Overview

The Encyclopedia of Law is a free online service that helps the readers to find legal information and web resources for their studies and research.

With millions of resources available on the Internet, it can be difficult to find useful material. We have reviewed and evaluated thousands of resources to help our readers choose key websites about legal information.

Context

The environment within which we operate is constantly changing, the people we serve are finding new ways of working, and we grapple with finding appropriate measures to demonstrate value for money and develop our services to ensure continuing relevance. This context is not unique to the Encyclopedia of Law, but is recognisable for many information services.

As an organisation we took the opportunity to re-think the way we operate and evaluate our core business. The latter stays the same. There is no doubt in our minds that a service which is concerned with issues of free access to law, quality and trust is even more relevant now than when the project started. We reflected on the former, our model of working, i.e. a distributed network of legal subject groups with a whole host of further collaborators, partners and contributors; and reinforced our commitment to working in a way which provides creative exchange of ideas, a variety of expertise, and integral links within the community we serve. We operate with a culture of collaboration, aligned to community needs, and at our core we provide access to secundary legal materials.

Work in Progress

Lawi is a work in progess. Services and applications will be added in phases and may be modified with experience. This is an overview of our current plan:

Alert and Engage

Social networking services and other online and conventional outreach strategies will be used to alert individuals and groups who may have an interest in the entries.

Educate and Inform

Materials about law, specially in developed countries, and effective participation will be available, strucutured to allow people to learn about the law, making it, often, more accessible.

A second aspect of Education will be to train students in online facilitation of discussion. A goal of the project is to produce young lawyers with basic knowledge of Web 2,0 technologies and a framework for thinking about the ways the Internet might improve legal knowledge and public interaction with government policymakers.

Facilitate Informed Discussion

A forum and a moderated blog will facilitate public discussion of the major issues of a featured point of law or its practice.

Encourage Comment Aggregation & Consensus-building

Reaction and discussion will lead into a collaboration phase during which users can participate in drafting and responding to other users comments. Moderators trained in group facilitation will actively assist this phase.

How does Lawi works?

The goal of Lawi is not just more public participation, but better participation. The site is designed to make it easier for this to happen.

A note on site policy: Regulation Room does not pre-screen comments before they are posted. As much as possible, moderators allow users to engage each other in conversation without intervention by us. But we are committed to maintaining an environment in which productive discussion about important issues can happen. We will take action towards any content that we believe undermines such an environment. See Terms and Conditions. Our action may range from a gentle reminder about the ground rules for discussion, to redacting (removing a portion of) comments, to removing the entire comment, to disabling a user account in extreme cases. We will try to indicate when and why we have redacted or removed a comment, except in cases of spam or similar activities.