Saving the trees is important. However, the computers that were to save paper (remember the paperless office) have combined with the fax machine and photocopying machine to cause an outpouring of paper enough to wreck our balance of payments.
So every attempt to save paper must be welcomed. One has arrived this week: The Electronic Law Book Series.
The trouble with the law, of course, is that Parliament is forever changing it or adding to it. In the five years to 1990 it enacted 17,907 pages of legislation. Moreover, we poor electors are deemed to know the law.
The trouble with the paper version is not only that it chews up trees, but it is often harder to wade through to find what you want.
The Electronic Law Book series provides up to a million words on a single floppy disk. The first in the series is telecommunications law (available now at $195. More details on 02 8785111). It will followed by a complete corporations law series. There will be regular updates.
To date, the main Australia electronic legal service has been Info-One which provides all Federal, NSW, Victorian, South Australian and Tasmanian statute and case law. It is accessed by modem and telephone line and charges according to time connected. Its advantage is that it is updated virtually every day.
The Electronic Law Book relies on a new Australian software that compresses five megabytes (a million words) on to one 1.44 megabyte disk. No extra software is needed and no space is taken up on the hard disk.
Phrases or words can be searched and text can be transferred to another disk for editing or incorporating into articles being written by the user.
It is cheaper to update than paper and the disks are reusable.
The project has some way to go and is likely to present some difficulties for lawyers. The telecommunications “”book” contains 13 Acts of Federal Parliament and hundreds of regulations, rules, determinations, declarations and directions made under them. That is great for looking up specified sections of Acts or browsing through contents of Acts. It is also good for key-word searching to find if there is any law covering a certain matter.
However, a lot of legal research in telecommunications would require searches through the whole base of statute law, not just the 13 Acts and delegated legislation on the disk. Also, there is a need for case law.
I suspect the difficulties of researching and accessing the mass of legislation and case law generated in Australia will only ever partly be overcome by legal publishers (electronic and otherwise). The problem will have to be dealt with at heart. Parliament will have to enact laws electonically, repealing old Acts completely and replacing them with the new version.
At present Parliament enacts endless amendment Acts that read something like “”delete the words “and to be approved by the Director-General” and insert the words “and to be approved by a prescribed authority”. Read on their own they are utterly meaningless. The only reason for doing it that way is (bizarrely) to save paper, so that people with copies of the original Act do not have to buy a whole new Act.
The ACT Attorney-General, Terry Connolly, has done a lot of work on the computer production of ACT laws. He hopes that every time amending legislation is passed, a completely new Act will be created electronically. The public will still be able to buy prints, but they will be printed from the electronic database only when an as needed. It will save paper and an enormous amount of research time.
The Electronic Law Book system will be useful for non-lawyers who are required to have a knowledge of the law in their area: industrial relations managers, personnel officers, environment officers etc.