What Government and the Law can Learn from Cloud Computing’s Success

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0200

[Originally published on the OpenUp blog.]

The enormous impact of cloud computing on the pace of business innovation over the last ten years bears an important lesson for the law and the government: the significant value of shared, re-usable resources.

The success of Twitter, Netflix, Uber, the iPhone and thousands of other products and companies that have launched in the last decade is in many ways directly due to cloud computing. The on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud platforms offered by the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have dramatically lowered the costs of innovation, experimentation, failure and growth. This has had enormous benefits for consumers, both in the form of business innovation and reduced prices.

How cloud computing changed innovation

Before cloud computing, running a business on the Internet required multi-year hardware agreements, large up-front capital investments, and high ongoing operating and maintenance costs. If your business was an overnight success and thousands of users overwhelmed your service, you had little chance of reacting fast enough to add additional servers to handle the load before your paying users walked away, frustrated.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is famous for telling companies to stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting and move to the cloud instead.

This undifferentiated heavy lifting was all the hard work that every business had to do before they could focus on the value created by their product or service.

It was undifferentiated because everyone had to do the same thing (buy and maintain hardware and everything required to run it).
It was heavy lifting because it was expensive and time-consuming.

Businesses were spending a lot of time and money on something that neither differentiated them from their competitors nor added value for their customers.

Cloud computing turned all that on its head. Anyone can now, in literally seconds, get basically as much hardware as they like, pay for it by the hour, and throw it away when they no longer need it. Amazon, Microsoft and Google do the heavy lifting for them. As a result, businesses can spend a much bigger portion of their time and money on their competitive edge, innovating for their customers.

The muck of consolidating law

So what does that mean for the law and the government?

In South Africa, as in almost every other African country and many others around the world, there is no source of freely accessible, openly licensed, consolidated legislation. In many instances, the government itself does not own a full digital collection of consolidated legislation.

Companies such as Lexis Nexis, Sabinet and Juta make a business out of taking the original acts from the Government Gazettes, re-capturing and typesetting them, consolidating them by applying amendments, and publishing them. A public function—disseminating the law—has been privatised.

To work with and use the law, civil society, the government and the private sector must either perform these same laborious tasks or pay others who have performed them.

This is undifferentiated heavy lifting.

It’s undifferentiated because anyone and everyone who needs up-to-date, consolidated laws must first go through this process. Doing so doesn’t help companies differentiate themselves from their competition, since they all need to do the same work.
It’s heavy lifting because the process requires expertise, is laborious and time-consuming, and is thus expensive.

How this hurts us

Companies with consolidated collections need to recover the costs of the consolidation process, pushing up customer prices. The nature of the product means that they’re not willing to share their collections openly for re-use since they’re a valuable investment. This means the barrier to entering the industry is high because a new entrant must build up a body of legislation before they can even begin to add value. Competition and innovation is therefore poor, which again hurts the end user.

There’s also the additional concern that everyone must and should have access to up-to-date versions of a country’s laws. Unfettered access is the most basic requirement of the rule of law. The government, civil society and the private sector all need it in order to function effectively.

Stop wasting money

Here’s what we can learn from cloud computing: we must stop spending money on undifferentiated heavy lifting when it comes to the law.

Every country needs a collection of its laws that is:

available to all, for free
openly-licensed for commercial and non-commercial use
machine-friendly with rich metadata
up-to-date
consolidated, and available as it was at a particular point in time
trusted

Such a collection will free up the private sector to differentiate themselves from their competition. It will lower costs for companies, the government and end users. It will lower the barrier to entry and promote innovation in the legal and justice domains.

Importantly, it will allow all individuals, civil society, the public and private sectors equal access to the laws that govern them.

Who and how?

A coalition of public, private sector and civil society organisations must collaborate to ensure openness, fairness and efficacy.

Government, as the originator of laws, is best placed to seed and drive the creation of such a collection. They can mandate the use of appropriate standards (more on this below) and processes that ensure openness and inclusivity. Government is also critical for contributing to processes to maintain and add to the collection as new laws are drafted, promulgated and repealed.

An excellent starting point is the existing collections held by the private sector. They are generally the highest quality, broadest collections of up-to-date, consolidated legislation. If their owners are unwilling to share these collections then civil society and the government must work together to build a collection from scratch.

PDFs are not good enough

The format of the collection is important. A collection of PDFs or webpages isn’t sufficient. Cloud computing works because the utilities being sold are useful in a wide variety of contexts and industries. So, too, must these digital laws be machine-friendly and data-rich in order to be broadly useful, including for use-cases we don’t yet know about.

Machine-friendly formats are critical because there is so much more value in legislation beyond the “words on a page” that a PDF encapsulates. Legislators can write better laws if technology helps them understand the impact of potential changes; paralegals can provide better support if they have access to richly annotated legislation and cross-linked case law; citizens will have better access to justice if they understand more clearly how the law is woven into their day-to-day lives.

An excellent candidate format is Akoma Ntoso. It is an open (ie. non-proprietary), standardised format for legislative documents that can capture the content, structure and semantics of a piece of legislation. It is machine-friendly, can be used to generate webpages, e-books and PDFs, and enables many other use cases such as those listed above.

Conclusion

The legal and justice domains will not see the same degree of rampant innovation that cloud computing has driven over the last decade, until we build a common collection of our laws.

We, as a society, have so much work to do to make the law approachable and accessible, understandable, useable and useful. We can only tackle these challenges if we stop investing in undifferentiated heavy lifting, build on a common base, and free up our resources to invest in innovation.

Laws.Africa, AfricanLII and Kenya Law: faster, cheaper, better

Thu, 14 Mar 2019 09:20:00 +0200

In the last week of February 2019, the team from Kenya Law visited AfricanLII and Laws.Africa in Cape Town and we spent a week exploring how Kenya Law can use Indigo to manage and consolidate Kenyan legislation.

Kenya Law, or the National Council for Law Reporting to use its formal name, is a semi-autonomous state corporation and is the official publisher of the Kenya Law Reports and the Laws of Kenya. This makes Kenya one of the few countries in Africa that consolidates and publishes its own legislation.

Kenya is also, to our knowledge, the only country in Africa to use machine-friendly Akoma Ntoso XML to consolidate and publish their legislation, both online and in print format.

Why Akoma Ntoso?

Akoma Ntoso (or AKN) is an open, non-proprietary XML markup format for legislative documents. It was accepted as an OASIS standard in 2018 and allows authors to capture the rich semantics and structure of legislation. When legislation is marked up with AKN, it’s machine-readable. This unlocks value and makes it faster and easier to publish legislation in multiple user-friendly formats, including online, mobile, ebook and hardcopy print. It also makes it easier for others to re-use the legislation in a variety of apps and services.

The Kenya Law challenge

The editorial team of Kenya Law are very experienced with Akoma Ntoso. They’ve been manually marking up their legislation with AKN for over 5 years and have a good understanding of both its strengths and the challenges it presents. Their AKN markup powers the Laws of Kenya website as well as the production of print-ready, high-quality Laws of Kenya books and bound volumes.

However, their current system inhibits them in two significant ways.

First, the manual process of marking up legislation with AKN is slow and error-prone.
Second, it’s difficult for them to fully use the power of AKN and add new functionality, such as rich point-in-time navigation, to the Laws of Kenya website.

Kenya Law and Laws.Africa are collaborating to see how the Indigo platform could help them solve both of these problems.

How does Indigo help?

Indigo is AfricanLII and Laws.Africa’s open source legislation consolidation platform. It makes it easy to mark up existing legislation with Akoma Ntoso and capture rich metadata. Indigo will help Kenya Law reduce the time it takes to consolidate complex legislation from months to days, ensuring the timeous publication of new and consolidated statutes. Indigo does this by automating mark-up and associated common tasks, implementing and supporting editorial workflows, linking up in standard ways to related sources of gazettes and legislation, while enforcing strict editorial controls over quality.

Indigo’s Content API makes it easy to pull content into another platform. This means that Kenya Law are free to run their public website using whichever platform they choose. This is crucial as their website must support gazettes, law reports, case law and much more in addition to legislation. Indigo focuses on legislation consolidation, and doesn’t restrict how its content can be used.

Indigo’s Content API also simplifies the complexities of working with Akoma Ntoso XML. This makes it easier to produce rich functionality for end users that help them navigate and work with legislation. For example, maintaining a Table of Contents for an act such as the Companies Act which has over 1000 sections is laborious and time-consuming. Indigo does this automatically and keeps it up to date with every amendment that is applied.

Built in Africa, for Africa

Indigo is open source software, built initially for AfricanLII, and further developed and maintained by the Laws.Africa team in Cape Town, South Africa. AfricanLII is an umbrella organization, an overarching collegiate of 15 legal information institutes (LIIs) in Africa. By working with AfricanLII and with Kenya Law - AfricanLII’s most experienced member in the legislation consolidation domain - we’re expanding the skills and knowledge of working with Akoma Ntoso and Indigo in Africa. This reduces the cost of working with these technologies and grows the regional and global Akoma Ntoso community and applications ecosystems.

Into the future together

We’ll be working with Kenya Law as they migrate to Indigo over the next few months.

Kenya Law are at the front of the pack when it comes to working with legislation as data and providing up-to-date legislation available online, for free. We’re incredibly excited to be working with Kenya Law to improve their efficiency and enable new functionality for Kenyan judges, advocates, academics and citizens as they work with the Laws of Kenya.

