Compiling Legal Hypertexts

The paper describes techniques for the automatic construction of hypertexts starting from various legal source documents: statutes, law reports, and so on. The approach described is based on the use of text grammars and parsers. It is general and formal enough that converters for new classes of documents can be written quite easily. We describe the processes of text reconnaissance and grammar construction that allow us to identify link anchor points in a legal text. Each source text gives rise to a text module which may include entry points and external references rather like a program module. Construction of a large hypertext is completed using a link editor that resolves the hypertext links between text modules.