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This is probably a product of the massively automated "mark up" software used by AustLII, which is essentially heuristic in nature - that is, it makes `intelligent guesses' and therefore also makes the occasional mistake, such as a link to the section of an incorrect Act where the context of the case does not make it clear which Act is referred to.
Some of these are able to be fixed, however many relate to the nature of English (and particularly Legal) language. Broken links and unavailable documents should be reported to Feedback, with details on where the link occurred and what you expected to find.
The software to mark up AustLII's databases was written by Andrew Mowbray. It is the result of a number of years of development. The heuristic rules that it embodies continue to be refined to deal with the nuances of the various databases available via AustLII. A version of the markup scripts called UserMark is available to give users access to the markup technology.
The alphabetic list of cases which is available from the opening pages of some databases is generated automatically from the cases in the database. Unfortunately this may mean that the list of cases is not as useful as it might be, since case names provided by courts can include first names and other details. Please bear in mind the signifcant manual work that would be involved in keeping a more accurate alphabetic list up to date.
Legislation is best found by clicking on the relevant jurisdiction from the Databases page, chosing the acts database, then selecting from the alphabetical list. If using the search engine, set your search method to this act name only.
For the Case Law databases, currency can be established by looking for the 'Most Recent Case' line at the top of the 'Recent Cases' page. At the moment the currency details for legislation are best established by reading the table of contents and notes for the individual piece of legislation. The last update date is also displayed on the opening page of each legislation database.
The reproduction of legal materials on AustLII is always with copyright and data permissions of the Courts or Legislatures. However, this permission should not be read as having granted 'authorised' status to the AustLII published version. In the case of Commonwealth Legislation, for example, the 'authorised' version is still that published on paper by the Australian Government Publishing Service. In time this status may change ...
To borrow from the world of information technology marketing, the answer is 'Real Soon Now'. We are always negotiating for the addition of new materials to the AustLII databases. There is a recognised advantage in the use of comprehensive sources when undertaking legal research, and we aim to make AustLII the most comprehensive resource for Australian legal research.
If you work for a court or tribunal that does not have its materials published on AustLII then we encourage you to contact us at Feedback to discuss arrangements. If you'd like to see a particular court or tribunal on AustLII then contact them and suggest they publish on AustLII.
AustLII does not choose which cases will be reported. For some jurisdictions AustLII holds every case decided in a particular jurisdiction, for others we hold significant decisions (as selected by the court), and in others we hold only reported cases. There are very few databases on any service (electronic or paper based) which include all decisions of a particular court.
If AustLII's coverate does not include a case you need you may be able to get it at one of the subscriber services. Butterworths Online is one such service that has an extensive array of legal materials. (Other legal publishers should contact us to be listed in this part of the FAQ.)
This is not an argument with AustLII, but with the nature of our legal system itself. It is a basic feature of our system of justice that courts and tribunals conduct their hearings in public and that they publicly report their reasons for judgment. There are only some very narrow exceptions to this principle (victims of crime in certain types of offences or cases involving children for example).
There are two main reasons for the transparency of the Anglo-Australian system of justice:
AustLII is only one of the mechanisms by which courts and tribunals publish their decisions.
If you still feel that you'd like to have the case removed then AustLII has some some procedures in place to deal with your complaint:
First, contact AustLII at Feedback and let us know the exact location of the case (or cases) that you would like removed.
Without waiting for a reply from AustLII, immediately contact the Registrar of the court or tribunal which handed down the decision (see the WhitePages for contact information). Let them know that you want either a suppression order on the case or for your name to be removed. Provide full contact details as well as case numbers, citation and decision date.
Let us know that you have contacted the court.
If the court agrees to your request they will contact us directly with a suppression order or a new version of the case with your name replaced by an initial. Please be aware that each court will have specific guidelines in which this will be done.
At present, transcript of most cases is only generated from tapes on demand, at some cost. We are not currently planning to provide transcript of cases as a general service.
However, the High Court is now providing AustLII with transcripts of proceedings. The transcripts date from 1996 and can be found at the High Court of Australia Transcripts database page.
After search results have been returned, pick the document you want to look at. At the top of the page will be a link called Context -- if you click on it, it should indicate where in the document your search term occured. Use the up and down arrows next to each highlighted search term to navigate through the document to see where else your search terms appear.
The Context link isn't 100% accurate -- it will highlight and select every search term, even if that peice of text did not trigger the "hit". This sometimes gives the impression that SINO returned a document that didn't meet the search criteria, however this is not the case.
In the case of legislation and High Court cases, persistent references allow you to easily find links to the document you are viewing. This is accomplished simply through the use of the [Noteup] button at the top (or bottom) of the document you are viewing. The use of this link will generate a search for references to the document you are viewing.
As a basic introduction, 'common words' are words that are not indexed by the search engine as they occur so often as to be practically useless search terms. Common words are stripped from searches before they are undertaken to improve speed and efficiency. For the very curious, a current list of common words is available at the common words help page.
