Is searching the best way to retrieve legal documents?
Trygve Harvold
Legal texts have a rich structure and a large number og links which can be utilized in retrieving documents. This paper is based on a numerical study of the link structure in approximately 200.000 documents in the Lovdata database. The hypertext structure is analyzed and it is suggested that it should be possible to navigate the database on the basis of indexes and links. Analysis of the use of Lovdata also indicates that utilizing chronological and alphabetical indexes and the hyperstructure of links might in many cases be a more efficient and user-friendly way of finding documents than the traditional search.
