By Wendy Yang
Since 1995, the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) has provided free access to law in Australia. For law students, legal practitioners and others, AustLII has been an indispensable tool for legal research including access to legislation, case law, and journals.
To mark this milestone, a special event was held on Wednesday, 20 August. The Chief Justice of Australia, the Hon. Stephen Gageler AC, and Attorney General of Australia, the Hon. Michelle Rowland MP both attended the event as guests of honour. Close to 200 guests representing the legal profession, courts and tribunals, higher education and community legal sector were at the event.
AustLII was developed after Graham Greenleaf (UNSW) and Andrew Mowbray (UTS) received a grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC). In 2008, the two universities agreed to form a foundation, the AustLII Foundation Limited, to manage stakeholder funding and to ensure the ongoing provision of ‘free access’ to law. While the users are asked to make an ‘annual contribution,’ the AustLII Foundation does not charge users to access or use the site, nor does it host advertising.
According to AustLII, in 2024, it received over 450 million requests for pages (more than 1.2 million requests per day) from over 10 million distinct hosts. The service contains over 1000 databases and publishes the decisions and judgments of over 200 courts and tribunals. It also provides historical decisions from over 100 courts and tribunals.
In November, AustLII will host the ‘Law via Internet’ conference. The conference will bring together leaders of the ‘Free Access to Law Movement’ (FALM) and examine topics like access to legal data, transformative potential of AI and the hurdles in ensuring integrity, reliability and trust during a period of swift technological change and how Generative AI has been the biggest disruption to legal information systems since AustLII commenced 30 years ago.
This article was first published on LSJ Online. It is republished here with permission.
