Lawradar

The SILE project utilises LAWRADAR, a research infrastructure that can be used to locate and study public documents created during the preparation of legislation. During the SILE project, the areas of LAWRADAR that will be developed are the research tools, and the accessibility of law drafting material.

LAWRADAR can be found at lakitutka.fi. The infrastructure is currently only available in Finnish.

The service compiles all publicly available and accessible preparatory materials produced during law drafting processes. The documents include legislative proposals, parliamentary debates, statements by stakeholders, decisions to establish working groups, parliamentary reviews, and expert opinions issued for parliamentary committees. In LAWRADAR, the documents have been placed within timelines to facilitate the examination of the preparatory materials of individual draft laws.

In addition to compiling documents, LAWRADAR enables aggregated content searches for all document types and offers various tools to facilitate and advance research related to law drafting. The service is primarily aimed at researchers, law drafters, journalists, and lawyers. It can also be used for educational purposes and by anyone interested in drafting law.

While LAWRADAR is currently in the beta-testing phase, it can still be used for a wide range of tasks; for example, LAWRADAR facilitates information retrieval and the preliminary analysis of materials related to law preparation, as well as the delimitation of the material and the automation of its coding.

Previous funding for the development of LAWRADAR was provided by the University of Turku’s infrastructure funding (2018).

This work package is led by Anne Alvesalo-Kuusi, Professor of Sociology of Law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Turku. The working group also includes project researchers Oona Alitalo and Marjaana Sjölund, research assistant Nea Peltoniemi from the University of Turku and IT designers Ossi Laine and Olli Jalonen from the university’s Research IT Unit. See Research Group for more detailed contact information.