Open Australian Legal Corpus
Data
legal dataset
SHOW HN2023
172points
61comments
#349of 3,109 in 2023
Top 12%of 2023 by points
How HN took it
LovedMost comments that take a side are positive
15 positive, 15 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 2 critical, out of 32 comments about the project. Thread score +0.39.
Idea: 7 for, 1 againstDocs: 1 for, 0 againstExecution: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Impressive effort and useful resource for the community
From 4 comments
Insanely great. Amazing work.
danielmarkbruce on HNIncredible effort. These types of projects have the potential to influence a nation.
thomasfromcdnjs on HNI'm floored by what you accomplished in a year. Here in Canada, case law is under an iron grip by Canlii, LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters (Westlaw). As far as I'm aware, there is…
jfil on HNWell done!
subhashp on HN
Open legal data is valuable for democratising law
From 2 comments
Love what you're doing! Being able to more easily bring LLMs and other AI in will democratise the law quite a bit. Agreed that even though Austlii exists, it needs to be under a…
ENGNR on HNIt would be lovely I think if you used ML to help people ask questions so they can have more accessible law at their hands and understand what lots of things mean. This can be…
Mrirazak1 on HN
Objections
Not truly open in the sense of copyright-free, unlike AustLII and Jade
From 1 comment
Australia has had free, searchable collections of Australian Law for 25+ years. Austlii is a prime example. There are Federal and State collections as well. The author is…
juliangamble on HN
Victoria's data is missing from the corpus
From 2 comments
That's really neat. Such a shame VIC couldn't be included though.
smcleod on HNThis is cool and I'm a little surprised to see that Victoria is the one dragging the chain here. Is DataVic just talk, or does that not apply to law for some reason?
cookie_monsta on HN
Requests
Add more metadata such as dates and reference info
From 2 comments
Yes, this. I've been trying to find a general way to automatically semantically chunk various legislation for a while now. Partly so as to diff various versions/amendments, but…
triggercut on HNI've used a number of pdf libraries in python and C# over the years, none have worked reliably as needed (that's just pdf I guess), but haven't used pdfplumber, I'll be sure to…
triggercut on HN
Replicate corpus to Internet Archive, Zenodo, Kaggle or similar
From 3 comments
Would it we worth getting your corpus replicated into other venues as well, such at the Internet Archive or on GitHub itself?
DamonHD on HNThere are also national and university data repositories that might be interested and for which 5GB is not even noticable!
DamonHD on HNYou could also consider one or more of the scientific data repositories like Zenodo, FigShare, DataDryad, etc. 5GB is small potatoes for those folks and they have serious data…
Shorn on HN
Questions
How does it compare with AustLII for completeness?
From 1 comment
Nice, but I have to ask how does it compare with https://austlii.edu.au/, especially for completeness? The Australasian Legal Information Institute is a great resource and yet…
emmelaich on HN
How can the corpus be CC BY 4.0 if source data was not?
From 1 comment
Could you explain how the majority of your corpus is under CC BY 4.0? I realise that's the licence you have picked on HuggingFace, but if the source data was not already CC BY…
Syeposxr on HN
Alternatives named
AustLII
From 2 comments
Australia has had free, searchable collections of Australian Law for 25+ years. Austlii is a prime example. There are Federal and State collections as well. The author is…
juliangamble on HNNice, but I have to ask how does it compare with https://austlii.edu.au/, especially for completeness? The Australasian Legal Information Institute is a great resource and yet…
emmelaich on HN
Pile of Law
From 1 comment
There is! It’s called the [Pile of Law](https://huggingface.co/datasets/pile-of-law/pile-of-law), and it’s actually what inspired this project. The only caveat is that it doesn’t…
ubutler on HN
CanLII
From 1 comment
What do you think of the Canadian legal case law website CanLii? What could it do better or do you think its done well? Is it overdue for innovation?
Obscurity4340 on HN