About
Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII)
The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) provides free internet access to Australasian legal materials. AustLII is one of the largest sources of legal materials on the net, with over 20
gigabytes of raw text materials and over four million searchable documents. AustLII publishes public legal information: that is, primary legal materials (legislation, treaties and decisions of
courts and tribunals); and secondary legal materials created by public bodies for purposes of public access (law reform and royal commission reports etc). AustLII's policy agenda is to convince
parliaments, governments, courts, law reform bodies and other public institutions to make legal materials they control available free via the Internet.
What kind of work?
AustLII publishes public legal information in the form of primary legal materials (legislation, treaties and decisions of courts and
tribunals), secondary legal materials created by public bodies
for purposes of public access (law reform and royal commission reports for example) and a substantial collection of law journals.
Location Sydney
Student Opportunities
UNSW students can intern at AustLII for course credit. Students must apply for an internship through the myLaw website.
The range of tasks involved will depend on the skill set of the candidates and the projects that are underway. Present needs include:
1. Assistance with digitation with historical case law, legislation and secondary materials
2. Research and policy development in relation to local and international projects
3. Editorial and development of community and plain language materials, training and other secondary materials
4. Participation in the development of rulebases for their DataLex intelligent decision systems ('AI and Law') project. You can find more information here:
https://my.law.unsw.edu.au/current-students/law-action/ internships/externally-hosted-internships
84
Graduate Opportunities
AustLII accepts applications for Project Officers and
Systems Developers. Project Officers and Systems
Developers at AustLII work with other members of the
database team and are involved in processing primary materials (case law, legislation and treaties) and
secondary materials (eg law journals and law reform reports) to produce databases on AustLII and related systems. You can find more information here:
http://www.austlii.edu.au/austlii/ employment/20090214.html
Fun Fact / Recent Project Datalex
AustLII’s DataLex rule-based legal inferencing
software, operating within the AustLII Communities platform, enables the development of knowledgebased applications to legal problems, with the
intention that they be used to support free legal advisory services, and other uses as appropriate. ‘Legal inferencing systems’ are one aspect of ‘AI
and law’ (often referred to as ‘legal expert systems’ or ‘legal decision-support sys- tems’.) They require the coding of knowledge-bases (KBs), and the
development of expert text resources linked to those
KBs and the dialogues they generate, so as to support decision-making by users.
The DataLex software is intended to provide a
method of low cost development and sustainable maintenance of knowledge-bases, particularly by
organisations which wish to develop automated legal
advisory systems (either for their staff or for end-users) to support the provision of free legal advice services. Use of the DataLex software will be free of charge to developers within the categories for which the
software is intended, and use of applications will be
at no charge to end-users. Subject to its own resource constraints, AustLII will aim to provide training and development support.