Kenya Law possesses tremendous knowledge and expertise in legislation consolidation and working with AKN. Laws.Africa will work with Kenya Law to translate that knowledge into resources and skills for the growing community of volunteer legislation contributors across Africa. Other LIIs in Africa part of the AfricanLII umbrella, in particular, will be the first to benefit from being able to implement these best practices and carry updated legislation for the benefit of their users.

Sign up to the Laws.Africa newsletter and read more about the Laws.Africa mission if you’re interested in free access to the law in Africa.

Attribution: Photo of Kenyans running the 2012 London Olympic Marathon by Sue Kellerman on Flickr.

Automating OpenByLaws.org.za with Laws.Africa

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 15:06:00 +0200

Municipal by-laws are part of the legal foundation of effective communities, small businesses, and local service delivery. However, they are often difficult to find, are out of date, or are in big PDF files that are difficult to work with.

OpenByLaws.org.za solves this problem by making South African by-laws easy to find, read and share. It includes the by-laws for a growing number of municipalities, including Cape Town, Johannesburg and eThekwini, and, through local partnerships, a number of smaller towns such as Cape Agulhas.

Open By-laws uses Laws.Africa to provide rich, interactive functionality to readers, and to automatically update its website every night. This means that it’s quick and easy to make the by-laws available to residents, municipal staff, and law enforcement, using either computers or mobile phones.

Quick and Easy: Legislation as Data

Open By-laws uses the Laws.Africa Content API to automate website updates. Every night, Open By-laws automatically pulls in the latest by-laws from Laws.Africa and publishes them on the openbylaws.org.za website. This includes images, gazette information, inline definitions, and by-laws in HTML, PDF and ePUB formats.

Traditionally, a website like Open By-laws would be painstakingly maintained by hand. Every change would require an editor to ensure that the headings are correctly formatted, the table of contents is updated, definitions are linked, and that the PDF version matches the webpage version.

The Laws.Africa Content API treats legislation as data, which means we can completely automate these tasks. Formatting is applied automatically, the table of contents is generated automatically, definitions are linked automatically, and the PDF versions are—you guessed it—generated automatically.

In addition, because the legislation is available as structured data (rather than as a Word document or a PDF), Open By-laws can add rich functionality. For example, specially defined terms are linked and their definitions are shown in a pop-up:

What else can be done with the content API?

The Laws.Africa Content API is very powerful. It provides a simple interface to extract and work with machine-friendly legislation, and associated metadata, using the open Akoma Ntoso XML markup standard.

Using the Content API, you can include African legislation in your website or app, build interactive tools to help users explore legislation relevant to them, or use machine learning to do research and analysis.

Find out more about the Laws.Africa Content API at laws.africa/api.

Who keeps the by-laws up-to-date?

The Laws.Africa editors and contributor community keep the by-laws up-to-date. When new by-laws and amendments are published in the government gazettes, they are updated on the platform, reviewed, and made available through the Content API.

Anyone can become a contributor. Laws.Africa provides training, support and guidance. The work is divided into tasks that are clearly described and easy to do.

For example, here are the tasks and by-laws for Cape Town.

Contributions feed into the legislation commons which is freely available online, to everyone. Apply to Laws.Africa to become a contributor if you’d like to help out.

Making even more by-laws freely available

Laws.Africa and Open By-laws are partnering with South African municipalities to put their by-laws online and provide training on how to maintain them on the Laws.Africa platform. If you’re interested, please email info@laws.africa.

You can find out more about how to use the Laws.Africa Content API in your website, app or research at laws.africa/api or by emailing us at info@laws.africa.

(Photo by Rohan Reddy on Unsplash.)

Using by-laws to tackle local service delivery

Thu, 22 Aug 2019 08:50:00 +0200

Few people would believe that we could get twenty people exploring their municipal by-laws on a Saturday morning. But that’s exactly what we did with the Cape Agulhas Youth Council on a Saturday in July, including in-depth discussion on how by-laws can be used to manage refuse removal, prevent illegal shebeens, and support small business.

In mid-July 2019, OpenUp, Laws.Africa and the Cape Agulhas Municipality held a by-laws workshop together with the Cape Agulhas Youth Council. The goal of the day was to explore how by-laws⁠—the local legislation produced by municipalities in South Africa⁠—can be used to resolve two pressing issues raised by Cape Agulhas youth: illegal shebeens (liquor sales) and poor refuse removal. OpenUp have also written about the workshop.

The participants discovered that the by-laws helped to frame their complaints and concerns and provide clear next steps to take towards resolving them. For almost all participants, this was the first time that they had read or worked with their local by-laws.

Making it easier to find and read by-laws, and raising awareness about them, helps residents to use the law to articulate and find solutions to service issues.

What are by-laws?

By-laws are local laws that are passed by municipalities. Jennica Beukes and Yolanda Bam-Mguye, both Masters students from the Dullah Omar Institute at the University of the Western Cape, explained to the participants that the South African Constitution gives municipalities the right to make by-laws for certain issues. These laws have as much power as a national or provincial law.

Liquor sales and refuse removal are two issues directly managed by municipalities through by-laws. Municipalities are allowed to determine when liquor can be sold and consumed in public, and when and how the municipality must remove refuse and recycling.

Ask “what do the by-laws say?”

Before the workshop, only two or three of the participants had read a by-law. While most participants had an idea that by-laws could help solve the issues they experience, they were uncertain where to start. At the end of the day, all participants knew where to go to read their by-laws and had actively worked with the text of a by-law to try to solve a local issue.

Participants worked in groups to explore solutions to two main issues raised by the Cape Agulhas Youth Council: illegal shebeens and poor refuse removal. Four printed copies of the Cape Agulhas Municipality By-laws (over two hundred pages each) were provided to participants, two in English and two in Afrikaans. The by-laws are also available online, but most participants preferred to work with the printed versions as it makes group work easier.

Each group answered six questions:

What problem are you trying to solve? Write it down in a single sentence.
What by-laws are applicable?
Do you understand the by-laws?
Is the law being broken?
What next?
Write down TWO next steps to take to resolve the problem.

These questions helped them to frame their problem clearly and identify how the law could support them. They helped participants to answer the question “what do the by-laws say?” This was crucial to determining how to engage with the municipality and law enforcement to explore solutions to their problem.

By-laws lay the foundations for discussion

One of the most exciting aspects of the workshop was that it involved municipal staff and residents working together. A by-law is legislation and compliance is not optional: both municipalities are residents are required to obey the law. When both parties are aware of what the law says, they have common ground through which they can work to resolve a problem or complaint.

For instance, without engaging with the by-laws, a resident may complain to their municipality that “the bins are overflowing and our streets are full of rubbish”. After working through what the refuse removal by-law says, they can express a more nuanced concern in terms of the by-law, such as “the bins in our streets are too small and too few; I request larger bins and more of them, as provided for in section 3(3) of the refuse by-law.”

Similarly, a resident can engage more confidently with a fellow resident when they know they have the law on their side. Instead of complaining that someone is littering and making the town untidy, they can instead confidently inform that person that by littering, the person is breaking section 8 of the refuse removal by-law.

Knowledge of by-laws clarifies a person’s rights and obligations. It can transform a subjective opinion into an objective fact, and it can help to level the playing field between two unequal parties.

What do YOUR by-laws say?

When did you last read your by-laws? Do you know where to find them? Are they up to date?

Open By-laws - www.openbylaws.org.za - is a project by Laws.Africa to make by-laws easier to find, read and share. Together, Laws.Africa and OpenUp are helping youth and municipalities to engage with their by-laws and make them widely available. If you’re interested in taking part, please email info@laws.africa.

Photo of trash bins by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

How we built an automated glossary for Namibian legislation

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 20:24:00 +0200

Legislation often defines terms that have a specific meaning. For instance, Namibia’s Criminal Procedure Act (Act 25 of 2004) defines “charge” as “an indictment, charge sheet, summons or written notice”. These definitions are crucial for the correct interpretation of legislation. It is interesting to explore which Acts define which terms and how those definitions change over time.

Using the Namibian statutes in the Laws.Africa legislation commons, we’ve created a glossary of more than 3000 defined terms and definitions.

The glossary is updated automatically and doesn’t require any human editors, thanks to the machine-friendly legislation in the Laws.Africa commons. We use machine learning to group together similar definitions to make the glossary simpler to work with.

As of the date of this post, there are 3086 terms defined in 297 Acts. The bulk (79%) of the terms are defined in only one Act, 14% in two or three Acts, and the remaining 7% of term are defined in four or more Acts.

The curious case of “minister”

Some terms are defined in many different acts with widely varying definitions. This is the case with “minister”.

The term “minister” is defined in 220 Acts. This is a common term since many Acts legislate how the government minister responsible for a particular area (such as Finance or Health) should execute their duties and obligations. The definition in each Act will depend on the subject area being legislated.

For example, here are the definitions of “minister” that relate to Health and Social Services:

“Minister” means the Minister of Health and Social Services;

National Welfare Act, 1965

National Pensions Act, 1992

Hospitals and Health Facilities Act, 1994

“Minister” means the Minister responsible for Social Services;

Social Work and Psychology Act, 2004

“Minister” means the Minister responsible for Health and Social Services;

Namibia Institute of Pathology Act, 1999

The glossary has detected that these definitions are all related to Health and Social Services, and has grouped them together. It also groups together definitions that are identical.

Here are the definitions related to Agriculture:

“Minister” means the Minister responsible for agriculture;

Plant Quarantine Act, 2008

Animal Health Act, 2011

Seeds and Seeds Varieties Act, 2018

“Minister” means the Minister of Agriculture;

Land Tenure Act, 1966

Soil Conservation Act, 1969

Subdivision of Agricultural Land Act, 1970

In all, there are 79 groups of related definitions of “minister”.

