One of the main reasons for the success of the progression of China’s legal information system is due to the online legal databases. These databases on China law is created by various academic institutions of China and the government agencies, all under the LexisNexis and Westlaw template.
This idea originated in the 1980s, when the legal researches were contemplating about adopting a service that would supply comprehensive legal services online to all those who required it. In China, the online database services have features such as powerful searching capacities, omnibus help features and exhaustive coverage.
In the past, Chinalawinfo, in co-operation with LexisNexis and Westlaw supplied Chinese law databases in Chinese as well as English. This database constituted of local as well as national laws relating to foreign and economic business.
In the 1990s, other legal services similar to Chinalawinfo provided the same contents to the world .These are sinolaw.com, CEI and LawOnline, which is a production in Hong Kong.
The topic was s famous that even foreign publishers began to include Chinese law in their database. Various legal education institutions, law enforcement firms and agencies also established law database and provided services online.
The Internet has become a very useful platform for the development and publication of Chinese law and information on the same. However, there are certain problems that cannot be solved by the Internet alone. One such reason being the revisions and amendments of legal provisions for the purpose of ensuring the quality of control of law compilation. This is a highly confusing as well as problematic aspect of China’s law publication.
However, that is not the sole issue. Another crucial issue is adopting the modern legal publishing techniques and standards. The indexing system and the digest system should be included in legal publishing for better use. There should be adoption or creation of a unified citation system which would solve the problems of difficulties in accessing the information system in China. This citation system should be a search term as well as a one of a kind component for organizing information.
In other words, the current secondary sources and the finding tools are not well developed at the moment. It has to keep up with the current existing legal publishing structure. Hence, tools that would help make retrieval of information easier such as research tools and guides should be released regularly. One more life-saver here is the online search algorithms.
One should realize, however, that the internet technology does not create the database itself and hence the development of such database cannot solely be based on the Internet. The government is expected to maintain its policies regarding the information archival, distribution and retrieval. But why the government? Because the Chinese government is the most prominent creator of legal information and also the supplier who is responsible for distributing the official releases of legal documents such as law, statistics, directories, etc.
The Internet is a boon as well as a bane, and hence the Chinese government must learn tp be discrete and secretive about the information access over the Internet.