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GAZETTE
MARCH 1994
The I n f o rma t i on H i ghway:
Us ing t he I nt ernet f or
Legal Research
by Dr Gerard Quinn (Faculty of
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Law, UCG) & Paul Doyle
(Computer Services, UCG).
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Introduction
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Most solicitors are by now well
| acquainted with commercial databases
; in law. Many of these databases are
quite extensive and reach beyond
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purely legal information. They have
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| become indispensable tools in
retrieving relevant information
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j efficiently and quickly. The use of
these facilities is likely to increase as
the modern emphasis appears to be on
making computers literate about
people and their needs and not the
other way round. The old and rather
off-putting requirement of computer
literacy was seen as a major
obstacle to full use of the technology.
All that is changing rapidly
with the development of intuitive
!
systems that can be mastered within
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an hour.
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Important though the commercial
databases are, there are other
electronic resources which solicitors
should be aware of. The purpose of
this article is to described one such
resource, namely the Internet.
What is the Internet?
;
Most countries in the world have their
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own academic computing network.
, These networks carry information
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from one academic institution to
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another and also enable researchers to
! remain in constant contact. Personal
contact can be maintained through
electronic mail (e-mail) which can
carry not only messages but also
| transmit whole files (e.g. a draft
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j
article). The Irish academic network is
called HEANET and its British
; counterpart is called JANET. The
global network of which HEANET
and JANET form an integral part is
called the Internet.
Having access to the Internet enables
the user, for example,
GerardQuinn
• to use electronic mailing facilities
• to search the catalogue of many
academic libraries around the world
(e.g. Harvard, Yale, Oxford law
libraries)
• to search the databases of
Í
international and regional
organisations (e.g. the United
j
Nations, its specialised agencies, the
European Commission)
|
• to search public domain government
documentation (e.g. the US
Government's databases are vast
and searchable)
• to search commercially maintained
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(fee-based) databases
• to subscribe to specialist mailing
lists (of which there are at least one
hundred in law alone).
The Legal Information Institute (LII)
at Cornell Law School, for example,
maintains an extensive library of legal
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information. Once logged into the LII
the user is prompted into more
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specialist databases which include
such diverse areas as recent Supreme
Court decisions, constitutional law,
health law, environmental law,
international organisations, disability
!
law, commercial law, intellectual
property, etc. Another extremely
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interesting and useful law site or host
computer is based at Washington &
Lee University.
Paul Doyle
Searching the Databases
Because the amount of information
available on-line on the Internet is
quite vast there are certain user
friendly tools available to help the
user navigate to what s/he actually
needs. A tool called GOPHER, for
example, uses a system of simple
menus to carry the user to host
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institutions that carry relevant
information. The World Wide Web
tool is based on hypertext (and now
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hyper or multi-media). This
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effectively means that a document is
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displayed with highlighted words
which, if clicked on or otherwise
invoked, can branch the user out into
other documents and databases and so
on
ad infinitum.
One can even
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download audio lectures in law
through the LII provided one's
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hardware has a multi-media
capability!
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Access
Access to the Internet was generally
restricted to the academic community
until quite recently but now the
majority of new Internet users are
private sector based. The Internet is
rapidly becoming the
de facto
international standard for conducting
electronic business. A useful side-
effect of this shift in emphasis with
the Internet is that whereas e-mail was
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