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AHTI SAARENPÄÄ UNIVERSITY OF LAPLAND

AHTI SAARENPÄÄ UNIVERSITY OF LAPLAND. LEGAL INFORMATION AND NETWORK SOCIETY. NETWORK SOCIETY. What has emerged is a general (public) information infrastructure . The merely static information society has become the dynamic, interactive network society.

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AHTI SAARENPÄÄ UNIVERSITY OF LAPLAND

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  1. AHTI SAARENPÄÄ UNIVERSITY OF LAPLAND LEGAL INFORMATION AND NETWORK SOCIETY

  2. NETWORK SOCIETY • What has emerged is a general (public) information infrastructure. • The merely static information society has become the dynamic, interactive network society. • The transition to e-government is an essential element in this change. • Networking among individuals, groups and communities is merely one facetof the overall transformation.

  3. KHO:2006:18 An almost blind and deaf man got new Windows based screen magnifier and voice synthesizer programs as social benefit, because there are increasing number of public information and services in net!

  4. LEGAL INFORMATION • I use the term legal information broadly to refer to any information that has an impact on our conception of what is right or just • The core resource here is however the basic store of legal information – the sources of law, • e.g., legislation, government bills, official guidelines, case law, and legal literature.

  5. LAW AS SOCIAL CAPITAL

  6. LAW AS SOCIAL CAPITAL • Today the point of departure is the citizen’s right to legal information. • In a democratic constitutional state, law is a part of the social capital. • It belongs to us all. • Law is not merely a matter of detrimental consequences for those that fail to observe the law.

  7. THE SCREEN • The forum in which we encounter the law has changed. • We interact with social capital on a computer terminal on a what-you-see-is-what-you-get basis. • In this context, even the question how legislation appears on the screen becomes an important consideration.

  8. AS GIVEN……. • We are used to living in a world where government, lawyers and the discipline of law – at least traditionally – take legal material as given without subjecting it to any particular scrutiny. Appropriately enough, this has been cited as one of the shortcomings of our legal culture to day.

  9. LEGAL INFORMATION RESOURCES (BASIC STORE)

  10. Official material • The core of the basic store of legal information consists naturally of official material. • Today we can find this material along the information superhighway, produced and maintained with various degrees of success. • The observation that using the information along the highway is like collecting the litter of those who have gone before us is an apt one in many respects. • Publishing material on networks is technically straightforward but the end result can be even chaotic.

  11. Celex, eurlex ….. • The EU offers a premier example of how difficult it can be to take information produced at different times and in different ways and shape it into a uniform whole. • What initially might seem to be a simple process readily becomes a difficult and expensive undertaking.

  12. Fondation Robert Schuman              Subscribe  PDF Version  9th July 2007 - n°310  • Community Legislation  The Publications Office of the EU is completing the consolidation of the secondary legislation, also known as the "acquis communautaire", in 19 of the 20 languages official prior to the 2007 enlargement. Making Community law both transparent and accessible is part of the European Commission's "Better Regulation" action plan. With this aim in mind the laws applicable in the EU have now been consolidated into fewer than 3000 acts. They are not legally binding, but give a continually updated picture of the EU legislation in force. 

  13. PRINCIPLES OF LEGAL INFORMATION RESOURCES

  14. Access and Anonymity • Given that we are dealing with the use of a new public social capital in a new public infrastructure, access to networks should be easy. • And seeing that a fundamental right – the right to information – is involved, the anonymity of the user must be ensured. • It is here that a certain tension arises in e-government: we should have a secure link to the basic store of information and, at the same time, be guaranteed anonymity when using that information. • The strong identification of an individual is an ill-suited approach here.

  15. Official legal information resources • Upon closer scrutiny, we find that we would do well to distinguish at least the following seven fundamental questions: • availability, • accuracy, • accessibility, • searchability, • understandability, • usability • reasonable cost

  16. SOURCES OF LAW

  17. Expert organizations • We should take seriously note of the increasing importance of expert organizations in legal life. • They – for example Epic and Privacy International - influence authorities and influence ordinary citizens. • However, one must be able to distinguish expert organizations from others, for example, civic organizations. This is no easy task for laypeople or for lawyers for that matter.

  18. Are guidelines displacing law ? • One prominent feature of e-government is the increase in legal information being provided on government web pages. • This highlights in a novel way the basic question of the tripartite division of powers. • Legislative, judicial and executive power are different, a lot different things. • This will soon become one of the core problems in e-government when we move from original material to various government guidelines

  19. RECITALS? • Given that our conception of law and justice is based on various narratives of law in addition to legislation, we cannot avoid a certain harmonization of the European doctrine of the sources of law. Contributing to the process are the recitals in directives, although the standard we see in recitals still varies quite a bit.

  20. WHAT TO DO?

  21. What to do 1 • Just developing the principles of the basic information stores on the European level would be a commendable aim. • We are dealing with a public commodity whose use the government should guide and supervise. • The principles developed will have repercussions for the markets as well.

  22. What to do 2 • Another – practical - way to remove obstacles to communication is collaboration between legal and other professions – essential to developing e-government – and the associated legal design of information systems. • This legal design should add legal information and images to systems too

  23. What to do 3 • Nor should we forget the need to increase legal education at the lower levels of the educational system. • The notion that for the most part legal education begins only at university level is utterly obsolete and incompatible with the principles of the constitutional state. • We need broader-based legal education in the network society.

  24. What to do 4 • Replacing linear text with an interactive structured body of texts that shows the structural depth of the legal provisions is probably the best solution. • Information technology and network-based communication provide every opportunity for implementing this. • In legal communication, it is very often every bit as important to know why as to know what!

  25. THE END

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