Online Access to Legal Doctrine

This chapter discusses the evolution of online access to legal doctrine and some of the factors underlying the writing, production and dissemination of legal doctrine in England and Wales with some reference to the USA. This involves a brief discussion of legal doctrine in the context of scholarly legal writing, the nature of the communities which primarily produce the legal writing classed as doctrine and the drivers for their behaviour. It also takes into account the nature of the ongoing transition from print production and distribution to online availability in a wide variety of models