Hagan and Dolin: Map of Legal Innovation Centers

Dr. Margaret Hagan and Dr. Ron Dolin have posted Legal Innovation Centers mapped , at the website of their Program for Legal Technology + Design.

Here is the text:

We have begun to compile a map of people, groups, and institutions who are working at universities, with students, on legal technology and design.

It isn’t intended as a map of who is working on academic research on legal technology — but rather which programs are actively experimenting in how to train students to become legal innovators.

Use this to scout out opportunities & collaborators. And please help us populate it — send us the people and orgs that are not on here yet! [...]

As of 31 December 2013, the map includes 15 centers, all in the U.S.

The map seems to have been made using Google Maps Engine.

HT @UCDLawSchool

Filed under: Applications, Maps, Projects Tagged: Design of legal technology, Innovation in law practice, Innovation in legal services delivery, Law laboratories, Law labs, Law practice innovation, Law school innovation programs, Law school programs in innovation, Legal design, Legal education, Legal innovation centers, Legal maps, Legal technology innovation, Maps of legal institutions, Margaret Hagan, Program for Legal Technology and Design, Ron Dolin, Training law students in innovation, Visualization of legal information, Visualization of legal institutions



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/31/hagan-and-dolin-map-of-legal-innovation-centers/

LSC releases Report of The Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice

The U.S. Legal Services Corporation has released Report of The Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice (2013).

On 30 December 2013 the corporation issued a press release describing the report.

Here is a summary of the report, from the press release:

The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) today released the report of a national summit on ways to use technology to provide all Americans some form of effective assistance with essential civil legal needs.

More than 75 representatives of legal aid programs, courts, government, and business as well as technology experts, academics, and private practitioners convened at two sessions in 2012 and 2013 to explore the many ways technology can expand access to justice.

The “Report of The Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice” presents a number of concrete recommendations to broaden and improve civil legal assistance through an integrated service-delivery system that brings the knowledge and wisdom of legal experts to the public through computers and mobile devices. [...]

The strategy for achieving this goal has five main components:

• Creating in each state a unified “legal portal” which directs persons needing legal assistance to the most appropriate form of assistance and guides self-represented litigants through the entire legal process.


• Deploying sophisticated document assembly applications to support the creation of legal documents by service providers and by litigants themselves.


• Taking advantage of mobile technologies to reach more persons more effectively.


• Applying business process/analysis to all access-to-justice activities to make them as efficient as practicable.


• Developing “expert systems” to assist lawyers and other services providers access authoritative knowledge through a computer and apply it to particular factual situations.

LSC hosted the summit, and formed a planning group to design it that included participants from LSC’s grantees, the American Bar Association, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, the National Center for State Courts, the New York State courts, the Self-Represented Litigation Network, and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Access to Justice Initiative.

For more details, please see the complete report.

HT David Bonebrake

Filed under: Applications, Policy Materials, Reports Tagged: "Best practices for legal information systems", Access to justice and legal information systems, Access to justice and technology, American Bar Association, Legal document assembly systems, Legal document assembly systems for pro se litigants, Legal expert systems, Legal information systems for pro se litigants, Legal mobile technologies, Legal portals, Legal Services Corporation, Legal Web portals, Mobile devices and access to justice, Mobile devices and legal information systems, Mobile technology and legal information systems, National Center for State Courts, National Legal Aid and Defender Association, New York State Unified Court System, Online legal services, Online legal services delivery, Online portals for pro se litigants, Portals for pro se litigants, Report of The Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice, Self-Represented Litigation Network, Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice, Technology for access to justice, Technology for pro se litigants, U.S. Department of Justice Access to Justice Initiative, Web portals for pro se litigants



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/31/lsc-releases-report-of-the-summit-on-the-use-of-technology-to-expand-access-to-justice/

Constitution UK Project: Crowdsourcing the drafting of a new UK constitution

A project to crowdsource the drafting of a new constitution for the United Kingdom — called Constitution UK — is underway at the London School of Economics.

The project has begun to accept public contributions, as of 16 December 2013.

Click here to access to the project’s crowdsourcing site, which runs on the UserVoice platform.

Here is a summary of the project:

Constitution UK is a trailblazing project that invites members of the public to participate in, offer advice on and eventually to draft a new UK constitution through crowdsourcing.