In the past, AustLII's common words list has grown quite large to cope with technical limitations in the Solaris operating system. The list has since been drastically cut and the new search interface will report if you ever use a common word in a search.
The SINO search engine was written by Andrew Mowbray especially for AustLII. It is a free text retrieval engine intended for use with httpd and other embedded applications. It was written to fulfil a number of goals, including the following:
For the full story, see Full SINO Doco.
SINO has been licensed to a number of public interest sites, including some overseas. It may also be available for commercial licensing and support (for further information, contact Andrew Mowbray at andrew@austlii.edu.au.
If you're willing to get your hands into a bit of compiling and installation then you can get the SINO source code from the Technical Library Tools page (as well as some other goodies). Please read the accompanying licence agreement and documentation carefully as only limited support can be provided by AustLII.
There are usually about two bottlenecks between AustLII and Australian end users ...
For the technical souls out there, AustLII equipment is connected to the outside world via the University of Technology, Sydney which is also the home of the Sydney Regional Network Organisation. This means that AustLII has very fast access to the AARNet 2 Backbone.
We have completed network traces on numerous occasions to determine the source of bottlenecks and invariably these are beyond our control.
That said, there are times when AustLII's servers start to run a bit slowly. Peak usage times occur on Tuesdays and Thursdays at around 11am-1pm and 2pm-4pm. AustLII is continually reviewing its hardware and software requirements and upgrading as funds allow.
We are not really in the habit of evaluating or recommending Internet Service Providers (ISPs). For people who really need advice, we recommend that you contact the Law Foundation of New South Wales, as they have evaluated a number of different service providers and are in a better position to make recommendations. They can be contacted by phone on (02) 299 5621 or by email at <lawfound@fl.asn.au>. University students and staff should try within their institutions before approaching commercial providers.
Legislation
If you wish to download legislation, use the [Download] button at
the top or bottom of the Table of Provisions or at the top or bottom
of each section of the act or regulations. This will provide a menu of
download formats. Chose "RTF" in preference to "plain text" where it
is available.
Case Law
To download case law, use the browser's {Save As} feature to save the
file as "source" (rather than text). You can then load the file into a
HTML compatible word processor.
See generally, Download Help.
If you were hoping to download a full act in HTML, see 4.5
Unlike legislation, which is easily divided into small, quickly downloaded parts, cases are very difficult to split. We are continuing to investigate this problem, although we must also be aware of the access issues raised by creating a browser specific solution (like using frames - see 4.4).
Splitting up cases is a function that is intended to be rolled in to a future version of AustLII's document management system.
The most likely cause of problems with your browser is the size of documents (particularly cases - see 4.2). There are a number of solutions to this problem:
Most of the AustLII materials are marked-up using HTML2. This means that most browsers should have no trouble with them. While the majority of AustLII users are using Netscape, we are also aware of many users using Microsoft Explorer and even Lynx (often a necessity for the visually impaired who use screen readers). At this stage none of our plans are tied to any particular browser.
We are not currently providing the capability to download entire acts or databases marked up in HTML. There are number of reasons for this, including copyright in our markup and the technical issues created by the distribution of heirarchies of files. Size and network bandwith are also concerns. Some of our databases are hundreds of megabytes in size and are not suited to an already overloaded Australian backbone (especially when update frequencies are considered).
Entire acts are available in a single file by using the "Download" feature available on each act. See Legislation Help.
Not at this stage. HTTP provides a similar level of functionality to anonymous FTP and is implemented more securely. FTP of AustLII materials is not planned for the future.
No. AustLII does not provide database access via CD-ROM. Materials distributed via CD-ROM are expensive to produce, cannot be updated as frequently and create further technical problems. AustLII is a small organisation with few resources and the World Wide Web provides the most suitable method of distribution for our materials. In addition, most data suppliers have plans to (or are aleady) distribute their own CD-ROM versions for a fee.
Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4 is known to crash when trying to print a document with a long title (such as some cases). The only real solution is to upgrade to the latest version of IE. You can get it for free from Microsoft.
A temporary workaround is to save the file to disk and load it into MS-Word or a similarly capable word processor. You can then print the document from there with no problem.
Check your system very carefully. Chances are that the virus did not come from AustLII.
Microsoft Word contains a feature called Macros. Macros are small programs that you can attach to your documents. Sometimes this feature is abused, and a virus is attached to the document. The virus may replicate itself and spread to other documents.
While MS-Word is not the only program that has a macro feature it is the most commonly abused. However, not all file types are capable of containing a macro virus. For example, plain text and RTF files cannot contain macros -- they simply do not support it. AustLII only distributes plain text or RTF versions of cases or legislation from the "Download" page. You cannot get a virus this way. If your IT department assures you that the virus came from AustLII via an RTF file then they are flat wrong. It is simply not technically possible. It's like blaming AustLII for your cats cold.
If further information is required then feel free to contact us at AustLII Feedback.
We have no problem with people establishing links into the AustLII pages (in fact we encourage this, and make sure that there is a well established naming scheme). For more details, please see our Linking Policy.
