The Lovdata Foundation
Background
Established:
Lovdata was established on July 1st 1981, as a private foundation by the
Ministry of Justice and the Faculty of Law at the University of Oslo. Some of
the background material leading up to the creation of Lovdata is collected in
The Lawdata Papers,
published in 1981.
Members of the
board:
The Lovdata board members are:
Knut Kaasen (chairman, The Faculty of Law at the University in
Oslo)
Marianne Vollan (The Ministry of Justice)
Hans Brattestå (The Norwegian Parliament)
Regine Ramm Bjerke (The Norwegian Association of Judges)
Randi Birgitte Bull (The Norwegian Bar Association)
Odd Storm-Paulsen is the managing director.
Purpose:
The purpose of Lovdata is to establish and operate
legal information systems on a non-profit basis.
Activities:
Lovdata's main activities are:
- The operation of a Web-site with legal information
- The operation of an online Legal information service
- Publication of The Legal Gazette and the production of the text
for Norwegian statutes in force, Norway Treaty Series and many
other publications containing laws and regulations.
- Development of software in connection with maintaining and
running large databases.
- Consultant in informatics.
Lovdata is also the publisher of the following
periodicals
- Lov&Data, a publication for legal informatics edited by
professor Jon Bing (published quarterly).
- EuroRett, a publication highlighting legal developments
within the European Union (ca 20 issues per year)
Web systems
In May 1995 Lovdata opened a Web site with the purpose of making
available legal information on a broader basis than earlier. In addition to
traditional information on our databases, prices and training courses, the
following databases have been made available to the public free of charge:
The Legal Gazette
New statutes and regulations are published in the Gazette.
At the present time the digital issues go back to january 2000.
(Launched May 1995)
Statutes in force,
All statutes in force are continually consolidated. An index to
chapters and sections is generated for each statute. A statute may be
located by searching or by the use of one of the following indexes:
chronological, alphabetical, systematic or
industry.
(Launched May 1997).
Regulations,
All central and local regulations in force are continually
consolidated. An index to chapters and sections is generated for each
regulation.
The central regulations (i.e. regulations applying
to Norway as a whole) are grouped according to ministry. For each
ministry the following indexes may be used:
chronological, alphabetical, systematic or
industry.
(Launched March 1998).
The local regulations are primarily grouped
according to municipality. In addition we have different categories
corresponding to national parks, wild areas and so on. For each
municipality or group the following indexes may be used:
chronological or alphabetical.
(Launched March 1998).
Supreme Court decisions
New decisions are made available within hours after they are handed down.
They will be available for a period of about 6 months. Hyperlinks to statutes
(including chapter/section) are generated automatically.
(Launched May 1997).
Appellate Court decisions
New decisions from the six Norwegian appellate courts are made
available for a period of about 4 months. Hyperlinks to statutes
(including chapter/section) are generated automatically.
(Launched August 1999).
European Court of Human Rights
From January 2006 Lovdata has cooperated with The Norwegian Center for
Human Rights at the University of Oslo. The Center produces Norwegian
summaries of category 1 cases and these summaries are published on Lovdata's
free site together with links to the complete texts of the cases.
(Launched 2006).
Online subscription system
All databases are in full text unless specified otherwise.
Lovdata Online
The Lovdata Onine system covers the Norwegian primary legal
sources.
- Legislation:
- All statutes since 1687 now in force and all historical versions since
1998.
- All regulations in force, central and local. Historical versions
of all regulations from 1998.
- The circulars of the tax and social security authorities.
- The Norwegian Legal Gazette from 1986.
- Travaux prepatoire (NOUer: offentlige utredninger) og ot.prper:
Odelstingsproposisjoner) from about 1980)
- Proposals before the Parliament from 1988.
- Treaties signed by Norway since 1992
- Decisions
- Supreme court decisions from 1836
- All appellate court decions from 1993. Selected decsions from 1870.
- Selected lower court decisions from about 1880. All
decisions from the lower court in Oslo from 2002. From 2004
the decisions from all the lower courts in Norway will be included.
- Nordic court decisions concerning maritime law from 1952.
- Court decisions on all levels concerning employment contracts.
- Decisions by the Employment court (from 1916)
- Social security court decisons from 1989.
- Opinions by the Civil Ombudsman (from 1963)
- Opinions by special boards dealing with complaints from private
customers of banks and insurance companies
- Opinions of the Market Council
- The opinions of about 15 different governmental appeal boards
- Literature
- Legal articles published in the main legal journals.
- Bibliografic references to legal literature
Citation jumps between the different databases are
implemented.
- The Norwegian version of the EEA agreement
- The Norwegian translations of directives relevant to the EEA
(about 4700 directives)
- The English version of the Celex database implemented on our
system
- The Lovdata database
Citation jumps between Celex
and Lovdata is implemented as well as citation jumps between the
Celex databases.
Updating, use and costs
Updating:
All databases are continuously updated. They
contain at present a total of about 1 gigabytes of source text. The
number of databases are steadily increasing.
Users:
Lawyers in private
practice, government agencies, banks and other financial institutions,
oil companies, large corporations, libraries and universities make up
our main user groups.
Cost of service:
Monthly charge - Lovdata Online NOK 785
Public libraries pay a monthly charge
of kr 393 for the Lovdata system.
Access:
Internet.
Collection of source material
Lovdata has entered into agreements with the
Parliament, the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Court, all the
appellate courts and several other organisations in order to secure the
collection of new source material. Lovdata role as the producer of the
The Legal Gazette has been especially helpfull in this respect.
Most new material is now received in machine
readable form. Historic material is read optically or entered
manually.
Use of high level markup codes
All texts that enters the Lovdata systems are coded
in Lovdatas own mark-up BOKUS. This language was originally developed
in 1979-81. It gives a complete description of the structure of the
document and can be automatically converted to other mark-up or
typesetting codes. The BOKUS codes used are simple to learn and use.
The coded texts are stored in so-called "mother files". All
amendmends, corrections or changes to the texts are made in these
mother files.
The texts can then be utilized for either
publishing or for incorporation in the retrieval system.
If the text is to be published, it is run through a
program which translates the codes to typesetting codes. Finished
pasteups are generated automatically.
For incorporation into the data bases the text is
run through another program which automatically edits the text on the
basis of the codes and produces a layout suitable for retrieval
purposes.
Financial status
Lovdata is run on a commercial basis. Gross income
in 2005 is about NOK 20 million. Lovdata operates at a moderate
profit. About a two thirds of the income derives from the information
systems, the rest from sale of text/pasteups to legal publishers and
from other services including consultant contracts.
At present Lovdata has 19 full-time employees.
Lovdata runs its own computers, including the computer used for the
retrieval system. Alpha-based computers from Compaq are used.
Access from abroad
Lovdata's online systems are based on the Norwegian
text retrieval system SIFT and Lovdata's own Web-based user interface
developed to help the inexperienced user as much as possible.
Both the user interface and the documents in the
databases are in Norwegian, a language you therefore have to
understand fairly well if you want to access our online databases.
The best way to reach our computer from abroad is
to connect to the Internet
www.lovdata.no.
At present
we have foreign subscribers in all Nordic countries as well as in
continental Europe.
Access codes to our online systems are received
within a couple of days, after signing a subscription agreement. A
one-day introductory course is recommended to learn the basic commands
in a quick and easy way.
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