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The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) provides access to the most comprehensive set of British and Irish primary legal materials that are available for free and in one place on the internet. As at October 2004, BAILII includes 46 databases covering 7 jurisdictions. The system contains around 7.5 gigabytes of legal materials and around 400,000 searchable documents with about 15 million internal hypertext links.

BAILII is legally constituted in the UK as a company limited by guarantee (No 4131252) and as a charitable trust (registered charity no 1084803) and has been supported by a number of major sponsors and is assisted by many other organisations and individuals. BAILII is hosted in the UK and Ireland by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London and the Law Faculty, University College Cork.

The databases on BAILII are derived from a number of sources. Some of the data comes from existing free to air sites. Most of the databases are based on published and unpublished CD-ROMs or rely opon direct and indirect feeds by relevant courts, government departments and other organisations. All of the data has been converted into a consistent format and a generalised set of search and hypertext facilities have been added. Further details as to where databases come from are provided on the database home pages.