It’s interesting to notice a trend in the definition of “minister”. Before the 1990s, Acts almost always use the wording “the Minister of X”. From the late 1990s onwards, however, most Acts use the new wording “the Minister responsible for X”.

How old are “youth”?

It’s also interesting to discover definitions that are only slightly different. One might assume that the definition of “youth” would be consistent across the legislation. However, these two Acts define “youth” slightly differently:

“youth” means a young person aged from 16 to 35 years old.

National Youth Council Act, 2009

“youth” means an individual aged between 16 and 30 years.

National Youth Service Act, 2005

Similarly, the definition of a “minor” for gambling-related purposes is someone under the age of 21, whereas for witness protection purposes it is someone under the age of 18.

“minor” means a person who has not attained the age of 21;

Lotteries Act, 2017

Gaming and Entertainment Control Act, 2018

“minor” means a person who is below the age of 18 years;

Witness Protection Act, 2017

Besides being a useful research tool, there are lots of other interesting oddities to be found when exploring legislation through the lens of defined terms.

How we built the Glossary

The glossary is built and maintained automatically. As we add and amend new Acts on Laws.Africa, the platform automatically identifies defined terms, extracts their definitions, groups similar definitions together, and updates the glossary. So how does it do this?

Identifying definitions

At Laws.Africa we markup legislation using Akoma Ntoso XML. Our platform searches for a definition by looking for a phrase such as ‘“X” means…’ and then marks that up using the Akoma Ntoso <def> and <term> tags.

<p refersTo="#term-day">
  “<def refersTo="#term-day">day</def>” means the space of time between sunrise and sunset;
</p>

It’s straight-forward to then go through through all Acts and extract the <def> elements.

Grouping similar definitions

Once we have the terms and their definitions, we can cluster similar definitions together using some simple machine learning.

First, we extract the text from the definitions, strip punctuation and numbers, and normalise whitespace.

def defn_text(element):
    """ Extract plain text (without punctuation and numbers) from definition XML elements.
    """
    # join text elements with spaces, strip punctuation, and convert to lowercase
    text = remove_punctuation(' '.join(element.itertext()) or '').lower()
    # replace numbers with N
    text = num_re.sub(r'[0-9]+', 'N', text)
    return text


def remove_punctuation(text):
    # strip punctuation in unicode
    # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11066400/remove-punctuation-from-unicode-formatted-strings
    punct_table = dict.fromkeys(i for i in range(sys.maxunicode) if unicodedata.category(chr(i)).startswith('P'))
    return text.translate(punct_table)

# map a list of definition elements to plain text
texts = [defn_text(e) for e in definitions]

Now, for each term, we need to determine which definition texts are similar. We do this by vectorising the text and calculating the cosine similarity between the vectors. This gives what is effectively the “distance” between every pair of definitions.

from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer
from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import cosine_similarity

vectorizer = TfidfVectorizer()
tfidf = vectorizer.fit_transform(texts)
distances = 1 - cosine_similarity(tfidf)

Finally, we use agglomerative clustering to group the terms based on these distances. This gives us a list of cluster labels, one for each definition.

from sklearn.cluster import AgglomerativeClustering

clustering = AgglomerativeClustering(
    n_clusters=None, compute_full_tree=True, distance_threshold=0.3,
    affinity='precomputed', linkage='complete').fit(distances)
labels = clustering.labels_

We then use these cluster labels to show related definitions in the glossary.

The power of Legislation as Data

Treating legislation as machine-friendly data makes it really simple to build and maintain this glossary automatically, something that would have taken weeks or months of research by humans. This is just a small example of what’s possible with the machine-friendly Laws.Africa legislation commons. It simplifies previously time-consuming tasks and opens up a range of possibilities.

You can explore an automated glossary for all countries and places we have in the Laws.Africa commons. Choose a country, click “Insights” and then click “Glossary”. For example, check out the glossary for Namibian national Acts or the glossary for the City of Cape Town’s by-laws.

What will you build with machine-friendly legislation?

Machine-friendly legislation – who’s doing what

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 10:24:00 +0200

I recently attended the Lex Summer School and Akoma Ntoso Developers Workshop at the Law Faculty of the University of Bologna in Ravenna, Italy, where a jam-packed schedule introduced attendees to everything from marking up legislation by hand to using machine learning to extract knowledge from legal text. Below is a sample of current projects creating / working with machine-friendly legislation. (Note: AKN can be used for all kinds of legal texts, not just legislation; I’m just focusing on legislation because that’s what we do.)

While Akoma Ntoso (AKN) has been around in different guises for about a decade, it is a nascent standard, having been officially accepted by OASIS in August 2018. People are working with AKN in the ways that make most sense to their contexts, and it’s a strength of the standard that there isn’t One Right Way to produce and work with valid AKN.

Having legal text marked up in AKN unlocks the potential to work with the text in a more meaningful (and efficient) way. While improved search and cross-referencing alone may well be worth the trouble of converting existing legal corpuses into AKN, we can also take it a step or two further: creating links between concepts, marking up legal rules, and testing a body of rules for internal consistency. To those of us working towards access to the text itself, this is more of theoretical interest than of immediate practical application, but the work already being done in this space in other places gives us a glimpse into what is possible once the hard slog of converting legal text into AKN has been done.

Official AKN projects

FRBR URI resolver

Legislation changes over time, so a vague reference to a given Act is deceptively simple: the Act as it stood on the date this other document was produced? when it was published? or the most recent version? and in which language? Where multiple versions of a piece of legislation are available and only some of the reference information is given (say the Act year and number, but not the language), the resolver makes some informed guesses as to which one is meant (but gives the option to switch as well). Check out the demo here: http://akresolver.cs.unibo.it/ (Tip: once you’ve clicked through to a ‘resolved’ version, click on the AKN logo in the corner.)

Subschema generator

AKN is a large standard with very many elements and a pretty low barrier to validity. It doesn’t care if you have parts inside sections – a bonkers idea in the South African tradition, but perfectly valid in the US – precisely because what is bonkers to you and me is perfectly valid elsewhere. That also means, however, that it’s possible to produce a valid AKN document that doesn’t conform to the local tradition. One of a few ways of addressing this is to create a subschema, which when validated will check for valid AKN as well as any constraints you may want to add on top, e.g. ‘sections must have headings’ or ‘chapters may contain parts and sections, but no standalone text’. A user-friendly way of generating such a subschema can be found here: http://akn.web.cs.unibo.it/akgenerator/.

LIME – Language-Independent Markup Editor

LIME allows a human editor familiar with their local legal traditions to mark up legal text without hand-coding the XML. It includes an ‘Automatic markup’ functionality that will guess at elements like sections, parts, definitions, etc., and a human can then go through and add/correct as necessary. See for yourself here: http://sinatra.cirsfid.unibo.it/lime-lex/.

RAWE – LegalRuleML rules designer

LegalRuleML is a (you guessed it) markdown language for modelling logic rules inferred from legal texts. RAWE allows a human to construct such rules visually, using Scratch: http://sinatra.cirsfid.unibo.it/rawe-legregsw/.

Other editors

Laws.Africa: The Indigo editor
Xcential: LegisPro
Bungeni Consulting: BungeniX (conversion) and BungeniEd (editing)
European Commission: LEOS

Other cool projects and tools

African LIIs and Laws.Africa are building the largest free and open access repository of African gazettes

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 11:14:00 +0200

Legal certainty demands that public information is accessible, authoritative and available for verification. The Government Gazette is the official government publication for disseminating legislation, rules and other legal information. In African countries, the Gazette is often very difficult to find, and is generally only available in paper format and at a price. We created Gazettes.Africa to make this crucial source of government information freely available on the Internet.

Why gazettes?

The Government Gazette, sometimes also referred to as the Official Gazette or Official Journal, is a periodical publication - print or digital - which authoritatively carries public and legal notices. The Gazette serves an important communication and record-keeping function, establishing certainty on promulgated legislation, rules, order or any document within the governmental public order that needs to be public. The Interpretation Act of South Africa, for example, makes the Gazette the default outlet of any government (national, provincial or municipal) information. Additionally, a myriad of laws require private entities to publish notices in a public way through the gazette - liquor licenses, company information, change of name, etc. It is only in exceptional circumstances that the President may proclaim a different method of publication of public information. This is the situation, with slight variations, in most countries around the world. Gazettes are a vital component of legal certainty and the rule of law. They are indispensable sources of information for the legal and justice sectors in any country. But this most basic and most public of all documents is surprisingly difficult to obtain in many African countries.

Gazettes.Africa

Gazettes.Africa aims to be the ultimate repository of freely available digital gazettes from Africa. Backed by a “Gazette Machine”, which automates the recognition and storing of metadata, and aided by brilliant library students from the University of Cape Town, we have added over 21,000 gazettes in the past 3 months alone.

Visiting Gazettes.Africa today, you are able to browse chronologically through the gazettes of:

Angola (2015 - 2019)
Botswana (1997-1999; 2018)
eSwatini (1976 to date)
Kenya (1906 to date)
Mauritius (2017 - 2019)
Namibia (1990 to date)
Nigeria (1957 - 2018)
Rwanda (2004 - to date)
Tanzania (2010 to date)
Uganda (2000 to date)
Zambia (2015 to date)
Zimbabwe (1980 to date)

Botswana, Ghana, Mozambique, the Seychelles, Sierra Leone and South Africa are currently in preparation - most are digitized, but requiring further processing. The website offers a clean, simple search interface that allows users to freely search across jurisdictions, and filter results by country and gazette date.

