Introduction to AsianLII's Myanmar/Burma Legal Databases
21 Pages Posted: 26 May 2016
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Introduction to AsianLII's Myanmar/Burma Legal Databases
Introduction to AsianLII's Myanmar/Burma Legal Databases
Date Written: May 23, 2016
Abstract
The Asian Legal Information Institute (AsianLII) has been developed by AustLII (the Australasian Legal Information Institute) for over a decade and now includes over 300 databases from 28 Asian jurisdictions, provided with the cooperation of eight free access Legal Information Institutes (LIIs). Until now, AsianLII has not had any significant content from Myanmar.
The paper introduces the collection of eleven databases on Burmese/Myanmar law now developed on AsianLII. These include the Burma Code 1839-1951, Myanmar Laws to 2015, three databases of nearly 5,000 decisions in the All India Reporter from 1907-41; the Burma Law Reports 1947-69, Privy Council appeals from Burma, 1869-1941, constitutions, and 'virtual' databases (extracted from existing LII content) of UN Resolutions, International Agreements, and scholarship concerning Burma/Myanmar.
One main limitation of the databases is that they only contain English language content, and the collection therefore is more relevant to the history of the development of law in Myanmar than to its current legal system.
A principal advantage of the databases is that the contents are searchable at the level of individual Acts and individual cases. Cases are also data-mined for citations, and the results included in the LawCite citator, so that the citation histories of many Burmese cases can be traced.
This introduction also discusses many issues involved in the development of the databases, and the many sources of content it would also be valuable to add in order to have more comprehensive coverage of Burmese/Myanmar law.
Keywords: Myanmar, Burma, AsianLII, AustLII, free access to law, Asia
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