It is led by LSE’s Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) and Department of Law, together with the LSE Public Policy Group (PPG) and Democratic Audit. It builds on the IPA’s successful and ongoing Imagining One Nation Britain programme, on the Department of Law’s academic knowledge and the specialist excellence of PPG and Democratic Audit. [...]

Click here for a video in which Professor Dr. Conor Gearty describes the project.

Filed under: Applications, Projects, Videos Tagged: Citizens' participation in constitutional drafting, Citizens' participation in lawmaking, Citizens' participation in legal drafting, Conor Gearty, Constitution UK, Constitution UK Project, Constitutional crowdsourcing, ConstitutionUK, ConstitutionUK Project, Crowdsourcing constitutional drafting, Democratic Audit, Legal crowdsourcing, London School of Economics, UserVoice, UserVoice in constitutional crowdsourcing, UserVoice in legal crowdsourcing



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/31/constitution-uk-project-crowdsourcing-the-drafting-of-a-new-uk-constitution/

Want to Leave the Law? Your Next 3 Steps

A new year is upon us. Lawyers are analytical folk by nature, so at this time of the year we spend a lot of time thinking about what is past and what may be coming next. But what if what's...



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via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2013/12/want-to-leave-the-law-your-next-3-steps.html

2014: The Year of Social Media Engagement

Now that you've got a "handle" on Twitter and other social media platforms, take your social media prowess to the next level: Make 2014 the year of engagement. It's all about beefing up posting where it will reach your audience...



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via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2013/12/2014-the-year-of-social-media-engagement.html

Top 9 Litigation No-No's of 2013

Being a litigator can be stressful, but no amount of stress should drive an attorney to commit any of these bonehead mistakes. Take heed, gentle legal professionals, and delight in these top nine litigation no-no's of 2013:...



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via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2013/12/top-9-litigation-no-nos-of-2013.html

New interview with John Sheridan about Legislation.gov.uk, Good Law, and Open Legislative Data

A new interview with John Sheridan of The National Archives (UK) has been posted by Alex Howard at E Pluribus Unum : U.K. National Archives makes ‘good law’ online, builds upon open data as a platform .

The post discusses Sheridan’s Legislation.gov.uk open legislative system, the UK’s Good Law Initiative, and open legislative data.

Here are excerpts of the post:

[...] I’d first met Sheridan virtually, back in August 2010, when I talked with the head of e-services and strategy at the United Kingdom’s National Archives about how linked data was opening up eight hundred years of legal history. That month, the National Archives launched legislation.gov.uk to provide public access to more than eight centuries of the legal history in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Just over three years later, I stepped off the Tube at the St. James Park Station and walked over to meet him in person and learn how his aspirations for legislation.gov.uk had met up with reality.

Over a cup of tea, Sheridan caught me up on the progress that his team has made in digitizing documents and improving the laws of the land. There are now 2 million monthly unique visitors to legislation.gov.uk every month, with 500+ million page views annually. People really are reading Parliament’s output, he observed, and increasingly doing so on tablets and mobile devices. The amount of content flowing into the site is considerable: according to Sheridan, the United Kingdom is passing laws at an estimated rate of 100,000 words every month [...]

Notable improvements over the years include the ability to compare the original text of legislation versus the latest version [...] and view a timeline of changes using a slider for navigation, exploring any given moment in time. Sheridan was particularly proud of the site’s rendering of legislation in HTML, include human-readable permanent uniform resource locators (URLS) and the capacity to produce on-demand PDFs of a given document. [...]

More specifically, Sheridan highlighted a “good law” project, wherein the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel (OPC) of Britain is working to help develop plain language laws that are “necessary, clear, coherent, effective and accessible.” A notable component of this good law project is an effort to apply a tool used in online publishing, software development and advertising — A/B testing — to testing different versions of legislation for usability. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

Click here for earlier posts about the Good Law initiative.