This is just the beginning. We are aware that the collections have gaps. We have already scanned materials to fill some of these gaps, or have sourced the paper gazettes to digitize and upload. Some countries are simply difficult to service. We are planning a separate - on the ground - intervention in Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to that, we are appealing to all libraries - in Africa and internationally - to help us source, digitize and open access the public legal history of African countries. When we set off on this journey, we were surprised to discover that African gazettes are more readily available in the libraries of former colonial masters or in well-stocked libraries oceans away, but always remaining expensive and out of reach for African researchers and citizens. This prompted us to resolve to donate a copy of each digital collection to government and academic libraries in their respective countries.

Contributing to the collection

What about new gazettes? The AfricanLII network of LIIs is rising to the challenge. We are already receiving updates every Friday from our correspondents in a number of African countries. We are finalizing formal collaborations with two African countries’ Government Printers to capacitate them to publish the gazettes online freely and on the day of publication. Informed citizens, businesses and investors contribute more to the coffers of government than the small revenue generated from selling the gazette. International best practices reveal that free digital versions of the gazettes are both economically sustainable, and indeed more effective at communicating government and public information. What was previously the domain of cost recovery is turning into the domain of digital opportunity. African governments and their Printers are beginning to take note.

A myriad of future uses

A year ago Greg Kempe and I started Laws.Africa (https://www.laws.africa/) to create the first open-access digital and machine-readable legislation commons for Africa. Laws.Africa is important in so many ways (read about it here), but chief amongst those is the ambition to solve a perennial problem plaguing many African countries - producing consolidations of laws efficiently and authoritatively. In just under 12 months we have managed to process close to 5000 pieces of legislation from four African countries, and enroll two governments on the platform. The potential for growth is immense and the benefits are immediately obvious. Each piece of legislation, government notice, by-law, or amendment thereof, is backed up by the digital copy of the official gazette from Gazettes.Africa. Unlike any other legislation system on the continent, within seconds you can verify that the legislation you are reading is exactly as promulgated in the gazette. Gazettes.Africa is a vital component of the larger free access to law project in Africa.

In 2020 we plan to experiment with new premium services on top of the freely available content. These services will aim to deliver relevant gazettes and other related legal information to users’ mailboxes.

Using our existing APIs, we can extend machine-readable access to your legal software and applications, your internal knowledge management systems, or your website. We welcome your feedback on what would be the most useful ways to serving this gazette and legislative information to you and your organization.

Advocacy for free gazettes

The task ahead is not easy. As mentioned earlier, obtaining gazettes from African countries, especially digitally, is not as easy as one might expect. The situation needs to change. We will continue to advocate for and work with Printers to make current gazettes more readily available to the public. We appeal to private libraries and individuals to send us their digital gazettes. We will publicly acknowledge your contributions to the Gazettes.Africa commons. If you only have print gazettes, donate them to the commons, we will digitize and upload them too.

If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together

We thank our comrades at all LIIs in Africa, OpenUp, as well as the librarians at the Johannesburg Bar Library, the University of Cape Town Government Publications section of the Library, Werksmans Attorneys, Webber Wentzel and LLMC (United States) for their in-kind donations to the commons.

Read African law on AfricanLII, Laws.Africa and Gazettes.Africa, and join us in making African law more accessible to all!

*This blog post first appeared in the Organization of South African Law Librarians newsletter in November 2019 and is republished here with a few updates.

African legal technology organizations partner to develop a new caselaw management system for Kenya

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 15:30:00 +0200

Kenya Law has developed and continues to curate the largest collection of national caselaw in Africa. The official law reporter of the Kenyan government plays a critical role in the organisation, management and dissemination of Kenya’s primary legal materials: legislation and case law. This aids the public, the legal profession and Government, and supports an effective justice sector.

Kenya Law has partnered with the African Legal Information Institute, Laws. Africa NPO and Netrix Business Solutions Ltd. to develop a new web-based software platform to modernise and improve the management of their case law database. The system will support the most effective reporting of case law through the Kenya Law Reports. It will also enable Kenya Law to deliver additional products and value to their users, provide insight into the business processes around case law reporting, and report on developments in Kenyan jurisprudence.

To support these requirements, Kenya Law has identified the need to capture and manage rich, structured data and metadata for Kenyan case law. The new software platform will enable and assist the reporter in capturing, structuring, researching, analysing and publishing this data and its derivative products. Caselaw will be captured and made available in an Akoma Ntoso XML format, which will support Kenya Law in treating the case law database not just as a collection of case reports, but as a valuable, rich, structured dataset of Kenyan jurisprudence that enables the creation of new value-adds for Kenya Law and its stakeholders.

The project will run over the course of two years, from 2020 to 2022.

The National Council for Law Reporting (Kenya Law) www.kenyalaw.org is a service state corporation established by law to prepare and publish Kenya’s official law reports which contain judgments, rulings and opinions of the superior courts of record. Kenya Law has also been mandated to revise, update and consolidate the Laws of Kenya which currently consists of 503 individual statutes running into over 35,000 pages of legal text. Kenya Law has established itself as Kenya’s focal point institution for preparing and disseminating Kenya’s public legal information.

The African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII) www.africanlii.org was established in 2010 and is a programme of the Democratic Governance and Rights Unit at the Department of Public Law, University of Cape Town. AfricanLII capacitates individuals, organizations, and governments to build and maintain sustainable free access to law portals, and reach the people of Africa and beyond. It offers software solutions, project management advice, know-how, and university-certified courses in legal information systems development and management. AfricanLII convenes a network of 16 African LIIs (https://www.openlawafrica.org/ ) - a collaborative group of organizations and individuals in Africa, dedicated to free access to the law on our continent. The AfricanLII website also provides a Pan-African legal search engine and hosts African regional legal materials for free access.

Laws.Africa www.laws.africa is a South African non-profit organization, which digitizes African law for public use. Laws.Africa created and supports a machine-friendly, openly licensed African legislation commons (https://laws.africa/commons). Laws.Africa also develops and maintains the largest open-source implementation of the Akoma Ntoso XML standard in Africa through the Indigo Legislation Platform. Laws.Africa is an integral technology partner of AfricanLII.

Netrix Business Systems Ltd. (Netrix) is an ICT firm based in Nairobi, Kenya. The company was established in 2008 and registered as a limited company in 2010. Netrix’s core business is the design and development of web-based computer systems, mobile solutions and general software solutions. Amongst the offerings is also Cloud hosting and Services, website design-development and hosting., system integration services, Emerging Technologies and Consultancy. Netrix is a professionally managed software development company servicing clients all over East Africa. It approaches its services with a clear goal to offer quality services to its clients. Total customer satisfaction is Netrix’s Quality Policy, as they work to efficiently and effectively apply their documented quality standards.

Contacts for further information:

Long’et Terer, Kenya Law: lterer@kenyalaw.org

Mariya Badeva-Bright, AfricanLII: mariyab@africanlii.org

Greg Kempe, Laws.Africa: greg@laws.africa

Jesse Ndegwa, Netrix: ndegwa@netrixbiz.co.ke

Bergrivier and Cederberg municipal by-laws are now available on openbylaws.org.za

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 08:03:00 +0200

Bergrivier and Cederberg are the latest two municipalities we have added to the openbylaws.org.za website. We’ve digitised all of their by-laws and put them online in user-friendly formats, making them easier to find, read and share.

The Open By-laws website now contains the by-laws of a total of eight municipalities, and we’re working on adding more.

Bergrivier

Bergrivier municipality in the Western Cape includes the towns of Piketberg, Velddrif and Porterville, and has an estimated population of about 67 000 people. Bergrivier has 30 by-laws, covering aspects such as liquor sales, municipal land-use planning, and informal trading. The oldest by-law in force is a 1994 by-law from the old Municipality of Velddrif regarding charging for sewerage services.

Cederberg

Cederberg municipality, also in the Western Cape, has a population of 53 000 and includes the beautiful Cederberg mountains and the towns of Clanwilliam, Citrusdal and Lambert’s Bay. The municipality has 29 by-laws, covering aspects including nature reserves, outdoor advertising and boats on the Clanwilliam dam.

COVID-19

Some aspects of municipal functioning are impacted by the recent government regulations passed due to the COVID-19 coronavirus. These regulations are available at openbylaws.org.za/covid19.

Photo of Velddrif in Bergrivier by jbdodane on flickr. Photo of Cederberg by SA-Venues.com on flickr.

Kannaland municipal by-laws are now available on openbylaws.org.za

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 15:02:00 +0200

Kannaland is the latest municipality we’ve added to the openbylaws.org.za website. We’ve digitised all of Kannaland’s by-laws and put them online in user-friendly formats, making them easier to find, read and share.

The Open By-laws website now contains the by-laws of a total of nine municipalities, and we’re working on adding more. Kannaland comes hot on the heels of Cederberg and Bergrivier, which were added in late March.

Kannaland

Kannaland municipality is in the Garden Route district in the Western Cape and includes the towns of Ladismith at the foot of the Swartberg mountains, Zoar and Calitzdorp. Kannaland has 10 by-laws, covering aspects such as liquor sales, water supply and manegement, and the prevention of nuisances such as dumping.

COVID-19

Some aspects of municipal functioning are impacted by the recent government regulations passed due to the COVID-19 coronavirus. These regulations are available at openbylaws.org.za/covid19.

