China's lesson for Bulgaria
I met a Bulgarian lawyer last week who told me that Bulgarian laws and regulations weren't available online for free. In the week in between, I've heard from another Bulgarian who told me that there is a great deal of legal material in Bulgaria available online. There seemed to be a tussle about the facts, so I decided to wait until things were clearer before blogging about this subject.
It turns out that the first person was right in saying that there wasn't a single place you could go online to see Bulgarian laws and regulations. This is a problem for the rule of law - if you don't know what the law is, you can't decide how to order your life and business. You run the risk of arbitrary responses to whatever you do. Pretty fundamental for a civil society.
Now, via Beth Noveck, comes the announcement that a search engine in China plans to provide just this kind of comprehensive online legal resource for China: Baidu Plans Free Law Search Service. (I use Findlaw here in the US — there's also the wonderful Legal Information Institute at Cornell.)
Just having the materials online doesn't necessarily solve the rule of law issue. If whoever interprets the law has the arbitrary, hidden power to ignore what the legislature or a judge has said, you're still living in an essentially lawless place. Technology can't fix that problem, but it can illuminate it.