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An Overview of the AustLII Project

The Australasian Legal Information Institute provides free internet access to Australasian legal materials. AustLII is one of the largest sources of legal materials on the net, with over 20 gigabytes of raw text materials and over 4 million searchable documents. AustLII publishes public legal information: that is, primary legal materials (legislation, treaties and decisions of courts and tribunals); and secondary legal materials created by public bodies for purposes of public access (law reform and royal commission reports etc). AustLII's policy agenda is to convince parliaments, governments, courts, law reform bodies and other public institutions to make legal materials they control available free via the Internet.

What is in the AustLII Collection ?

Who uses AustLII ?

AustLII is used by over 80,000 people who access over 600,000 pages per day (as at February 2007). Our usage statistics indicate that AustLII's users span the whole community, including educational institutions (about 30%), the legal profession and business (25%), community organisations (15%), government (10%), and 20% from overseas.

How is AustLII Funded ?

AustLII is operated jointly by the Faculties of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW). It is funded by grants of around $1.4 million per year. For details of AustLII's current funding sources, refer to the Funding Sources page.

AustLII's Technical Innovations

AustLII's approach to computerising legal materials is based on ten years of research and development. Technical innovations by AustLII researchers include:

• Automated rich hypertext: There are over 40 million automatically inserted hypertext links in AustLII's more than 2 million pages, including links to statutory definitions, other sections, Acts and Regulations, and cases.

• Development and use of our own software: The whole AustLII database can be searched in a few seconds, using the SINO search engine, with boolean and proximity operators and relevance ranking. The LINKS software maintains and presents AustLII's indexes.

• Integration of hypertext and text retrieval: Every section in an Act and Regulation has a 'Noteup' link which causes an automatic search for cases, other legislation, and secondary materials that refer to that section.

• Generic point-in-time legislation system: This allows an AustLII user to see an Act or section as it was for any date covered by the system. Users can also visually compare sections at different dates side-by-side.

AustLII is committed to continuing research in computerisation of law, and its researchers have received a series of Australian Research Council grants for research on text retrieval, hypertext, inferencing, point-in-time legislation, indexing and litigation support.

Contacting AustLII

For details of how to contact AustLII, please refer to our contact page.

To contact AustLII with feedback, please use the AustLII Feedback form.