Photo of Calitzdorp in Kannaland by Robert Wallace on flickr

Do you trust legislation that you find on the Internet?

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:43:00 +0200

For anyone with a mobile phone or a laptop, the Internet is the first (and often last) step most people take to find legislation and other legal information. But how do you know you can trust the legislation that you find online?

The Internet makes it much simpler for both legal practitioners and the general public to access legal information. At the same time, it also makes it much easier to unwittingly find incorrect, outdated or partial information.

At Laws.Africa we’re interested in learning how we can help users to navigate these difficulties. This has been particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic as countries have been regularly publishing and updating regulations that directly impact our day-to-day lives.

Questions you should ask about that random PDF

As with most information you find on the Internet, it’s a good idea to be a bit skeptical about what you read. When you find a webpage or PDF of an Act or regulation, what questions should you ask before relying on it?

“Can I trust this legislation?” (Trustworthiness)
“Is it up to date?” (Completeness)

These two questions are a good starting point for determining whether what you have found is useful, or if you need to keep looking.

What our users say

We asked users about how they judge the trustworthiness and completeness of online legislation. We used a Twitter poll and a poll on the openbylaws.org.za website.

Trustworthiness

Both our Twitter poll and our website survey showed that most users establish trustworthiness by relying on a website or publisher that they already trust. In other words, the trust is transferred from the publisher to the document. Practically, this means most users look for a website name, a company logo, or a government coat of arms.

Although imperfect, this seems like a reasonable approach, since in most cases it’s impractical or impossible to verify each word in the document with the original Government Gazette publication (if one can find it).

Completeness

Legislation changes over time, in some cases very quickly. A key South African COVID-19 regulation, Government Notice 318 of 2020, was first published in mid-March 2020, amended six times over the next four weeks, and then repealed completely and replaced in late April.

How do readers ensure that what they have found is complete and up-to-date, and not missing a recently published amendment? Our survey showed that most readers rely on a combination of a “last updated at” date and checking the Government Gazette for missing amendments.

Completeness can be subtle and difficult to determine. Many documents include only the date of the most recent amendment, which has limited value, particularly if that amendment was a long time ago. It’s best to look for an “as-at” date, which is the date at which the document is known to be complete. It’s important that publishers continually update the “as-at” date on their documents to indicate to readers that they’re keeping their collection up to date.

While checking the Gazette for missing amendments is good in principle, it can be impractical since finding Gazettes can be difficult, time-consuming and expensive in its own right.

Conclusion

Asking some simple questions can help you verify legal information you find online. However, there is still a long way to go to make it faster, easier and less error-prone. We’re continuing to research this area and will publish our findings on our website.

Laws can be messy, but they don't have to be

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 13:43:00 +0200

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made. We knew at the outset of the Laws.Africa journey that we would have an opportunity to reference Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s (but more likely, John Godfrey Saxe’s) views on legislation. While the politics of legislation-making may have benefitted from the obscurity of the process, it is well accepted today that knowledge of the law (including how it is made) is a cornerstone of the rule of law - the transparency of the process increases respect for the law.

Laws.Africa’s work digitizing and consolidating legislation is a complicated process. It can be as messy as sausage-making too. That is why it is very important for us to shed light on every step of the editorial process - document assent, publication, commencement and amendment dates, link them to the gazettes of record, officially documenting these events in the lifecycle of legislation. Our recent interactions with Western Cape Provincial legislation reaffirm the importance of this approach.

A missing commencement

One of our new projects this year is the addition of Western Cape provincial legislation. A team of dedicated researchers reviews all gazettes published by the Province and records new and amending enactments as well as any notices giving legal force to legislation. The platform flags legislation as uncommenced unless a gazette is attached as a verification document for the event.

Inconsistencies in promulgated final legislation are not rare. They are usually of a technical nature and can mostly be dealt with using editorial notes. We were surprised when the lead researcher discovered that an important piece of Western Cape legislation, the Petitions Act No. 3 of 2006, had seemingly never commenced. All Western Cape Provincial gazettes published since 2006 were double-checked, but no commencement notice from the office of the Premier for this legislation was found. Regulations had been duly enacted: the Western Cape Petitions Regulations, 2010 were proclaimed with Provincial Notice 232 of 2010 in Provincial Gazette no. 6755, 31 May 2010. The Petitions page on the Western Cape Provincial Parliament’s website accepted petitions in terms of this legislative framework.

Western Cape Parliament responds

We decided to write to the Secretary of the Western Cape provincial legislature to seek clarity. Mr. Romeo Adams responded with an acknowledgement within two hours of receipt of our letter. Mr. André le Roux, Senior Legal Adviser for the provincial parliament, responded on the first working day following receipt of our letter. He confirmed our findings. Mr. le Roux assured us that the Western Cape Provincial Parliament would consider how to resolve this unwanted situation. Most importantly, he clarified that in the meantime, section 115(d) of the Constitution of South Africa continues to empower the legislature and its committees to receive petitions, representations and submissions from interested persons or institutions.

Laws.Africa is impressed by the speed and efficiency of our Western Cape Provincial legislature. However, this story proves that even the most efficient of our government institutions can sometimes get tripped up by the messy business of legislation. Digital legislative drafting systems, coupled with interlinked (and interoperable) gazette databases, smart analytics and reports, can go a long way to eliminating inconsistencies and inefficiencies of analogue legislation-making processes.

Technology can make finding legislation problems easier

The Laws.Africa platform enforces quality of legislation consolidation by incorporating provenance, verification and strict reliance on the government gazette as the source of public record. This cloud-based legislation platform can help navigate the complexities of the legislation drafting processes.

Please get in touch with us with your ideas on how legislation data might support your work.

Photo of Lawmaking and sausages used from Policy Institute at King’s blog

Call for board member nominations

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 08:26:00 +0200

Greg Kempe, the Chairperson of Laws.Africa NPO, invites the public to nominate persons for appointment as non-executive members of the Laws.Africa NPO advisory board, in terms of s14.9 of the Laws.Africa NPO Constitution.

About Laws.Africa

Laws.Africa is a South-Africa based non-profit organization registered with the Department of Social Development created in late 2018. The main objectives of the organization are, among others, to:

promote and support human rights, the right to access to information, democracy and the rule of law in South Africa and the African continent, by supporting citizens’ free and open access to the laws that govern them;
improve access to the law, stimulate access to law innovation, and lead by example;
create a machine-friendly, openly licensed legislation commons;
build a mutually beneficial relationships with African governments and a contributor community; and
make the commons sustainable through licensing and charging for value-added services and expertise.

You may read more about Laws.Africa’s work on the organization’s website: www.laws.africa

Advisory Board

Duties

Laws.Africa seeks to appoint members to its inaugural advisory board for a three year term starting in 2021. The primary function of the Advisory Board is to guide and support the work of the Association in accomplishing its mission, by:

advising on strategy, research, stakeholder relations, diplomacy and networking, fund-raising, and on the content and conceptual approach of the programmes of the Association;
identifying potential new projects of relevance to the Association consonant with its mandate;
advising on strategies for financial sustainability, and supporting fundraising activities;
representing the Association on certain occasions at the request of the Chairperson of the Management Committee;
assisting with national, African and international networking.

Profile of Board members

Members of the Board will be drawn from the following groups:

jurists from the African continent;
technologists from the African continent and internationally;
representatives of international organisations, internationally significant business, civil society, community organisations and other key interest groups concerned with free access to the law;
prominent regional opinion leaders with a commitment to continental governance issues.

Meetings

The Advisory Council will meet annually (in person, if funding allows, or virtually) but may convene for additional meetings at the request of the Chairperson. In addition, it is expected that board members will be available for consultation between meetings via phone calls or email. Secretarial support will be provided by the Chairperson’s office.

Remuneration

Members will not be remunerated.

Nominations and contact

Nominations are accepted via email until 15 March 2021 and must contain:

For nominators: Full name, affiliation, e-mail address and cell phone number
For nominees: acceptance of nomination, full name, CV and references

For further information or to send in nominations, please contact advisoryboard@laws.africa.

Successful candidates will be contacted by 31 March 2021.

Using Akoma Ntoso with African legal materials

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:46:00 +0200

Akoma Ntoso (AKN) is the leading XML markup standard for legal documents. Laws.Africa uses it because it captures rich metadata and structural information and allows a computer to automate common tasks. Read more about what AKN is and how we use it on our website.

AKN includes a naming convention that makes it possible to automate linking between documents, which relies on being able to reliably predict a document’s unique identifier, or FRBR URI.

Our AKN4Africa Recommendation provides guidance on the implementation of the AKN Naming Convention in the African context, taking into account documents from African countries and regional bodies and their drafting traditions.

This first version should help other users of AKN across Africa generate FRBR URIs, and help anyone resolving links to Laws.Africa-generated AKN documents.

AKN also includes a way of generating unique identifiers for individual provisions within a legal document, for example section 12A, subsection (6), paragraph (j) of a given Act. The next version of the AKN4Africa Recommendation will include our recommendations around edge cases like duplicate numbered sections and the like.

Read our AKN4Africa Recommendation and email us at info@laws.africa if you have any feedback or questions.

(Photo of National Theatre in Accra, Ghana by kojo nana from Unsplash.)

Uganda National Legislation Collection

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 10:10:00 +0200

The Uganda Law Reform Commission completed the last official revision and consolidation of the Laws of Uganda in the early 2000s. It updated legislation up to and including 31 December 2001. This digital version of the Laws of Uganda is widely available and used in Uganda and abroad, despite being 20 years out of date. Legislation users could not have reliably known that since the early 2000s, there have been over 1250 commencements, amendments and new enactments to Uganda laws.

