The Gazette 1982

GAZETTE

JULY/AUGUST 1982

LEGAL DATA BASE NOW ON TEST'

A research project of the Department of Library and

Information Studies in U.C.D., aimed at establishing the

feasibility of establishing an automated data base of Irish

Legal Information, is now available for test. The project,

funded by the National Board for Science and

Technology, has produced a small data base in the subject

area of Constitutional Law.

One of the difficulties which faced those organising the

project in considering the choice of a suitable subject area

was the non-exclusivity of the Irish Legal Data Base. In

many areas of law, U.K. statutes still apply and United

Kingdom case law is of significant persuasive authority,

even where the bulk of it is no longer of binding authority.

While one of the reasons for choosing Constitutional Law

as the test subject was because of its general interest to

people outside the legal profession, it must also have been

in the minds of those making the choice that Constitutional

Law provided an area of reasonable exclusivity. The

system, called "Aidlaw", is a full text information

retrieval system, enabling every word of the original text to

be searched; the data base available is (1) The

Constitution of Ireland, (2) The Text Book — The Irish

Constitution by J. M. Kelly (3) Decided cases relating to

Articles 1 to 15 and 40 to 45 of the Constitution. The data

base includes full reports of some of the more important

cases but, in most cases, only head notes and abstracts

have been included.

There are ten different indices to the material in the

data base, which enable searches to be made not only

through the text but also for the decisions of a particular

judge, or the name of a particular book or the name of a

particular article. The organisers of the project are anxious

to arrange for as wide as possible a test of the system to be

rru

by potential users, primarily with a view to

ascertaining whether there is a sufficient demand for a

computerised legal information retrieval system in

Ireland.

The service may be accessed directly by potential users

through their own computer terminals, or be searched by

an intermediary. There is no charge for the use of the

service during the test period. Demonstrations or sample

searches can be made by contacting one of the following:

Aideen Cantwell, U.C.D. Tel. 693244, ext 8354. Jenny

Aston, Law Library, Tel. 720368. Margaret Byrne, Law

Society. Tel. 710711.

This project has been carried out at a time when a major

battle between competing commercial interests is being

fought in the U.K., where two legal information retrieval

systems are available, one being Lexis, which is being

marketed in the U.K. by Butterworths and the other,

Eurolex, which is being marketed by the Thompson

Organisation. The merits and de-merits of the rival

systems have recently been the subject of debate in the

columns of the New Law Journal. Reservations are being

expressed whether the data bases, as presently established,

are of particular interest to the ordinary practising solicitor

comprising, as they do, largely statutory material and

reports of cases. The view has been expressed that the

inclusion of what are called "secondary materials", such

as text books, commentaries and articles in legal journals

and books of precedents, would be of far greater value to

the ordinary practitioner than the wealth of information

already in the Data Base.

For Ireland, the problem is that of a small jurisdiction

whose statutory and case law is inextricably mixed up with

that of the United Kingdom, so that the establishment of

an "Irish Legal Data Base" would necessarily involve the

inclusion of substantial amounts of U.K. material. It is

understood that the major cost of a Legal Data Base arises

in the original inputting of the material into the system. If

this is the case, it would seem difficult to justify on any

economic basis the establishment of a separate and

comprehensive Irish legal Data Base, since it would

involve the inclusion of much material already included in

one or other of the existing U.K. Data Bases. This, no

doubt, will be one of the points to be raised at a seminar

which is to be promoted by the National Board for Science

and Technology to consider the results of the project. •

The

daily

sealing

. . . of Administration Bonds is a

feature of our service, and of course,

our terms are highly competitive.

HIBERNIAN

INSURANCE

Offices throughout the country.

154