Staffan Malmgrens blogg

Finally, after many a late nights of coding, lagen.nu is now usable enough for me to make it public. For new viewers, this is the hobby project I’ve been working on during weekends and evenings for the last few months, and it’s basically the entire body of swedish law, nicely formatted, hyperreferences and linkable.

As an example, take a look at the official online edition of the swedish copyright law, (or the more nicely formatted version at Notisum) and contrast it with the one at lagen.nu

Things to notice:

• The table of contents, simplifying navigation in large law texts.
• The lenght and simplicity of the URL, making it feasible to input from memory, as long as you know the ID of the law (later on I will add some nice vhosting magic so you can input http://upphovsrätts.lagen.nu/, but that’s not finished yet).
• The “changelog” for each section, detailing when that law was changed, with links to transitional regulations and the preparation documents that led up to the law.
• Links to prejudical verdicts for each section, where such are available. This is particularly important, since many parts of law are hard to interpret without the knowledge of legal practice.
• The fact that each and every paragraph and section is directly linkable. For example, to refer to the second paragraph in section 26 g of the copyright law, just use the URL http://lagen.nu/1960:729#P26gS2. Purple numbers are used to make it easier to discover and create such direct links.
• (This is my favorite part). Wherever there are inline references in the text to another paragraph or another law, direct links are created, so that you quickly can click around and find out the exact text of the referenced paragraphs. Or, for even quicker access, just hover with the pointer over the link to get a tooltip containing the first ten words or so.

Also, there’s of course RSS feeds. One for news about new features on the site, and one that contains all new and changed laws, as that information becomes public. I hope that the latter one in particular will become useful for anyone that wants to keep up to date on Swedish law.

Now, if don’t have an interest in Swedish law, lagen.nu won’t be of much interest to you, but if you do, I hope that you will take a look at it, and if you have any feedback at all (feature suggestions, bug reports, lavish praise), please do mail it to me.

I have really no idea of what will become of the project, but since I’m planning on starting law school at the start of next year, I will probably add whatever features that could be usable for a student of Swedish law.

Tags: folkets jubel, lagen.nu

This entry was posted on söndag, oktober 31st, 2004 at 19:43 and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.