HT @digiphile

Filed under: Applications, Interviews, Others' scholarly or sophisticated blogposts, Projects, Technology developments Tagged: #goodlaw, (John Sheridan, Alex Howard, E Pluribus Unum, Free access to law, Good Law, Good Law Initiative, Legal Linked Data, Legal plain language, Legal semantic web, Legislation.gov.uk, Linked Data and law, National Archives UK, Open legal data, Open legislative data, Plain legal language, Public access to legal information, Semantic Web and law



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/new-interview-with-john-sheridan-about-legislation-gov-uk-good-law-and-open-legislative-data/

Torres: Link Rot and Internet-Citation Practices of the Texas Appellate Courts

Associate Dean Dr. Arturo Torres of Texas Tech University has published Is Link Rot Destroying Stare Decisis as We Know It? The Internet-Citation Practice of the Texas Appellate Courts , Journal of Appellate Practice and Process , 13(2), 269-299 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

In 1995 the first Internet-based citation was used in a federal court opinion. In 1996, a state appellate court followed suit; one month later, a member of the United States Supreme Court cited to the Internet; finally, in 1998 a Texas appellate court cited to the Internet in one of its opinions. In less than twenty years, it has become common to find appellate courts citing to Internet-based resources in opinions. Because of the current extent of Internet-citation practice varies by courts across jurisdictions, this paper will examine the Internet-citation practice of the Texas Appellate courts since 1998. Specifically, this study surveys the 1998 to 2011 published opinions of the Texas appellate courts and describes their Internet-citation practice.

Filed under: Articles and papers, Research findings Tagged: Arturo Torres, Citation of Internet resources in court decisions, Citation of Internet resources in judicial decisions, Journal of Appellate Practice and Process, Legal citation, Legal citation practices, Legal citation studies, Link rot and preservation of digital legal information, Link rot in court decisions, Link rot in judicial decisions, Preservation of digital legal information, Preservation of electronic legal information, Stare decisis



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/torres-link-rot-and-internet-citation-practices-of-the-texas-appellate-courts/

Nissan: Legal evidence and advanced computing techniques for combatting crime: An overview

Dr. Ephraim Nissan of Goldsmiths’ College, University of London has published Legal evidence and advanced computing techniques for combatting crime: an overview , Information and Communications Technology Law , 22, 213-250 (2013).

Here is the abstract:

Surprisingly, evidence used to be a Cinderella until the late 1990s in ‘AI & Law’ (artificial intelligence for law), itself a burgeoning domain already in the 1980s. It was not until the 2000s that models of reasoning about legal evidence started to feature prominently. In so doing, it became vulnerable to the controversy about ‘probabilities in law’ among legal theorists; hence, the importance of developing models of plausibility (i.e. ranking alternative accounts) as opposed to strong commitment to probabilistic models of determination of guilt. Probabilistic models however potentially have a role in helping a prosecutor decide whether to prosecute. Moreover, they are quite useful in models supporting police investigation or helping with police intelligence. This is especially the case of data mining, a class of techniques which has been applied to legal databases as well as to law enforcement. Success was achieved especially in unravelling networks and in detecting fraud. We survey these classes of tools.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Technology developments Tagged: Criminal investigation information systems, Criminal justice information systems, Data mining in criminal investigation, Ephraim Nissan, Information and Communications Technology Law, Legal evidence information systems, Probabilistic models in criminal investigation



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/nissan-legal-evidence-and-advanced-computing-techniques-for-combatting-crime-an-overview/

Gatto: Crowdsourced legislation project in California state legislature

California legislator Mike Gatto on 16 December 2013 invited California citizens to participate in drafting new probate legislation.

His project is taking place on the Wikispaces platform.

Tim Bonnemann discusses the project in a post at Intellitics .

HT @planspark and @rcalo

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Citizens' participation in lawmaking, Citizens' participation in legislative drafting, Crowdsourced legislative drafting, Intellitics, Legal crowdsourcing, Legislative crowdsourcing, Legislative information systems, Mike Gatto, Probate law information systems, Tim Bonnemann, Wikispaces, Wikispaces and legal crowdsourcing, Wikispaces and legislative crowdsourcing



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/gatto-crowdsourced-legislation-project-in-california-state-legislature/

Curtotti and McCreath: An Open Online Platform for Research on the Readability of Law

Michael Curtotti, LL.M., LL.B. and Dr. Eric McCreath , both of Australian National University, have published A Right to Access Implies A Right to Know: An Open Online Platform for Research on the Readability of Law , Journal of Open Access to Law , 1(1) (2013).

