Nishikawa-Pacher Andreas, Hamann Hanjo
Recipient of a DOC Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Department of Legal and Constitutional History, University of Vienna, Austria.
Vienna School of International Studies, Austria.
Oxf J Leg Stud. 2023 Feb 4;43(2):298-321. doi: 10.1093/ojls/gqac032. eCollection 2023 Summer.
Countries all over the world document their statutory law in official legal databases (OLD), but the extent to which these provide effective access to (statutory) law remains unexamined. Ideally, an OLD should be (i) provided online and free for all without requiring registration or payment, (ii) searchable with regard to statutes' titles, (iii) searchable with regard to the full texts of statutes, (iv) provided in a reusable text-based format and (v) comprehensive in its coverage of at least the laws currently in force. To highlight the nature of OLDs as consumer products, we borrow a term from business operations research and refer to a database fulfilling these basic criteria as a 'minimum viable' OLD. We survey 204 states and jurisdictions to assess how far their country-level OLDs adhere to the minimum viability standard. We find that only 48% of them do; 12% of states do not seem to offer any online OLD at all; and a further 40% of countries offer legal databases that lack at least one of the criteria listed above. The quality of legal access is associated with geographical distribution (with Europe faring the best), economic development and a population's overall Internet usage. The results suggest that comparative legal research faces considerable hurdles when dealing with the Global South; that metadata-enriched digitalisation of legal corpora still remains a desideratum for at least half the world; and that the inaccessibility of law may carry high costs for legal practitioners and the wider public.
世界各国都在官方法律数据库（OLD）中记录其成文法，但这些数据库在多大程度上能有效提供对（成文）法的访问仍未得到检验。理想情况下，一个官方法律数据库应具备以下特点：（i）在线免费提供，无需注册或付费；（ii）可按法规标题进行搜索；（iii）可按法规全文进行搜索；（iv）以可重复使用的基于文本的格式提供；（v）至少全面涵盖现行法律。为了突出官方法律数据库作为消费产品的性质，我们借用商业运营研究中的一个术语，将满足这些基本标准的数据库称为“最低可行”官方法律数据库。我们对204个国家和司法管辖区进行了调查，以评估其国家层面的官方法律数据库在多大程度上符合最低可行性标准。我们发现，其中只有48%的数据库符合标准；12%的国家似乎根本没有提供任何在线官方法律数据库；另有40%的国家提供的法律数据库至少缺少上述标准中的一项。法律获取的质量与地理分布（欧洲情况最佳）、经济发展以及民众的整体互联网使用情况相关。结果表明，比较法研究在处理全球南方问题时面临相当大的障碍；法律语料库的元数据丰富数字化至少对世界上一半地区来说仍是一种迫切需求；而且法律获取不便可能会给法律从业者和更广泛的公众带来高昂成本。