NB: Do not link to cases which have are named using unrepXXX.html as the final component of the location. These cases are not yet maintained at a fixed location.
NB 2: When linking to pages in World Law, use the canonical URL given at the bottom of the page (ends in a number, followed by ".html"). Do not use the "hierarchical path" that you might see elsewhere. There are exceptions. See our Linking Policy.
See 5.3 for further details on the structure of links.
This depends on the type of material, and the method of reproduction. AustLII is proudly a "free to air" service, but nonetheless our detailed markup is subject to copyright and cannot be copied for commercial purposes. The markup is absolutely not in the public domain as far as any sort of commercial reproduction is concerned.
For more information you should contact Feedback and request information about the specific materials you want to reproduce.
In general, the paths to AustLII databases are very carefully structured within a heirarchy that provides easily followed naming conventions. For example, Commonwealth Consolidated Acts are at </au/legis/cth/consol_act> and the High Court of Australia cases are at </au/cases/cth/high_ct>.
Full details of this naming scheme and the construction of the unique identifiers for legislation will shortly be published in an AustLII Technical Note. In the interim, legislation can be linked to, by copying the link after finding the legislation.
Yes. See the pages at the Web Developers pages for documentation and examples.
Yes, subject to the conditions of the Robots Exclusion Protocol as defined in our robots.txt file. Please do not index material excluded by robots.txt. Material is not excluded arbitrarily.
If you wish to index material currently excluded by robots.txt you should contact Feedback and make special arrangements.
Yes. We log access for a number of reasons, including research, development, security, maintenance and for statistics generation. We currently log accesses using a slightly enhanced version of the Common Logfile format which produces logs similar to the following:
138.25.65.9 - - [8/Oct/1996:16:58:42 +1000] "GET /au/legis/cth/consol_act/pa1990109/s3.html HTTP/1.0" 200 6646 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/pa1990109/index.html
This information includes details on the host address, time of access, exact request, response status code, size transmitted and http referer (where you were last). This information is never publically released by AustLII, and is only used for research subject to privacy guarantees.
Everytime you make a request for a document on the World Wide Web, your computer reveals information about itself so that the document can be accurately returned ... most of this information is discarded, but some is logged (see 6.1 above).
You get more information on what your browser reveals about you from the Privacy Analysis of your Internet Connection page run by privacy.net. Users who are genuinely concerned about such issues can use the anonymizer (free and subscription version available) for privacy protection.
We are probably far more concerned about this than you are! One of our main system administration tasks is the maintenance of a fairly tight hold over security. It is for this reason that our services are split between multiple services, and also why some services are simply not available from the AustLII sites.
Further information about security may be provided for legitimate queries.
See question 1.13.
AustLII is a jointly operated "research infrastructure facility" of the Faculties of Law at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). AustLII now also has an extensive research group and a broad public policy role.
See AustlII Personnel.
Further details about the AustLII research group are also available there.
Feedback is the most closely monitored contact channel, used for making queries, reporting problems or asking for new features / databases.
Contact AustLII provides telephone, fax and (snail) mail details.
For individuals, see Personnel.
Subscribe to the AustLII News mailing list. This is used to provide news, announcements and updates regarding the AustLII service. Further details on subscription and back issues are available.
AustLII was established using funding from DEET and the two host Universities (University of Technology, Sydney and the University of New South Wales) It now also receives funding from the Law Foundation of New South Wales, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, the Australian Research Council and other bodies. The Law Foundation also assists AustLII in obtaining access to primary legal materials to be included on AustLII.
Ongoing support comes from a variety of organisations. Acknowledgements are given on the Sponsors page.
AustLII aims to improve access to justice through better access to legal information.
AustLII aims to put on the Net 'public legal information': primary legal materials (legislation and decisions of courts and tribunals); and secondary materials that are (or ought to be) in the public domain or able to be licensed for free. AustLII's public policy agenda is to convince governments, courts, law reform bodies and other publicly-funded organisations to make legal materials they control available free via the internet.
AustLII is one of many organisations aiming to ensure that some part of cyberspace is public space, where no one is denied use of resources because of financial considerations. Its aim is to create a public law library on the internet.
AustLII is involved in extensive policy development regarding these and related issues. In addition, AustLII's researchers and staff are involved in many other legal technology issues.
See AustLII...some technical details.
See AustLII...some technical details.
Most of the software used by AustLII to "mark up" our HTML documents has been written by Andrew Mowbray. He is also the author of the SINO search engine (see 2.4 above).
The CGI scripts are all written in Perl, with the help of a number of Perl modules (especially the LWP and CGI libraries).
Our WWW server software is currently Apache, a public domain UNIX HTTP server.
If you are a member of the public:
If you are a legal practitioner:
If you are a student or staff member in a University:
If you work for an organisation that produces 'public legal information' contact us so that we can co-operate!
From time to time we do have positions available to work with the AustLII team. For current positions available, and general information about employment with AustLII, see our employment page. For ongoing updates, subscribe to News from AustLII.