Here is the abstract:

The widespread availability of legal materials online has opened the law to a new and greatly expanded readership. These new readers need the law to be readable by them when they encounter it. However, the available empirical research supports a conclusion that legislation is difficult to read if not incomprehensible to most citizens. We review approaches that have been used to measure the readability of text including readability metrics, cloze testing and application of machine learning. We report the creation and testing of an open online platform for readability research. This platform is made available to researchers interested in undertaking research on the readability of legal materials. To demonstrate the capabilities of the platform, we report its initial application to a corpus of legislation. Linguistic characteristics are extracted using the platform and then used as input features for machine learning using the Weka package. Wide divergences are found between sentences in a corpus of legislation and those in a corpus of graded reading material or in the Brown corpus (a balanced corpus of English written genres). Readability metrics are found to be of little value in classifying sentences by grade reading level (noting that such metrics were not designed to be used with isolated sentences).

The platform described in the article is Readability Research Platform .

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Research findings, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Eric McCreath, JOAL, Journal of Open Access to Law, Legislative information systems, Machine learning and law, Machine learning and legal text analysis, Machine learning and legislative information, Machine learning and legislative text analysis, Michael Curtotti, Plain language and law, Plain legal language, Readability of legal resources, Readability of legal texts, Readability of legislation, Readability Research Platform, Weka and legal informatics



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/curtotti-and-mccreath-an-open-online-platform-for-research-on-the-readability-of-law/

Trypuz and Kulicki: On deontic action logics based on Boolean algebra

Professor Dr. Robert Trypuz and Dr. Piotr Kulicki , of Catholic University of Lublin, have published On deontic action logics based on Boolean algebra , forthcoming in Journal of Logic and Computation .

Here is the abstract:

The aim of this article is to provide a metalogical systematization in the area of deontic action logic based on Boolean algebra. Differences among the systems involve two aspects: the level of closedness of a deontic action logic and the possibility of performing no action at all. It is also shown that the existing definitions of obligation in these systems are unacceptable due to their non-intuitive interpretation or paradoxical consequences. As a solution we propose a minimal axiomatic characterization of obligation with an adequate class of models. This article also describes how deontic action logic can be used to answer the questions from the Polish driving license test.

Filed under: Articles and papers Tagged: Boolean algebra and deontic logic, Deontic action logic, Deontic logic, Journal of Logic and Computation, Legal logic, Modeling deontic logic, Modeling legal logic, Modeling legal obligation, Modeling obligation, Motor vehicle law information systems, Piotr Kulicki, Robert Trypuz, Traffic law information systems



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/trypuz-and-kulicki-on-deontic-action-logics-based-on-boolean-algebra/

Jefferson et al.: Transparency tools in gene patenting for informing policy and practice

Professor Dr. Osmat A. Jefferson , Deniz Köllhofer, Thomas H. Ehrich, and Professor Dr. Richard A. Jefferson , all of Queensland University of Technology, have published Transparency tools in gene patenting for informing policy and practice , Nature Biotechnology , 31, 1086-1093 (2013).

Here is a summary:

[... There is] a pressing need for precise analysis of patents that disclose and reference genetic sequences, especially in the claims. Similarly, data sets, standards compliance and analytical tools must be improved—in particular, data sets and analytical tools must be made openly accessible—in order to provide a basis for effective decision making and policy setting to support biological innovation. Here, we present a web-based platform that allows such data aggregation, analysis and visualization in an open, shareable facility. To demonstrate the potential for the extension of this platform to global patent jurisdictions, we discuss the results of a global survey of patent offices that shows that much progress is still needed in making these data freely available for aggregation in the first place.

The platform described in the article is The Lens (also called Patent Lens ).

The technology described in the article is distributed through a nonprofit organization called Cambia.

Richard Jefferson discusses the article in a new interview in Scientific American: Seth Fletcher: Can Machine Learning Fix a Broken Patent System?

Click here for earlier posts on patent information systems.

HT Tom Bruce

Filed under: Articles and papers Tagged: Annotation of legal documents, Annotation of legal information, Annotation of legal texts, Annotation of patent documents, Annotation of patent information, Annotation of patents, Cambia, Deniz Köllhofer, Legal annotation, Legal annotation platforms, Legal annotation systems, Legal information retrieval, Machine learning and patent analysis, Machine learning and patent information, Machine learning and patent retrieval, Machine learning and patent search, Nature Biotechnology, Osmat A. Jefferson, Patent analysis, Patent analysis systems, Patent annotation, Patent information retrieval, Patent information systems, Patent law information systems, Patent Lens, Patent retrieval, Patent retrieval systems, Patent search, Patent search systems, Richard A. Jefferson, Scientific American, The Lens, Thomas H. Ehrich, Visualization of legal information, Visualization of patent information



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/jefferson-et-al-transparency-tools-in-gene-patenting-for-informing-policy-and-practice/

Greenleaf et al.: The Meaning of ‘Free Access to Legal Information’: A Twenty Year Evolution

Professor Dr. Graham Greenleaf of the University of New South Wales, Professor Andrew Mowbray of University of Technology Sydney, and Philip Chung of the University of New South Wales, have published The Meaning of ‘Free Access to Legal Information’: A Twenty Year Evolution , Journal of Open Access to Law , 1(1) (2013).

