About AustLII

What does AustLII do?

The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) provides free internet access to Australian legal materials. AustLII's broad public policy agenda is to improve access to justice through better access to information. To that end, we have become one of the largest sources of legal materials on the net, with over seven gigabytes of raw text materials and over 1.5 million searchable documents.

AustLII publishes public legal information -- that is, primary legal materials (legislation, treaties and decisions of courts and tribunals); and secondary legal materials created by public bodies for purposes of public access (law reform and royal commission reports for example). You will find these materials listed under AustLII Databases.

In addition to helping public bodies publish their legal information on the web, AustLII also provides a large index of other legal web sites from around the world, which is fully searchable and well organised. The World Law index includes a special section containing "Other Australian Law".

The size of AustLII's databases can be daunting, especially for those without specialist legal training. For that reason, AustLII is helping to collect Community Legal Information -- a set of "plain English" guides to the law.

AustLII maintains its own collections of primary materials: legislation and court judgements ("case law"). Some legal training or familiarity with the subject matter is sometimes required to make use of these documents.

Alternatively, AustLII also has a collection of secondary materials: commentaries and summaries on the law. This includes large projects such as the Reconciliation and Social Justice Library, the reports of the Australian Law Reform Commission and many others.

If you have no legal training but are trying to find out some legal information then consult the Community Legal Information pages. Select the subject matter that you are interested in and click on the links until you find the information you're after.

Help on using AustLII is available. You can consult the on-line help pages for help on searching and locating information, or you can download and print the more extensive AustLII User Guides. We have also developed a number of on-line tutorials and teaching materials for students and trainers.

• Disclaimers - diclaimers of legal liability for our free service.

• Privacy Policy - AustLII's privacy protection practices.

• Copyright Policy - database contents and AustLII mark-up copyright statement.

• Aims and Functions - the original policy statement from 1995.

• Linking - AustLII's policy and guidelines for creating links to AustLII materials.

• Year 2000 Readiness Statement - an explanation of AustLII's Year 2000 readiness.

• Personnel - Who's Who at AustLII.

• How to contact us - offices, mail, phone, fax and e-mail.

• Funding and other assistance - details of who has helped us.

• AustLII Surveys - user survey results and summaries.

• User statistics - hourly details of AustLII usage.

• Technical infrastructure - our computing and communications resources.

• Employment opportunities with AustLII - we need good people!

• Awards and accolades - nice things others have said about us.