Legal Research

Droit.org

By Simon Fodden

Droit.org, the web presence of L’Institut Français d’Information Juridique, is one of the many participants in the glorious global project to make law freely available, as you can see on CanLII’s “international” page. Droit.org presents a simple, elegant front page, offering you three options: Journal officiel (akin to our Gazette), Codes (where all of France’s legal codes are made available), and Novelles (containing news feeds from a variety of sources having to do with law).

I wonder whether the design effort that produced the attractive front page is continuing, because the design of the rest of the site has flaws. The Codes section is nothing but a simple text list of links to either the HTML or PDF pages, which would be enough if there were any header or footer to the page; as it is, there’s no way to jump to any of the other sections from this page, and no indication at all as to authorship. I’d make a similar complaint about the Journal officiel page, though I like the way in which the links are constructed into a hyperlinked calendar. And although the Novelles page is styled — and offers options to switch among one, two and three columns — the design is unconnected to the design of the main page; and once again, curiously, there’s no way to get to the main page or the Codes page from Novelles.

All this aside, droit.org is clearly a resource that should be in your list of links.

(An aside: when did we stop calling the law of other countries foreign law? “International” used to mean “as between nations”.)

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 29, 2009 (boomark / email).