Here is the abstract:

Free online access to legal information is approaching maturity in some parts of the world, after two decades of development, but elsewhere is still in its early stages of development. Nowhere has it been realised fully. The main question asked in this paper is “what should ‘free access’ mean in relation to legal information in order for it to be fully effective?” As with software, we must ask whether free access to law is ‘free as in beer, or free as in speech?’

The six most significant attempts over the last twenty years to answers this question are analysed to show that a substantial degree of international consensus has developed on what ‘free access to legal information’ now means. Of thirty separate identifiable principles, most are found in more than one statement of principles, and many are now relatively common in the practices of both States and providers of free access to legal information (government and NGO). Many concern measures to avoid the development of monopolies in publication of the core legal documents of a jurisdiction. Which principles are essential to the meaning of ‘free access to legal information’, and which are only desirable, is usually clear.

Two complementary meanings of ‘free access to legal information’ emerge. The first states the obligations of the State in relation to ensuring free access to legal information – but not necessarily providing it. The key elements concern the right of republication. The second meaning states the conditions under which an organisation can correctly be said to be a provider of free access to legal information. We argue that a better definition is needed than the ‘consensus’ suggests, and propose one based on the avoidance of conflicts with maximisation of the quality and quantity of free access.

One use of such a set of principles is to help evaluate the extent to which any particular jurisdiction has implemented free access to legal information. A brief example is given of Australia, a county with a generally good record but some deficiencies.

Finally the paper considers what steps should be taken to most effectively realise a reformulated concept of ‘free access to legal information’, by civil society, by States at the national level, and at the international level.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Policy debates Tagged: Andrew Mowbray, Concept explications in legal communication studies, Concept explications in legal informatics, Construct explications in legal communication studies, Construct explications in legal informatics, Free access to law, Graham Greenleaf, JOAL, Journal of Open Access to Law, Legal information institutes, Philip Chung, Public access to legal information



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/27/greenleaf-et-al-the-meaning-of-free-access-to-legal-information-a-twenty-year-evolution/

Call for papers: Special issue on Law, Language and Information Technology, of Informatica e diritto

A call for papers has been issued for a special issue on the topic of ” Law, Language and Information Technology,” of the international journal, Informatica e diritto .

Click here for the call in English.

Click here for the call in Italian.

The submission deadline for title and abstract is 15 January 2014.

Here is a non-exclusive list of topics for the special issue:

• Linguistic quality in legal texts: assessing formal, technical and terminological quality;


• support to legislative drafting;


• quality indicators for readability, clearness and coherence in legal texts;


• construction, use and reuse of linguistic-semantic resources: taxonomies, thesauri, lexicons and ontologies;


• conceptualization of legal knowledge for cross-lingual and trans-national retrieval as well as for knowledge sharing;


• multilingualism and linguistic policies for digital legal information services;


• tools for multilingual alignment of legal terminologies;


• semantic interoperability among digital collections;


• metadata quality, standards and shared vocabularies for legal documents exchange and linked data in the legal domain;


• information extraction and automatic classification of legal corpora;


• historical archives: digitalization, preservation and usability;


• legal texts processing and quantitative analysis of legal documents;


• legal language and the communication of the law in multilingual and multicultural contexts;


• law and language in legal professions training

For more details, please see the complete call.

