. Members use a bullhorn to spread their accusations against barristers and judges alike with an arsenal of lawyer jokes. One favorite: “What do you say to a lawyer with an IQ of 50? Good morning, Your Honor.”

bq. “The idea is to get under their skin,” said Harvey Kash, a member of the 12-year-old group. “At our meetings we have wall-to-wall people now. There are so many people who have been wounded by the system.”

bq. Americans for Legal Reform has volunteer court watchers, maintains a database that members use to refer people to or steer them away from attorneys, coaches people on filing grievances against attorneys or judges and helps people develop a strategy for dealing with the court and their attorneys.

(Via Jurablogs Blog)

LATER NOTE:

It seems that Spiegel Online did take the report straight from a US source, an AP report:

bq. Men at courthouse cited for disorderly conduct
HEMPSTEAD, New York (AP) — Did you hear the one about the two guys arrested for telling lawyer jokes?
It happened this week to the founders of a group called Americans for Legal Reform, who were waiting in line to get into a Long Island courthouse.
“How do you tell when a lawyer is lying?” Harvey Kash reportedly asked Carl Lanzisera.
“His lips are moving,” they said in unison.
While some waiting to get into the courthouse giggled, a lawyer farther up the line Monday was not laughing.
He told them to pipe down, and when they did not, the lawyer reported the pair to court personnel, who charged them with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.
“They just can’t take it,” Kash said of lawyers in general. “This violates our First Amendment rights.”
Dan Bagnuola, a spokesman for the Nassau County courts, said the men were “being abusive and they were causing a disturbance.”
He said he did not have the name of the lawyer who complained.
Americans for Legal Reform monitors the courts and uses confrontational tactics to push for greater access for the public.

bq. The pair said that for years they have stood outside courthouses on Long Island and mocked lawyers.
On Monday, however, Kash said he was due in court to answer a drunken driving charge from a year and a half ago. The men are due back in court on the disorderly conduct charge next month.

Well, disorderly conduct is not a very serious offence and it still has more to do with how loud they were talking and whether they were trying to or likely to annoy the rest of those present. (Thanks to the IAFL list for the APA version)

Germany involves laypersons in the criminal justice system in the form of Schöffen. A Schöffe – lay judge, lay assessor – is attached to a particular panel for two years and sits a couple of times a month, as far as I recall. The most serious cases are tried by a panel of three professional judges and two lay judges, and four of them have to agree. That’s only one example of the kinds of panels with lay judges. A new generation of Schöffen are just starting this January.

One of them, Bernd Ramm (64), put an ad in the Berliner Morgenpost on Tuesday announcing he is going to do what he can to ensure punishment and deterrence take precedence over resocialization:

bq. “Die lasche Handhabung der Justizbehörden erweckt bei vielen Menschen den Anschein, als seien die Kriminellen und nicht die Geschädigten die Opfer der Gesellschaft”, sagte Ramm. Als Schöffe wolle er künftig mitwirken, daß bei schweren Verbrechen die Abschreckung und nicht die Resozialisierung in den Blickpunkt der Richter gelange. Als Beispiel nennt der Akademische Direktor an der Berliner Charité in seiner Anzeige die Verurteilung eines Täters zu 18 Monaten Bewährung, nachdem er ein 13 jähriges Mädchen vergewaltigt hatte.

It’s difficult to discuss these things without concrete examples. I don’t know the circumstances of the rape case in question. – We’ll also have to see if Schramm is now allowed to sit. Even if he does sit (February 4th is the first possible date, apparently), lawyers would challenge the court for bias.

From Die Welt via Handakte WebLAWg.