In early 2020 Laws.Africa partnered with the Uganda Legal Information Institute (ULII; www.ulii.org), a project of the Judiciary of Uganda based in Kampala, to digitise and update the Laws of Uganda 2000.

We’re excited to announce the outputs of this effort. A selection of 98 Acts and 8 Statutory Instruments are now up-to-date and available, for free, at www.ulii.org.

The year-long project involved hunting down and digitising mouldy gazettes scattered across Kampala, reading hundreds of notices to identify amendments and other notices, and finally bringing the 2000 consolidation up to date. Laws.Africa’s gazette and legislation technology made this process simpler and faster. Read more about the work that went into the Uganda project below.

From 2000 to 2021

The process of sourcing, assembling, reading, and understanding the amendments and repeals affecting the 2000 consolidation is complex and time-consuming. ULII partnered with Laws.Africa because our gazette and legislation technology makes this process significantly easier and faster, and produces high quality, re-usable, machine-readable output.

ULII selected a list of 98 Acts and 8 Statutory Instruments dealing with the administration of justice, finance, labour, family and succession, taxation and land. The list was settled with the help of Judges’ input and taking into account ULII website usage patterns.

Finding 20 years of Uganda Gazettes

The next step involved the scanning of 20 years worth of the Uganda Gazette. From February 2020 to February 2021, amidst several COVID-19 lockdowns, the ULII team crisscrossed law libraries in Kampala to collate and scan the Uganda Gazette’s first and only freely available digital collection. The team encountered mouldy and dusty paper archives, often incomplete, sometimes unscannable.

Their best effort to recreate a complete record of the Uganda Gazette, including supplements, is now openly available to the public on ULII Gazettes and Gazettes.Africa, totalling 1460 gazettes. The Laws.Africa team helped to digitise, “stitch” together, catalogue, and index this collection. We also helped identify the gaps that ULII will focus on scanning next.

In the space of only a few months, the editorial team at Laws.Africa digitised, updated, and published the only fully updated digital and freely available collection of Uganda legislation. The collection is not only reliable, it is also a pleasure to read and work with.

You may read, use and re-use the revised Laws of Uganda on ULII.org. Over 130,000 people have already done so since the first publication in March 2021.

Photo essay

ULII scanned over 1400 gazettes

Laws.Africa purchased a CZUR book scanner for ULII. ULII’s Eunice Logose is photographed here scanning gazettes at the Judicial Training Institute of Uganda.

State of access to legislation before the project

This is the Anti-Terrorism Act, 2002 as we found and scanned it at the library of the Law Development Centre. The pages show signs of overuse. Amendments are pasted as stickers pointing to gazetted legislation stored on another shelf. See the original scan

The digital Elections Act

Laws.Africa’s revised legislation incorporates all amendments to legislation, richly annotated and supplemented with links to the gazetted versions of amendment acts. The historical, or point-in-time, versions of legislation are also available to users, free of charge. See version on ULII

A timeline of legislation as enacted in Uganda

Some of the oldest Acts digitised date back to 1902. We are now also able to track the rate of amendments applied to legislation contained in the Grey book.

A Glossary of legal terms for Uganda

We are also now able to read the legislated meaning of over 1900 legal terms and phrases in Uganda. Defined terms in the Grey Book are marked up, making the creation of this Glossary possible. Read more about the technology behind the glossary in our blog post here.

From the Ashes: An African Preservation Imperative

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 16:04:00 +0200

(Photo by Lerato Maduna / UCT News)

In April 2021, a devastating fire broke out in the Jagger Reading Room of the University of Cape Town library. As a result, priceless and unique archives, including a sizable collection of government law gazettes from South Africa and other African countries, were turned to ash. More than just old books, the fire was an unimaginable tragedy given the unique nature of the way countries across our continent struggle to manage government and legal documents for public use.

Due to a combination of factors, the gazette archives of many African nations are locked in paper format, stored in varied locations, often in foreign countries, and are inaccessible to researchers and citizens. Government Printers often lament the lack of national archives with this critical information. As a result, libraries such as the Jagger are an essential source of government information, legislative and regulatory information, and help preserve a country’s, and indeed a continent’s, history.

(Photo by Lerato Maduna / UCT News)

The fire has been a wake-up call for the University of Cape Town in South Africa and all of our information partners and institutions across Africa. Thankfully, through global support and donations, www.Gazettes.Africa already carries over 35,000 official gazettes from 17 African countries and one regional economic community. We make all digitised gazettes available for free on Gazettes.Africa . In addition, we aim to supply a copy of the digitised collections to gazette printers and archival institutions in the respective countries. We are now also working on adding a complete set of the South African national gazette, beginning with its first edition dated 1910.

When we formed our non-profit, Laws.Africa, we initially focused on supporting librarians in select African countries to digitise their official gazettes and create legislation collections. Seeing the dearth of gazette archives, we quickly expanded our programs to pool resources and help support the broader community of librarians, archivists and government gazette authorities in Africa to secure the archival of these precious documents. But that has not been enough. Now more than ever, the countries of Africa – and the nations which support our development efforts – should not only focus on the sharing of information but also on efforts to help preserve the documents that underpin our legal systems and governance structures.

Please email info@laws.africa if you can support this essential preservation project in any way.

Country codes in FRBR URIs

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 10:10:00 +0200

This series of blog posts goes into some of the edge cases Laws.Africa encountered as we started applying the AKN Naming Convention to African legislation. Read the full AKN4Africa Recommendation.

After the universal akn prefix, which indicates that this is an FRBR URI under the AKN Naming Convention, the first variable element of a work’s FRBR URI is the ‘country or subdivision’.

This blog post explains how we grappled with the constraint that this must be a two-letter code under ISO 3166 when working with regional African bodies.

The simple case: Countries

For literal countries, we use the two-letter ISO 3166-1 code as prescribed by the AKN Naming Convention. Within a country, we use the official codes assigned to provinces, municipalities, counties, and the like – ‘localities’ in our nomenclature. The code for the Mbizana municipality in South Africa, for example, is za-ec443.

The trickier case: Regional bodies

Regional bodies in Africa – the African Union (AU), the East African Community (EAC), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) – enact legislation, as well as model laws, resolutions, and other legislation-like documents, which member states adopt or refer to when enacting their own legislation. Case law also often refers to these laws or instruments.

None of these bodies have ISO 3166 codes, at least not yet. But we need to use a two-letter country code to be AKN compliant.

Below is a rough reconstruction of our decision-making process:

Option 1: ‘Other (xx)’

While working on a separate project in 2020, we introduced the country ‘Other’ on the laws.africa editorial platform for working with documents from decision-making bodies in a certain industry that aren’t tied to any country or regional body. The country code we used for ‘Other’ is xx, one of the codes that’s ‘free for assignment at the disposal of users’ under ISO 3166-1.

We could therefore simply prepend xx- and treat all regional bodies in Africa as localities within the country ‘Other’: xx-au, xx-eac, xx-ecowas, xx-sadc.

This, however, felt counter to the spirit of AKN, which aims to mark up legislation in a way that retains the semantics. (For example, sections in legislation are marked up as "section" rather than using a generic or non-human-friendly code.)

Moreover, lumping important African bodies that inform the legislative and regulatory landscape across the continent into ‘Other’ felt not only misleading but also disrespectful.

Option 2: ‘aa’

We decided, instead, to use one of the other ‘free’ codes from ISO 3166-1 for African bodies: aa.

Because it starts with an ‘a’ it’s less random than ‘xx’, and this way regional African legislation doesn’t end up being grouped under the same umbrella as other documents that don’t have an obvious geographical home.

All regional bodies in Africa are thus prepended with ‘aa’: aa-au, aa-eac, aa-ecowas, and aa-sadc.

Initially, we used ‘aa’ as the code for the African Union, as the primary regional body in Africa. On further reflection, we decided to simply use ‘aa’ as an indicator that what follows is a regional body in Africa. The other bodies mentioned are after all not sub-bodies of the AU.

We published the second version of the AKN4Africa Recommendation on 26 July 2021 to reflect this change.

(Photo of the Gaborone skyline by Michael Schmucker from Flickr.)

Meet our advisory board: Vidhu Vedalankar

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0200

The four members of the Laws.Africa advisory board support the organisation through guidance and expertise.

One of our board members is Ms Vidhu Vedalankar. Vidhu has worked in a variety of roles focusing on building the capacity of the state to deliver services at scale to the public, in particular to the most vulnerable and marginalised people of our communities. Most recently she served as the CEO of Legal Aid South Africa managing the delivery of professional legal services through a national footprint to reach clients thus increasing access to justice for millions of South Africans.

In this Q&A, Vidhu explains why she joined the Laws.Africa advisory board and her belief in access to African legal information.

Why is free access to African legal information important?

Access to African legal information is important in a context where the majority of people do not have access to the legal information that governs their daily lives. This relates to people understanding their rights and obligations as established in laws and to use these to protect, defend and assert their rights as well as understand and live by the obligations that it creates for them. It is important for people to have the legal information to understand how to access basic services from the government amidst the maze of government bureaucracy. It is important for people to have access to information to hold the government to account and to require them to perform to fulfil their obligations. Access to legal information is at the core of building an effective and functioning democracy in which law and order is established and is the norm for both the government and the people.

Why do you support Laws.Africa?

Legal information is not easily available to people in most countries on the continent. I support Laws.Africa because they provide an essential service of increasing free access to legal information in the form of laws at national and local level which is essential for all persons, in particular poor and vulnerable persons to have access to, to act in terms of and within the law. Having one point of access for national and local laws provides ease of access and cuts through the bureaucracy of government services which is often difficult to navigate.

Are you seeing any trends that makes Laws.Africa’s work more important?

The continuing conflict in many countries, increasing authoritarian rule, entrenching of power by powerful elites once they are elected, silencing opposition and not including communities in decision making beyond elections continues to marginalise communities and exclude them from decisions made that affect their lives. In this context it is important to establish more participative forms of democracy in which communities continue to be included in governing between elections and are involved in deciding on matters that affect their everyday lives. The sharing of information empowers the public to meaningfully participate in building such a participative democracy. The important work of sharing legal information also contributes to understanding the rule of law and to make greater use of legal avenues to address matters that affect them to complement their other means of taking up their matters with governments.

You can read more about Ms Vedalankar, and our other advisory board members, on our About Us page.

Meet our advisory board: Justice Isaac Lenaola

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 10:07:00 +0200

The four members of the Laws.Africa advisory board support the organisation through guidance and expertise.

One of our board members is Justice Isaac Lenaola, a Justice of the Supreme Court of Kenya. Following a successful career at the Kenyan bar, he joined the judicial service in 2003 and worked as Resident Judge in several seats of the High Court of Kenya. Until his appointment as Judge of the Supreme Court, Judge Lenaola was the Presiding Judge of the Constitutional and Human Rights Division at the High Court in Milimani, Nairobi.

In this Q&A, Justice Lenaola explains why he joined the Laws.Africa advisory board and his belief in access to African legal information.

Why is free access to African legal information important?

In a continent with such huge disparity in terms of information generally, for reasons that are well documented, free access to legal information is critical and will go a long way in bridging the gap created by the disparity.

Why do you support Laws.Africa?

Upon being introduced to Laws.Africa, I noted that its mission aligns with my own in terms of ensuring access to legal information to as many people in Africa as can be reached, and to use technology to its maximum in doing so.

Are you seeing any trends that makes Laws.Africa’s work more important?

Kenya and Rwanda, for example, as well as South Africa have a far more enhanced reach in terms of access to legal information. Laws.Africa can be the link with other less advanced countries and it is poised to play that critical role if its strategic plans and engagements achieve fruition.

You can read more about Justice Lenaola, and our other advisory board members, on our About Us page.

Meet our advisory board: Robert Buergenthal

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 11:08:00 +0200

The four members of the Laws.Africa advisory board support the organisation through guidance and expertise.

One of our board members is Mr. Robert M. Buergenthal. He has worked for thirty years to implement international development programs and support initiatives that create the underlying conditions for sustainable global development. Specializing in governance, justice sector reform, conflict resolution, and civil society development, he has worked in over seventy-five countries leading projects to support the dissemination of public legal information and academic scholarship.

In this Q&A, Robert explains why he joined the Laws.Africa advisory board and his belief in access to African legal information.

Why is free access to African legal information important?

Given the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, transparency of legal information is critical as countries throughout Africa quickly develop their new legal frameworks and as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) continues its roll-out in an effort to attract both regional and foreign direct investment. While emergency donor assistance has been partially able to mitigate the stress on regional economies, global experience demonstrates that long term development and poverty reduction efforts require access to information to facilitate sustainable investments. In order to help lift the poor out of poverty and support efforts to facilitate opportunities for women and young entrepreneurs, both regional and international investors need to be able to balance risks and rewards by having access to regulatory information that allows them to make informed decisions in a rapidly changing legal environment.

Why do you support Laws.Africa?

As a nonprofit, Laws.Africa has been able to quickly bridge the digital divide by working directly with regional institutions to overcome the numerous operational factors that for decades have frustrated commercial vendors. By creating strong partnerships, Laws.Africa has already become the “go to source” for both the public and private sectors in a region where the collection and processing of legal information is not without its challenges. Laws.Africa has used its local know-how to develop strong collection networks and deliver the information through a modern digital platform that has already empowered numerous diverse users; and that list is growing exponentially.

Are you seeing any trends that makes Laws.Africa’s work more important?

As Africa’s new legal frameworks take shape—and the region strengthens its domestic and regional justice sector institutions—the impact will also be reflected in the region’s legal information and scholarship. Laws.Africa provides the digital platform that already tackles many of the information management challenges that would require a reliance on costly platforms that are not widely available to the public sector or civil society organizations which lead those very efforts to strengthen the justice sector. As the need grows, Laws.Africa’s platform can grow with it and continue to meet the needs of all of its users.

You can read more about Robert, and our other advisory board members, on our About Us page.

Meet our advisory board: Ndidi Ezenwa

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 11:37:00 +0200

The four members of the Laws.Africa advisory board support the organisation through guidance and expertise.

One of our board members is Ms Ndidi Ezenwa. Ndidi is the General Counsel at Juven, a private investment firm which invests in technology enabled and consumer businesses operating in Africa. She was also seconded to work as Head of Legal and Investor Relations for Kobo360, a Lagos based tech startup.

In this Q&A, Ndidi explains why she joined the Laws.Africa advisory board and her belief in access to African legal information.

Why is free access to African legal information important?

Law is the bedrock of society and governs every aspect of our daily lives. Key examples include access to finance and healthcare, matters relating to family and inheritance, taxation, land rights, the environment, commercial transactions, immigration and human rights. On this basis, free access to legal information is essential (1) to ensure that the average person understands their rights and can accordingly protect their personal and business interests; and (2) to level the playing field between individuals seeking justice, regardless of their socio-economic status.

Why do you support Laws.Africa?

As a corporate lawyer by background who has spent a significant portion of the last decade advising clients on transactions in Africa, I have witnessed the challenges that unclear legislation in certain jurisdictions can present for international companies seeking to make commercial decisions. Individuals and SMEs are faced with similar problems when faced with a lack of access to the legal framework governing their daily lives. I truly believe that broader access to law, and therefore access to justice, is an essential tool to empower individuals in all aspects of their life and protect their rights. On this basis, Laws.Africa’s mission aligns with my personal values and beliefs.

Are you seeing any trends that makes Laws.Africa’s work more important?

All over the world, we are seeing examples of women and girls experiencing a lack of access to education, financing and safe working conditions and being subject to violence, particularly in areas of conflict. Free access to law can serve as a powerful tool to protect and further women rights, and makes Laws.Africa’s work even more important. By way of example, the use of law to enforce land rights and ensure that women can access loans often means more equal power for women within the home and broader community, as well as enabling them to realize economic opportunities and safeguard their family’s future even if they become the sole provider.

You can read more about Ms Ezenwa, and our other advisory board members, on our About Us page.

Laws.Africa joins the Free Access to Law Movement

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 09:31:00 +0200

The Free Access to Law Movement is an international voluntary association whose members provide and support free access to legal information.

We’re excited to announce that Laws.Africa is a member of FALM as of March 2021, and we support the Declaration on Free Access to Law.

We look forward to collaborating and sharing expertise with FALM members, and continuing to strengthen free access to law in Africa and around the world.

(Photo of Victoria Falls by i_pinz on flickr)

New: Best practices for publishing legislation online

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 11:31:00 +0200

Laws.Africa has been focused on publishing African legal information for over three years. We have now published our best practices for making online legislation user-friendly.

These best practices reflect our experience and research in publishing legislation for desktop and mobile use. It includes:

Understanding your users and their needs
Supporting mobile phones (the majority of Africans access the internet on their phones)
Typography, such as choosing a good font
Formatting, such as using a visual hierarchy
Layout and navigation.

Our goal is to help other publishers to provide high-quality, user-driven experiences that make reading and understanding African legal information easy.

Small choices have a big impact

Legislation is technical and can be long, complicated and difficult to understand. If the reader is visually impaired or not fluent in the language of the legislation, it can be even more challenging.

Small choices, such as a good choice of font, decent line spacing, and creating a visual hierarchy can greatly improve the reader’s understanding.

For example, the clear indentation makes it a bit easier to understand the details of this single sentence in the Constitution of South Africa that includes two sub-paragraphs and three numbered items:

Supporting African Governments

Part of our mission is to enable African Governments to provide public access to their own legislation. We know this takes expertise, time and hard work to do well. By following these best practices, African governments (and other organisations) can build upon our experience to deliver first-class experiences for their users.

We conduct ongoing research with users in multiple African countries to understand their needs and challenges when accessing and using legal information. We incorporate these learnings and feedback into our content offerings and into our best practices.

Re-usable stylesheets for HTML

Our indigo-web CSS library for formatting online legislation incorporates these best practices. The library is open source and free to use, and makes it easy for others to provide great legislation experiences on their websites.

If you’re using our Indigo Legislation Platform or our Legislation Content API, include the indigo-web CSS into your website and the content will be styled automatically, according to our best practices.

Read more in the indigo-web documentation.

Making great reading experiences easy

We’re working on a new open source web components library that will make it even easier for governments and others to add interactivity and other features to their online legislation collections. We’ll announce more details on this blog in due course.

(Photo of Painted Chameleon in Madagascar by rod_waddington on flickr)

Pocket Law: Improving Free Access to Legal Information

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 11:20:00 +0200

Today AfricanLII and Laws.Africa are announcing a limited release of a new version of Pocket Law, a desktop application which makes African legal information available offline.

Access to the law - an important part of the development of Africa

For close to three decades since it was made available to the public, the internet has transformed lives across the world in numerous ways. The African continent has not been left behind and has taken advantage of the opportunities made possible in this new internet age. However, there is still room for improvement. Internet connectivity is still a hurdle and more than half of the continent is still offline and without access. This is partly driven by the cost of infrastructure which in turn drives up the cost of internet access.

Lack of free access to legal information is another of the challenges many people on our continent still face and has implications not only on daily lives but also on our collective future as a continent. By leveraging the internet technology available today, we can engage in initiatives that promote and sustain free and reliable access to legal information which will in turn empower individuals, communities and governments as they strive towards good governance, democracy, justice and the rule of law. One of these initiatives is Pocket Law.

Pocket Law - delivering offline access to African law

Pocket Law is an off-line desktop application for Windows and Mac, that allows users to browse and search caselaw, legislation and other legal materials, found on a Legal Information Institute (LII) website. The project is an initiative by AfricanLII and Laws.Africa that aims to provide offline access to the collection of legal information that is currently available on the various LII websites of the free access to law community in Africa. Through Pocket Law, we seek to make legal information available and accessible to users with limited or costly internet access.

As much as the internet is gaining traction on the continent, barriers such as cost still exist that prevent a majority of people reaping from its benefits and those of freely accessible online legal information. Pocket Law aims to break down some of these barriers and make legal information accessible to even more people by providing an offline solution that mitigates against issues of poor internet accessibility and high costs of data.

Pocket Law comes bundled with a base collection of the legal materials available on the LII. Users can download the application from the LII website, or receive the installer on a USB stick. Content on the application is fully searchable and accessible even in situations where internet access may be unavailable or unreliable. Updates which may also include updated content and improvements are available once the user is in coverage and requests an update.

Technology for offline access to legal information

By leveraging technologies such as Electron and file formats such as WARC, Pocket Law will not only provide a consistent experience across platforms, but also maintain the same experience that is available on the LII websites. Users will be able to browse, read and search for content as they would on the online LII websites.

The LIIs are constantly updating and adding more content on their websites and Pocket Law will not be left out. As such, updates will be made available from time to time in order to ensure users of Pocket Law will be able to access up-to-date content and legal information.

While users will still need some level of internet access to download or update the application, it will be able to function and legislation content will still be accessible even when internet access is not available.

Pocket Law is currently in the beta stage of development and will soon be available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. Pocket Law Zimbabwe will be the first to launch making the content available on ZimLII available offline. More versions for more LIIs will be added to the project in time.

We are still scoping out the development of Pocket Law for Android and iOS.

To learn more about Pocket Law or experience the beta, reach out to us via email on info@laws.africa.

(Photo of a Red Hartebeest by Peter-Hg on Shutterstock)

Open By-laws is now a part of Law Library

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200

OpenByLaws.org.za is very close to my heart: it’s the project that got me interested in improving access to African legal information. Ten years ago, in 2013, I started exploring what it would look like to make South African municipal by-laws easier to find, read and share. The goal was to use modern web technology to build rich reading experiences to make working with local municipal legislation simpler and easier.

Today marks a significant milestone in that journey: Open By-laws is now a part of LawLibrary.org.za.

Law Library is a project by Laws.Africa and AfricanLII that makes a wide range of South African legal information freely available to the public. Law Library includes national and provincial legislation, judgments from South Africa’s major courts, almost 100,000 South African Government Gazettes. And now, it includes municipal by-laws.

Law Library is also part of AfricanLII’s network of 14+ legal information websites that provides free access to African legal information to 100,000s of users every month.

What’s changing?

Open By-laws is now powered by Laws.Africa’s Open Law Technology. This means a better search experience, smarter integration with provincial and national legislation, and improved support for non-English by-laws, amongst other things.

Open By-laws will also benefit from the new features that Laws.Africa and AfricanLII are deploying, such as AI-powered semantic search.

What’s staying the same?

Open By-laws will continue to be available at openbylaws.org.za, where it is visited by thousands of users every month.

The by-laws continue to be, and will always be, free to use.

Help us add new municipalities

We’re still a long way away from having all the by-laws of every South African municipality. Laws.Africa is looking for donors to help us digitise this content and make it freely available for everyone. If you can help, please contact us.

Join the Africa Startup Law Accelerator Program 2024 for Startups in Africa powered by Law.Africa and the Lawyers Hub

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0200

The Africa Startup Law Accelerator run jointly by Laws.Africa and Lawyers Hub call for applications is open from 11 April 2024 to 30 April 2024!

Laws.Africa has entered into partnership with Lawyers Hub to launch the Africa Startup Law Accelerator 2024. The Africa Startup Law Accelerator 2024 encourages innovation in the legal tech space in Africa. The program helps new and existing organizations to integrate Law.Africa’s digital legislation and legal data into their projects, with the intention of lowering the barrier to entry for innovation.

While the program is open to all, the practical application is for those already developing solutions involving AI and legal data. Participating organizations will get free access to Laws.Africa’s digital legislation collection, guidance on use of the data together with Laws.Africa’s Law Widget library, and access to a curated set of court judgments.

Virtual workshops will cover the following training modules:

Workshop 1: Foundations of AI & Legal Data
Workshop 2: Technical Integration of AI & Legal Data
Workshop 3: Legal Issues in Cross-border AI & Legal Data Integration
Workshop 4: Market Fit Strategies for AI & Legal Data Products
Workshop 5: Pricing & Affordability of AI Products

Submit your application at http://www.lawyershub.org/Africa-Startup-Law-Accelerator2024

No more tracking cookies on our Legal Information websites

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0200

At Laws.Africa, we believe that access to legal information should not only be free but also private and anonymous. These values are part of the founding declaration of the Free Access to Law Movement.

That’s why we’re excited to share a significant update with our users and visitors: we have completely eliminated tracking cookies from the network of Legal Information Institute (LII) websites that we run in collaboration with AfricanLII. We no longer use Google Analytics and visits are both private and anonymous.

This change is part of our commitment to ensuring that you can access important legal resources—such as legislation, court judgments, and government gazettes—without compromising your privacy.

Anonymity

“We believe that the right to privacy is fundamental, and anonymous access to free legal resources is an essential part of that,” says Ms. Mariya Badeva, founder of AfricanLII and an expert in access to law in Africa. “By eliminating cookies and enhancing site performance, AfricanLII and its partner websites are at the forefront of making legal information accessible while respecting user privacy.”

Faster websites

By removing cookies, we not only protect your anonymity but also improve the performance of our websites. Without cookies, we can now use advanced caching techniques to help our pages load faster, allowing you to access the information you need more quickly and efficiently. This means less time waiting and more time engaging with critical legal information.

Privacy-first

Unlike many other sites, our privacy-first approach ensures that your search history and site interactions remain confidential and anonymous. This commitment sets us apart in the digital landscape, where data privacy is a top concern for many users.

We invite you to visit our partner sites such as AfricanLII.org, LawLibrary.org.za and TanzLII to explore our broad collection of African legal information, knowing that your privacy is preserved, and your access is faster than ever. Share this development with friends and colleagues who will appreciate both the breadth of free legal information and the respect for their privacy.

Leopard tracks photograph by Brian Burger on Flickr

What Government and the Law can Learn from Cloud Computing’s Success

How cloud computing changed innovation

The muck of consolidating law

How this hurts us

Stop wasting money

Who and how?

PDFs are not good enough

Conclusion

Laws.Africa, AfricanLII and Kenya Law: faster, cheaper, better

Why Akoma Ntoso?

The Kenya Law challenge

How does Indigo help?

Built in Africa, for Africa

Into the future together

Automating OpenByLaws.org.za with Laws.Africa

Quick and Easy: Legislation as Data

What else can be done with the content API?

Who keeps the by-laws up-to-date?

Making even more by-laws freely available

Using by-laws to tackle local service delivery

What are by-laws?

Ask “what do the by-laws say?”

By-laws lay the foundations for discussion

What do YOUR by-laws say?

How we built an automated glossary for Namibian legislation

The curious case of “minister”

How old are “youth”?

How we built the Glossary

Identifying definitions

Grouping similar definitions

The power of Legislation as Data

Machine-friendly legislation – who’s doing what

Official AKN projects

FRBR URI resolver

Subschema generator

LIME – Language-Independent Markup Editor

RAWE – LegalRuleML rules designer

Other editors

Other cool projects and tools

African LIIs and Laws.Africa are building the largest free and open access repository of African gazettes

Why gazettes?

Gazettes.Africa

Contributing to the collection

A myriad of future uses

Advocacy for free gazettes

If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you ​want to go far, go together

African legal technology organizations partner to develop a new caselaw management system for Kenya

Bergrivier and Cederberg municipal by-laws are now available on openbylaws.org.za

Bergrivier

Cederberg

COVID-19

Kannaland municipal by-laws are now available on openbylaws.org.za

Kannaland

COVID-19

Do you trust legislation that you find on the Internet?

Questions you should ask about that random PDF

What our users say

Trustworthiness

Completeness

Conclusion

Laws can be messy, but they don't have to be

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.

A missing commencement

Western Cape Parliament responds

Technology can make finding legislation problems easier

Call for board member nominations

About Laws.Africa

Advisory Board

Duties

Profile of Board members

Meetings

Remuneration

Nominations and contact

Using Akoma Ntoso with African legal materials

Uganda National Legislation Collection

From the Ashes: An African Preservation Imperative

Country codes in FRBR URIs

The simple case: Countries

The trickier case: Regional bodies

Option 1: ‘Other (xx)’

If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together