Filed under: Applications, Calls for papers, Technology developments Tagged: Automatic classification of legal documents, Cross-language legal information retrieval, Digitization of legal documents, Informatica e Diritto, Legal classification, Legal communication, Legal communication instruction, Legal communication training, Legal document exchange standards, Legal document exchange systems, Legal drafting support systems, Legal information exchange models, Legal information extraction, Legal information retrieval, Legal knowledge representation, Legal language, Legal language instruction, Legal language training, Legal lexicons, Legal Linked Data, Legal metadata, Legal metadata quality, Legal metadata standards, Legal ontologies, Legal taxonomies, Legal text analysis, Legal text corpora, Legal text processing, Legal thesauri, Legal vocabularies, Legislative drafting, Legislative drafting support systems, Legislative drafting systems, Linked Data and law, Multicultural legal communication, Multilingual legal communication, Multilingual legal information systems, Preservation of legal documents, Quality of legal language, Quantitative analysis of legal documents, Readability of legal resources, Readability of legal texts, Semantic interoperability of legal data, Semantic interoperability of legal information, Transnational legal information retrieval, Usability of historical legal documents, Usability of historical legal information, Usability of legal documents



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/27/call-for-papers-special-issue-on-law-language-and-information-technology-of-informatica-e-diritto/

Small Firm Tech To-Do List for 2014

We're going to steal a page from our Technologist blog and talk tech today. But don't worry, it's relevant -- we promise. Small firms operate under constraints we can identify with -- limited budget, no room for downtime, and a...



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via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2013/12/small-firm-tech-to-do-list-for-2014.html

Applications invited: LAST-JD: Joint International Doctoral Degree in Law, Science and Technology

Applications are invited for LAST-JD: Joint International Doctoral (Ph.D.) Degree in Law, Science and Technology.

The application deadline is 21 January 2014.

One research theme of the program is Legal Informatics and Artificial Intelligence and Law, which covers the following topics:

• Semantic Web and Legal ontologies modelling


• Information Retrieval and Database techniques in the Legal Domain


• Legal document modelling and representation including Open Data, XML, and standardization


• Computer Forensics


• Information Systems for eJustice, eGovernment, and eLegislation


• Computational models of legal and ethical reasoning including educational applications


• Intelligent Information extraction and NLP of legal resources


• e-Discovery and data mining in Legal domain


• Formal Models of Norms and Legal Reasoning


• Logic-based models of norms and legal knowledge (e.g. for case law)


• Legal reasoning, including argumentation and reasoning about evidence


• Argumentation and Argumentation systems


• Game theory as applied to the law


• Normative Multi-Agent Systems and e-Institutions


• Regulatory Compliance


• Robot and Intelligent System ethics

In addition, some of the “10 top research topics” for the program deal with legal informatics:

• Deontic logic for reasoning about machine ethics


• Temporal Defeasible in Legal Reasoning


• Robotic, ethical issues and IPR aspects


• eDiscovery and data mining techniques for legal domain


• Legal ontologies for regulatory compliance

Some fellowships are available.

For more details, please see the program’s Website.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani, the Director of LAST-JD.

Filed under: Fellowships, PhD programs, PhD student positions Tagged: LAST-JD, LAST-JD Joint International Doctoral (Ph.D.) Degree in Law Science and Technology, Legal informatics doctoral programs, Legal informatics doctoral student positions, Legal informatics PhD student positions, Monica Palmirani



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/applications-invited-last-jd-joint-internation-doctoral-degree-in-law-science-and-technology/

Ohio's Text-Solicitation Opinion: What Does It Mean for Lawyers?

Late last week, the Columbus Dispatch seized upon a months-old advisory opinion by the Ohio Supreme Court which, in theory, allows lawyers to text potential clients. Phone call and in-person solicitation is not allowed, nor is chat room solicitation, but...



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via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2013/12/ohios-text-soliciation-opinion-what-does-it-mean-for-lawyers.html

Vibert et al.: Legivoc: Connecting laws in a changing world

Dr. Hughes-Jehan Vibert of the French Ministry of Justice, and Dr. Pierre Jouvelot and Benoît Pin of MINES ParisTech, have published Legivoc – connecting laws in a changing world , Journal of Open Access to Law , 1(1) (2013).

Here is the abstract:

On the Internet, legal information is a sum of national laws. Even in a changing world, law is culturally specific (nation-specific most of the time) and legal concepts only become meaningful when put in the context of a particular legal system. Legivoc aims to be a semantic interface between the subject of law of a State and the other spaces of legal information that it will be led to use. This project will consist of setting up a server of multilingual legal vocabularies from the European Union Member States legal systems, which will be freely available, for other uses via an application programming interface (API).

