Collection Development Principles

Comprehensiveness

No distinction is made between Reportable and Unreportable cases. All are published on the LII.

Authoritativeness

• The LII sources materials directly from the court/tribunal/legislative body/government gazette as much as possible. Using authentic documents from the source is the basis for creating trust in the information and service the LII offers.

• Alternative sources of legal documents will be considered subject to the reliability/ authority of the source and/or validation of content from another source, preferably the court (for judgments) or the Government Gazette/AG office for legislation.

Currency

• Current cases are prioritised for upload.

• Daily batches of historical judgments are processed whenever possible.

Language policy

• Judgments are published in their original language.

• Translations thereof, if available, should be clearly identified.

• Case names are designated in the original language of the judgment.

Authenticity

• Judgments are published in the format - Word or PDF - received from the judge or the court's registry. If judgments undergo any form of digital conversion, the original judgment document is appended to the record.

• Judgments consisting of the (dissenting or concurring) opinions of several judges in the same matter will be combined in one document by LII, irrespective of their receipt as separate documents from the Registry or Court Library. The judgment thus combined will receive a single citation, appearing under one record (page).

Format

• Judgments are uploaded on the system in the format supplied by the court registry or judges' secretaries.

• The preferred format is a Word document.

• Availability of PDFs is mandatory for scanned judgments. They serve as a verification version where optical character recognition software is used to produce a text/web page version of the judgments published on the LII.

Corrections to judgments

• The LII does not correct judgments. Not even spelling mistakes! Corrections done by the Court and reflected in a newly circulated judgment, should be clearly indicated on the currently published version of a document on LII. A notice such as this:

Editor Note: This judgment has been corrected by the court, and this version was put in place on [date]

The notice is to be placed on all versions of the judgement in the very beginning of the document. The past version of the judgment should be kept on file if it needs to be consulted by users and/or the judge. The LII website software makes provision for this function.

Anonymisation

In principle courts are responsible for ensuring privacy requirements with respect to personal information in judgments are met. However, in some jurisdictions, an LII has a responsibility to redact certain judgments of personal and private details to protect the identity of vulnerable persons and groups in society, especially where the law or a court order requires it.

This requirement varies across jurisdictions and each LII should develop its own anonymisation guidelines.

Retrospectivity

• Priority is given to current decisions, i.e. 2005+ must be collected and published. 2005 is approximately the year when courts began to computerise and likely stored judgments in electronic format.

• In principle, there is no cut-off date for earlier decisions, but more recent cases will be loaded first, depending on availability.

• Users will be assisted if the collection plan for the LII includes a list of important past reported judgments, and still standing precedents, which are prioritised for scanning and uploading on the service. This creates tremendous value for users with less effort and financial commitment on the part of the LII. A good starting point could be either the electronic publication of the Law Reports or consulting law school books and reading lists for cases most used in law teaching and subsequently in practice. The Laws.Africa and AfricanLII software can identify and list all judgments that have been cited but cannot be found on the system.

MNC - Media Neutral Citaion

• No judgment will be loaded on the LII without a Medium Neutral Citation being assigned to it. Please see below for an explanation of the MNC standard.

• Paragraphed judgments are preferred, however the LII does not insert paragraph numbers as this will conflict with the authoritativeness and integrity of the judgment.

• The LII should include this issue on its policy engagements with courts of the land. Electronic citation and full adoption of electronic judgments depend on the use of pin-point citation: a combination of the MNC and paragraph numbers in a particular judgment.

Court summaries

• Where courts issue summaries of judgments, the LII should collect them for publication. The system makes provision for the linking or displaying of case summaries in several ways.