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LRC's golden anniversary

The Law Reform Commission is celebrating its golden anniversary this year, writes Alma Clissmann

Having focused on law reform for its first 30 odd years, the Law Reform Commission (LRC) was assigned an additional role in 2006: responsibility for restatements (consolidations, now revised acts) and, a little later, for the Legislation Directory.

In 2006, the situation for accessing legislation and related information online was like the opening bars of Haydn’s The Creation – there were planets, but they were floating in a void.

The electronic Irish Statute Book (eISB) had come into being at the end of the 1990s, with acts and statutory instruments published there periodically, but infrequently.

The Legislation Directory (chronological tables of the statutes) was available separately online, but was some years out of date. There was no Legislation Directory for statutory instruments.

The Law Society Library supplied the LRC with a list from hard copies until the electronic statutory instrument system came online in June 2007.

The need for improvement was evident, and the field was wide open. There was a great sense of possibility – it was an exciting time.

A more ordered system

In tandem with a developing eISB managed by the Office of the Attorney General, bit by bit, a more integrated and complete system was built, and last year saw further improvements:

• We reached the landmark of 500 revised acts in February 2024. We now have 518 on the go – not counting 13 that are repealed. Our total is 531, and growing.
• Red and green banners on revised acts indicate whether they need updating or not. If they need updating, there is a link to show the amending legislation that is not yet incorporated.
• A new look for the HTML versions of revised acts, a new colour scheme, and the introductory material (put at the end), giving immediate access to the table of contents. The new colour scheme shows up hyperlinks.
• Previous versions of revised acts going back five years are now available in PDF form from the ‘revised acts’ page on our website (click on the little pointers on the right).
• A short video on the eISB to show how to use the Legislation Directory, to be released shortly in English and Irish.
• A new version of the Long List of Collective Citations, with hyperlinks to the underlying legislation. The link is at the bottom of our ‘legislation directory’ page, as well as on the eISB ‘acts’ page.

Back-office developments

Not yet visible are some back-office developments. We are working on a Legislation Directory with a four-column layout (rather than the existing two-column version: the provisions being amended, and the amending provisions).

‘Column 3’ will show the date of commencement of the amending provision, while ‘column 4’ will show the source of the date of commencement of the amending provision.

This is intended to address a trap for unwary users, who may think that amending or repealing legislation is commenced, when it is not.

We are using AI to help us read new legislation, analyse its amending effects, and feed these into our system. As well as sparing much of the work of a researcher, it is giving us, also, important quality assurance (QA) on accuracy and completeness.

As with all of these things, there is a steep investment initially, but it is paying off. We are looking at using AI to do QA on some aspects of revised acts, based on techniques developed for the Legislation Directory.

When this works well, it will improve productivity and quality. This will see further developments, and we appreciate the support of our user base.

We are always interested in your suggestions. Please email revisedacts@ lawreform.ie.

Alma Clissman is the LRC's access to legislation manager