Mariya Badeva-Bright

Co-founder, Laws.Africa

I am a technology lawyer and have been actively engaged in the promotion of free access to law in Africa since 2004. In 2010, I co-founded the African Legal Information Institute and now manage and direct the programme at the Democratic Governance and Rights Unit, University of Cape Town.

My work focuses on sustaining a network of efficient, functional and viable free and open access legal publishers in Africa. In 2009-2011, I lead the African component of a global study on the sustainability and impact of free access to law projects in Southern and East Africa.

I have a particular interest in content and technical standards for the development of legal information collections. This has informed my work on the documentation of content collection guidelines, as well as our participation in the development of the Akoma Ntoso community in Africa.

I have also worked on defining copyright and privacy policies for free and open access legal publishers designed to facilitate widespread access to African law.

I am a Section Editor of the Journal of Open Access to Law.

I was previously the Head of Legal Informatics and Policy at SAFLII. I taught the undergraduate course in Legal Information Literacy and the Cyberlaw LLM at the Law School of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa from 2005 to 2010.

I graduated in law from Plovdiv University “Paisiy Hilendarski”, Bulgaria (2001, Magister Iuris) and from Stockholm University, Sweden (2003, LLM in Law and Information Technology).

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