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Free and Easy? The Development of Internet Access to Irish Legal Materials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2008

John Furlong
Affiliation:
John Furlong is Director of Legal Resources and Education at Matheson Ormsby Prentice, Solicitors, Dublin and Immediate Past Chair of BIALL. This article is a revised version of an article which appeared in the Gazette of the Law Society of Ireland (October 2002).

Extract

Over the past decade, there has been a remarkable growth in the availability and use of Irish legal materials in electronic form (principally through the internet). There has been a transformation in the ease of access to legal materials – from a jurisdiction in which legal practitioners obtained up-to-date paper materials with difficulty to one where up-to-the-minute information is freely available online. It is now possible to access online the full text of Irish legislation, judgments, explanatory codes and memoranda, details of administrative procedures, parliamentary debates, certain secondary legislation, guidance notes and statements of practice. What has led to this remarkable transformation? What are the principal factors which have encouraged the continuing free flow of official legal materials onto the internet?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The British and Irish Association of Law Librarians 2003

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