Jurispedia:About
From Jurispedia
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JurisPedia is an academic project accessible on the Web and devoted to law systems throughout the world as well as with legal and political sciences. The project tends to offer information about all law systems of every state in the world. Since the internet allows access to such information all over the planet, we are no more dealing with a utopia. Based on a Wiki[1], JurisPedia combines the facility of contributions on that support with an academic control of those insertions a posteriori. This international project is the result of a free collaboration of different ressearch teams and law schools[2]. The different websites are accessible in seven languages[3]. Since two years of existence, the project covers more than 4000 articles and outlines of articles dealing with law systems of thirty states. More than 2000 users have subscribed and therefore we are talking about one of the most important law-sites of free access and in Arabic language in the world[4]. The open dimension of this law-wiki, which every internet user can contribute, did not lead to a massif surge of uncontrolled and uncontrollable contents, not even a bit. Although the number of articles rises continually, it stays reasonable and the academic character of the project certainly leaded to a selection of participants of a higher level in legal science. A great part of those participants are therefore students doing a master or a PhD degree, but also doctors, Professors and professionals in law like lawyers, notaries and judges of more than thirty states. All those specialists found the base of this concrete project by contributing from time to time as they can. Using this dynamism, this collective intelligence[5], it is possible to create other projects than a kind of “wikipedia of the law”. Most of the teams taking part work on law and informatics, so the project rapidly included a number of tools which facilitate research and give access to information on the internet. First of all tools of the internet 2.0 help to limit a research to the relevant parts of the internet concerning law[6]. But our participation in the development of semantic tools used by us in the field of law shall – based on the moving project JurisPedia – lead to a tool of evident reliability[7]. This evolution shall also found semantic relations between law systems in the world in order to facilitate research in comparative law. Another idea: This group of contributions/contributors maybe make quite a particular use of the internet in an academic world: Beyond the e-learning and the use of internet as a mean for the reproduction of classic lessons by teleportation (...), JurisPedia is also a link between the universities’ classes and the outer world… In the same way the contributors can as well be directly contacted as readers need further information or precisions on a certain point of law in their own country, in a more exotic state or for some professional reason. For example, it is possible to get information about the constitutional law of the Senegal in Arabic language on JurisPedia. The JurisPedia content is under a creative commons licence[8] that is quite customisable so that the content can be reused for other except for commercial purposes. This last point is linked to the authorization of the exact contributor. This is quite a fair choice in the information society where the digital divide is an important element concerning every international project on the internet: Only the most developed States have the possibility of using such collective creations in a commercial way,… and we take pride in counting contributors from Haiti or Sudan. JurisPedia is an international project that should follow some simple and federative guidelines. This is why we tried from the beginning on to eliminate any geological centralization (in order to inform about law as it is and not as it should be in a certain state) and, certainly, to follow the Universal Declaration of Human Rights accepted by the member states of the United Nations. The observation of law in the world is not necessarily connected to an approbation of the idea of globalization and – as we like to emphasize evidence – law is linked to its culture and can be more ore less[9] similar to our personal law-system. This is why shared law becomes on one hand a program allowing anybody not to ignore a law system. On the other hand JurisPedia will gradually make it possible to appreciate or react on what is done elsewhere, not only in the West but also in the North, East and South[10].
Contact us Michel Bibent, Professor and Manager of the Computer and law research team (ÉRID) (Montpellier I University, Faculty of Law)
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