Abstract:
The project aims to build a software tool for identifying and extracting the general structure of criminal court judgments in Malawi. The combination of indexes, thesaurus of legal terms, an organised system of citation/ referencing is crucial to legal research. The MalawiLII digitized legal filing system is not complete and not easily searchable (most judgments are images of scanned pdfs). There is no linkage between case citations and no linkage from cases to Laws/ Statues. It is not trivial to select legal keywords for International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS) classification. This presentation outlines the project activities and timeline.