2012, marks the 20th Anniversary of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, the first legal website on the Internet and the birthplace of the free law, open access movement.

Copyright regimes in many African countries (where mentioned) provide a favourable framework for free access to law initiatives, but access to historical content is often hampered by restrictive copyright conditions. 

In a recent development, CanLII, a member of the global free access to law movement, and the Federation of Law Societies in Canada have made submissions in the case of SOCAN v. Bell et al currently before the Supreme Court of Canada. 

CanLII' reasons: 

The New Zealand government recently approved new principles for managing the data and information it holds.

In what is seen as one of a few pioneering moves by government, the principles state that government data and information should be open, readily available, well managed, reasonably priced and re-usable unless there are necessary reasons for its protection.

More information is available here:

http://bit.ly/qZZ57T

In July 2011 AfricanLII completed the Southern Africa portion of the "Free Access to Law - Is It Here to Stay?" study into the sustainability of free access to law publishers. We produced comprehensive case studies on the Southern African Legal Information Institute and the Malawi Legal Information Institute (to be made available to the pubic shortly).

In a new blog post on Cornell LII's Vox PopuLII blog, Mariya Badeva-Bright discusses some of the lessons learnt for African legal information institutes supported by AfricanLII. 

AfricanLII attended and presented at the at the Access to Knowledge Global Academy Workshop, held 18-19 January 2011 at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa.