Relaunch of Juricaf: Database of Francophone Supreme Court Decisions

Guillaume Adreani of L’Association des cours suprêmes judiciaires francophones (AHJUCAF), has announced the re-launch of Juricaf, a database of francophone supreme court decisions, available on the Web, free of charge.

The database includes a total of more than 700,000 full text decisions, from 46 nations. Click here for dates of coverage and statistics on the number of decisions issued by each court. Whether any copyright restrictions apply to the decisions is unclear; the “rights” metadata tag for most decisions reads “public”.

Free, public Web access to these decisions appears to mark a change for Juricaf, which formerly restricted access to its content, according to a June 2011 post at precisement. The new version of Juricaf therefore seems to constitute a notable shift toward greater provision of legal open government data and free access to legal information.

In the new Juricaf system, decisions are output in HTML format. Dublin Core metadata is embedded in the text of most decisions, each of which is identified with a URN:LEX identifier. RSS feeds furnish notification of new decisions from each court and jurisdiction.

News about Juricaf is also available via the service’s Twitter feed ( @juricaf ) and Facebook page.

For more information, please see the Juricaf Website.

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