BAILII vs SAFLII

BAILII is a free web service for finding British and Irish case law, legislation, European case law, and other legal materials. Readers can search databases by keyword or browse by date and A–Z title list. Search help covers basic, advanced, multidatabase, citation, date, and Boolean searches, including AND, OR, and NOT. LawCite supports searching by citation, parties, court, jurisdiction, article title, author, year, and cases or legislation considered. Collections include case law, legislation, European Union case law, Law Commission reports, and other law-related material. The help section explains printing and downloading documents. BAILII says access requires no password and places no cookies on users’ machines. Its stated beneficiaries include pro bono organisations, neighbourhood law centres, students, and users in developing countries; legal practitioners and educators are also among its audiences. OpenLaw makes selected leading judgments and reports available for legal education. BAILII does not offer an API or permit bulk downloads, and says large-scale downloading may lead to blocked access. It invites commercial users and educational institutions to make annual donations, without specifying an amount.

SAFLII is a free web repository for open access to legal information. Its collection includes judgments, legislation, court rules, journal articles, commission reports, government gazettes, Rule 16A notices and court rolls. Materials from other countries in the region are also hosted through partnerships and links to other Legal Information Institutes. The SINO search can cover all databases or selected ones, rank results by relevance, and accept words, exact phrases, legislation names, case names or document titles. Boolean and proximity operators are supported. Results can be ordered by relevance, date, title or database, with 10, 20, 50 or 100 results per page. RSS feeds cover selected courts and databases. SAFLII says judgments come directly from courts and some government materials directly from gazettes. No login is required for individual reading, printing and copying allowed by copyright law.