I'm not sure how mixing legal terms from differing domains will pan out for your intended target audience, here in the Commonwealth hegemony we have issue with self representation in Court from those educated via central north american police and law shows .. quoting their US Constitutional Rights as a Free Citizen, etc.
That said, you might like, say, the New South Wales (Australian) guide to legal terms and self help:
https://www.lawaccess.nsw.gov.au/Pages/representing/lawassis...
which is government funded and assists in connecting people with legal aid and translating legal terms to plainspeak.
Best wishes with your endeavour.
In general, the documented precedent cases are used to develop a consensus by legal crowds. In many places "jury nullification" can theoretically supersede the courts judgement, but will likely get you kicked from the pool if you know such things exist. This is also why many punitive laws survive, simply by settling out of court via plea deals to avoid direct community/jury input. Citizens are still in charge, but decades of media often convinced people due process was somehow a bad thing (Socrates would be disappointed).
As a side note, if you are not using a legal rep, than expect people to make a bureaucracy more painful. Talk to a lawyer before you try to talk with anyone else, as you may be initially innocent.. but say/do something contradictory that still lands you in trouble. I also advise against doing your own dentistry as well. ;-)
It would be cool to have a law database effort which focuses on building something accessible that makes lawyers lives easier, and provides a tax free donation link to a nonprofit organization. Perhaps some sort of curated wiki style journal site with a validated legal comment section.
I like my lawyers and commercial accountants, as they were the best investment one could make for a business. =)
Impressive and really readable.
I feel this would benefit from a slightly different name such as International Common Law Dictionary or something similar instead of the general term used now.
I believe that many concepts found in common law just don’t translate to other law systems (let’s say Sweden, Spain, Germany) and a translation of the words (which would help in terms of understanding) actually doesn’t do the concepts justice because they just don’t exist in the other systems.
E.g. „Article III judge“. Probably won’t be found in other systems, but easily translatable or the Chapter entries (Chapter 11, Chapter 9 etc) - surely every law has some kind of similar law or code or whatever, but I believe it couldn’t be directly related to these code chapters.
617 entries is nothing. Look at Black's Law Dictionary. The problem with Black's is that as much as a third is archaic. Maybe half. Uncommon words and phrases that lawyers use would be useful--"affiant" is missing, btw--but at best this is a minor glossary. "Process server" is also missing. I once saw this translated as "judicial notifier." It's a phrase "uncommon" lawyers have trouble with, since it requires an understanding of two concepts that have nothing to do with each other.
The idea of using the program for specialized vocabulary, or building your own glossary, is much more interesting.
Great work! If relying only on government sources is not a pre-requisite, you could also consider this site for glossary of terms under Indian laws (https://nyaaya.org/glossary/). I am not associated with them, but they do incredible work in providing digital, accessible legal information to the general public. And they make it available under creative commons license.
The main difference between this, versus using a web search engine, appears to be the readability sorting of definitions and the fact that the definitions are scraped from government resources.
The sorting is quite a bit of fun to see in action.
But, what advantage is there that the source is from a government resource? Versus, say, doing a Google search, or browsing Merriam-Webster's legal dictionary, or doing a search through Black's online edition, and so on.
Congratulations on the launch!
The content on public.law (great domain) is useful and looks like its headed in the right direction. A small suggestion would be to move the newsletter signup from home page (or) at-least from hero to footer? And get other USP like the legal dictionary there.
Since the site covers international law, Perhaps you might be interested in the need-gap: 'Compare law of the land in an easy way'[1] posted on my problem validation forum; Say like if someone travels from USA to India then what major laws should they know about.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/255-compare-law-of-the-land-in-...
Interesting. I went to look for England&Wales entries and the first local (to UK) entry was from Ireland: https://www.public.law/dictionary/entries/emergency-care-ord....
It talks about "Tusla", which term was entirely opaque to me. Apparently it's a neonym for a child welfare agency. An otherwise very readable sentence became entirely opaque due to use of a proper noun.
The "ex parte" entry appears to say that it's a two party proceeding, in USA, is that true? In UK it's one-party before the court/tribunal. Multi-party proceedings where a party fails to respond are not ex parte in UK law (AFAIK) but are still inter partes.
This Singapore law glossary might be useful: https://www.judiciary.gov.sg/news-and-resources/glossary . Should be straightforward to scrape too.
Looks good, sending it over to legal team at my company
Well, my very first search yielded me:
Page not found
We're sorry, but we could not find the page you requested: www.public.law/search?term=perjury
Very cool project. Wishing you good luck!
A somewhat similar project that I started at Google (this was US-only) was:
Common constructions of computer terms ("database", "processor", "thread", etc.) These words appear in patent claims, and the claims are what determine infringement (I use the word "construction" instead of "definition" deliberately).
You might well think there's a standard dictionary of them. There is not, at least as of 5-6 years ago. The parties in a lawsuit propose a construction, and the judge creates one. He's not obliged to follow precedent. Thus you find that "database," for example, has been construed to include a flat file. The construction is supposed to be what the patent writer meant at the time of filing OR what the general industry meaning was.
If that sounds murky, it is. With a chemical patent, there are standard meanings for words, and you won't get far arguing that "methylated" doesn't mean what it generally means. Not so in software.
Often after the judge's claim construction, one side will offer to settle, because they know they'll lose.
Sometimes you'll see a patent from some other country, and of course the meaning of the terms there may not be the same as in the US. So this would be a much, much bigger project than you've taken on.