Ignorant no more

Ignorance of the law is no excuse - so went the maxim that meant you couldn't plead ignorance of the law as a defence. Citizens were presumed to know the law.

- David Harvey

In the past, this created difficulties. How did you find out what the law was? Public libraries had copies of the statutes and occasionally copies of the New Zealand Law Reports, which contained decisions of the senior courts. But beyond that, finding out the law was a problem.

The internet changed things. In the 1990s, the Free Access to Law Movement - a collaborative effort to democratise legal information - took steps to make case and statute law available online.

The earliest and largest of these sites, such as AustLII (Australasian Legal Information Institute) and British and Canadian equivalents, set the precedent for technical innovation and research-oriented design. New Zealand followed, and in 2004 NZLII was established by the University of Otago law faculty, with support from the University of Canterbury, Victoria University of Wellington and AustLII.