CanLII launches API

Colin Lachance of the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) tells us that CanLII, which provides free access to Canadian law, has opened an application programming interface (API).

A description appears below.

Colin has a new post at Slaw.ca that provides context for the API launch: Unbundling legal information.

Description of CanLII API:

This document describes the specifications of the CanLII API. The API provides over a million court judgments, tens of thousands of statutes and regulations and covers all the major courts and legislatures, as well as over 150 specialized courts and tribunals.

How it works

Let’s dig into the more technical information:

- The technical guidelines provide details about encoding, formats, error management and content negotiation.
- The technical guideline will give you detailed information on how to develop your client and interact with the API.

Supported Resources:

Currently, the API supports following services:

Legislation browse: Regulations and statutes from all Canadian federal, provincial and territorial jurisdictions,
Case browse: Judgments from all courts and tribunals accessible on CanLII.

On top of the complete documentation, you can also access directly to the content of the API thanks to the I/O Docs module. [...]

For the API key and for other details, please see the description.

HT @sglassmeyer

Glassmeyer: Free Law Users Group

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI has launched Free Law Users Group, on the pbworks platform.

Here is the description:

This group is for sharing news and developments in the Free Law world. Primarily it will serve as a conduit for connecting librarians to the law tech and developer communities, in the hope that librarians will be able to increase involvement and share their skills and knowledge. It is also hoped that individuals in the Free Law, Open Law and Open Gov developer worlds will join in and see that librarians aren’t so scary and can be a valuable resource in their projects.

This website is a wiki. Please feel free to add anything of relevance. It will really only succeed if the community takes charge of it. This also means it is a constant work in progress so check back often!

HT @sglassmeyer

On a related note:

Tim Stanley of Justia has started a new Free Law discussion group on Google+.

GitLaw in Germany: Deutsche Bundesgesetze- und verordnungen im Markdown auf GitHub = German Federal Laws and Regulations in Markdown on GitHub

German federal laws and regulations appear to have been marked up in Markdown format and placed on GitHub, at https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze#german-federal-laws-and-regulations.

According to the project’s ReadMe, “The source is the XML version of the laws from www.gesetze-im-internet.de “

Scrapers and other tools associated with this project appear to be on GitHub at https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze-tools.

The project seems consistent with the recent trend commonly called GitLaw.

For details on updates and other issues, please see the project’s ReadMe.

The names of the personnel on this project are unknown. The Twitter account associated with this project appears to be @bundesgit.

HT @newsycombinator and @sclopit.

Open Version of California Code of Regulations Released in HTML and RTF

An open version of the California Code of Regulations — in HTML and RTF formats, and current as of March 2012 — has been posted at Public.Resource.Org, according to the readme file accompanying the data.

According to the readme, this is “an ALPHA RELEASE meant for developers.”

For more information, please see the readme and the data.

HT @carlmalamud.