Website reviews

Scottish Law Commission

www.scotlawcom.gov.uk

An obvious place to start, the Scottish Law Commission’s site, in a catchier version of its statutory remit, has “promoting law reform” as a tagline.

The site will tell you a bit about the commissioners and other staff, and details the areas of the law the Commission is currently considering, together with its plans for the future. There is also a section for news releases (averaging about one per month) and a sizeable selection of links including law reform agencies from Alberta, Canada to Victoria, Australia.

The real interest, however, lies in the publications section. You can access the Commission’s annual reports, but of much more value are its reports on the substantive issues considered. Incredibly, you can access electronic copies of papers from as far back as 1965, although a smaller proportion of documents from this era are available online. Helpfully, many of the more recent publications are available in both PDF and HTML.

It can take some time for a report to lead to legislation. For example, the recent Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004 had its origins in the Report No 162 on the Law of the Tenement (1998). It is interesting (and instructive) to compare the original recommendations with the legislation which ultimately results. Access to the original reports might even be useful as an aid to statutory interpretation.

Many of the more recent reports have therefore yet to be implemented. However, they can still be supremely useful. Each begins with a comprehensive overview of the current law complete with extensive reference to relevant case law, and discussion of issues arising. So, if you have any interest in the registration of rights in security by companies, damages for psychiatric injury, or insanity and diminished responsibility (some recent titles), this site is an ideal starting point for research.

It might be an idea to allow access to reports and discussion papers by listing them according to topic, rather than just chronologically. However, the search function does appear to work quite well, so this is only a minor quibble for an otherwise very good website.

Unidroit

www.unidroit.org

Unidroit is the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law. The international aspect is evident from the outset: the site is available in either English or français and gives Unidroit’s address as Roma, Italia.

I confess to having been previously unaware of the existence of Unidroit. However, it is clearly of considerable stature, an inter-governmental organisation committed to “modernising, harmonising and co-ordinating” private law (especially commercial law) among its 59 member states (or groups thereof), including the United Kingdom. Unidroit dates from the League of Nations and has a Secretariat, Governing Council and General Assembly.

It seems that Unidroit acts as a sort of law commission to the world and has been responsible for a number of conventions relating to international trade. All are available to view online. Its work has also been used in the preparation of multinational agreements for other organisations (UNESCO and the Council of Europe, principally) – these agreements are named but not produced for download. The site records Unidroit’s ongoing work programme, with a wealth of detail that almost goes too far. The original drafts, minutes and amendments are all very well, but do we really need photos of the working group between sessions?

Over and above that, we have the online databases Unilaw and Unilex. Unilaw (www.unidroit.info) allows you to scroll through the text of the Convention on the Contract for the International Carriage of Goods by Road and, by clicking each article, to view the text of that article together with the related legal issues and connected cases. Unilex (www.unilex.info) performs similar functions in a slightly slicker fashion in relation to the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and the Unidroit Principles of International Commercial Contracts.

If international commercial law is your thing, these sites are musts for the “Favourites” folder.

SCOLAG

www.scolag.org

The Scottish Legal Action Group (SCOLAG) “seeks to improve and advance Scots law for the benefit of those members of society who are economically, socially, or otherwise disadvantaged”. Its website acts mainly as a promotional tool and focuses mainly on its journal (SCOLAG Legal Journal). The contents lists of back issues from March 2000 are available, as are the editorials. For more recent issues, selected articles are made available.

In summary, there is not a huge amount to see or do here, although most of it is interesting and (sometimes) controversial. But the site uses frames. Which is bad. Trust me, it just is.