Attendees at the celebration included Australia’s chief justice and the attorney general
The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) commemorated its milestone 30th anniversary last week.
A celebration was held last Wednesday 20 August at the Aerial Function Centre of the University of Technology Sydney. The event was attended by Australia chief justice Stephen Gageler AC and attorney-general Michelle Rowland MP.
Other attendees included federal and state judges, government representatives, legal academics, senior barristers, law firm partners and representatives of the community legal sector, according to AustLII.
The institute was launched in 1995 by legal academics Graham Greenleaf (UNSW) and Andrew Mowbray (UTS) with a grant from the Australian Research Council. Since then, it has developed into a major free-access provider of online Australian legal materials.
The institute collates legal information from across the country and facilitates free and anonymous access to law. It has data provision agreements inked with government, courts, educational institutions and businesses.
It releases the decisions and judgments of more than 200 active courts and tribunals as well as historical rulings from over 100 courts and tribunals. The AustLII service contains more than 1,000 databases.
AustLII reported that last year, it received more than 450 million requests for pages from over 10 million different hosts. The organisation’s guiding principle is that “free access to key sources of legal information is essential in a democracy adhering to the rule of law, for the public, the legal profession and for researchers”, it said in a media release.
AustLII is set to host this year’s international Law via Internet Conference from 12-14 November, which will be attended by Free Access to Law Movement leaders. The conference theme is Shaping the Future of Legal Accessibility - Improving access to law through legal information, technology and artificial intelligence.
The event will tackle topics like access to legal data, AI’s transformative potential, and the challenges of ensuring integrity, reliability, and trust in a time of rapid technological change.
AustLII is operated by AustLII Foundation Limited and is hosted by UTS.
