(U)forståelige love, domme og digital formidling

Abstract

Islandske love er tilgængelige online på Altingets hjemmeside. Borgerne bruger dog ofte søgemaskiner for at finde frem til loven i stedet for at søge direkte på websitet. Domme fra de islandske domstole er ligeledes tilgængelige på internettet. God teknik er dog ikke tilstrækkeligt hvis domme og lovtekster skal forstås. Sprog, tekstbygning og fremstilling skal være sådan at personer uden juridisk baggrund kan forstå lovteksten og dommens resultat. I 2016 blev en kvalitativ pilotundersøgelse foretaget med det formål at finde ud af hvad almenheden mener om lovtekster, og hvor godt de forstår dem (Guðmundsdóttir & Cilia 2016). Resultaterne viser bl.a. at deltagerne havde problemer med at forstå lovtekster, og at de havde lave forventninger til lovteksternes forståelighed. Det viste sig dog også at teksterne var nemmere at forstå end deltagerne havde regnet med. Denne pilotundersøgelse er et første forsøg på at undersøge forståelsen af islandske lovtekster.

Summary

All Icelandic legislation is available to the public on the Internet. However, the citizens often use search engines to look for laws, and not the official website of the Parliament, which contains the most recent versions of each law. The rulings of Icelandic courts are also available online. One must bear in mind that good technical solutions are not the only sufficient requirement when it comes to understanding rulings and legislation. Language use, text structure and presentation must be accessible and clear for all members of the public to understand, and not only for those who have been trained in the university law faculties. A qualitative pilot investigation was carried out in 2016 in order to find out how the public experiences law texts, and how easily they can understand the texts (Guðmundsdóttir & Cilia 2016). The findings show, among other things, that the participants did not fully understand the texts, and that they had negative expectations beforehand as to their level of understanding them, but the texts proved nevertheless to be easier to understand than the participants had expected. This pilot research was a first attempt at understanding how well members of the public understand Icelandic law texts.