Filed under: APIs, Applications, Articles and papers, Projects, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: APIs, Benoît Pin, Hughes-Jehan Vibert, JOAL, Journal of Open Access to Law, Legal APIs, Legal application programming interfaces, Legal controlled vocabularies, Legal knowledge representation, Legal ontologies, Legal subject classification, Legal subject headings, Legal taxonomies, Legivoc, Multilingual legal controlled vocabularies, Multilingual legal ontologies, Multilingual legal taxonomies, Pierre Jouvelot



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/25/vibert-et-al-legivoc-connecting-laws-in-a-changing-world/

Torrents and Puig: The Case for Linking World Law Data

Enric G. Torrents of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and Dr. Sergio Puig of Stanford Law School, have posted The Case for Linking World Law Data , forthcoming in Journal of Open Access to Law .

Here is the abstract:

The present paper advocates for the creation of a federated, hybrid database in the cloud, integrating law data from all available public sources in one single open access system — adding, in the process, relevant meta-data to the indexed documents, including the identification of social and semantic entities and the relationships between them, using linked open data techniques and standards such as RDF. Examples of potential benefits and applications of this approach are also provided, including, among others, experiences from of our previous research, in which data integration, graph databases and social and semantic networks analysis were used to identify power relations, litigation dynamics and cross-references patterns both intra and inter-institutionally, covering most of the World international economic courts.

The project described in the paper is Neocodex :

Neocodex is a collaboration between researchers and professors from Stanford Law School, Duke University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Autonomous University of Barcelona and other institutions to develop open source technology for integrating, analyzing and making available information from all international courts and national jurisdictions in open linked data standards, including the automated processing, analysis and visualization of social networks (neutrals, litigants, and other entities), semantic networks (citations, case-law contents, legal knowledge) and the publication of corpus collections with added metadata.

Filed under: Articles and papers, Projects, Technology developments Tagged: Business law information systems, Cloud computing and law, Cloud computing and legal information, Cloud-based legal databases, Cloud-based legal information systems, Enric G. Torrents, Enric Torrents, Free access to law, Journal of Open Access to Law, Legal cloud technology, Legal knowledge representation, Legal Linked Data, Legal semantic networks, Legal semantic web, Legal social networks, Legal text analysis, Legal text corpora, Legal text processing, Linked Data and law, Neocodex, Open access to law, Public access to legal information, Publishing legal text corpora, Semantic Web and law, Sergio Puig, Visualization of legal information, Visualization of legal semantic networks, Visualization of legal social networks



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/25/torrents-and-puig-the-case-for-linking-world-law-data/

Bruce, Weibel, and Frug: New Google Glass Legal App: Signtater

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute (LII) has described a new Google Glass legal app, called Signtater , that he and LII personnel Wayne Weibel and Sara Frug have developed, in a new post: The Law of Where I’m Standing, Right Now .

According to Tom, the app reads legal citations that are written on objects in the world — such as signs in parks — and then retrieves links to the cited legal resources, from free-access-to-law services including the Legal Information Institute.

Here are excerpts from the post:

[...] Some weeks back, our friends at Justia.com very generously arranged for us to have access to Google Glass. We weren’t at all sure how Glass fits into the legal-information world. We still aren’t, and that’s what motivates this post. But Glass is very, very cool, and it or something very like it will be transformative.

Because it was very, very cool, we wanted to develop an app for it. Like all garage-bound experimenters, we looked to see what we had laying around that might be made to work with it. It turned out that Wayne Weibel had done something very smart a while back [...]. We have a tool called Citationer that extracts citations from documents, and it has a Tesseract-based OCR component that we use with image-based PDFs. Turns out that it’ll work with any image format, and Wayne had built that capacity out a bit, in the expectation that people would want to use it with document images sent from phones. And, as it turns out, from Glass.

So Wayne and Sara and I took two days out of the office to see if we could whack something together that would let you take a picture with Glass and send it off to a server-based application that would send you back a link or links to anything cited in the image. The result, almost entirely Wayne’s work, was an app called “Signtater”. It works well with documents and some signage, and it raises a lot of questions. [...]

But for right now Signtater’s capabilities are limited to documents and signage that can be made to look like documents in the image — that is, mostly dark lettering on white backgrounds in an area that mostly fills the screen. We were disappointed by the lack of range… but Signtater is still really, really cool. [...]

[...] Signs [in public parks] are an attempt to associate some part of the law with a particular place. Glass has geolocation capability, and could do all that through an application that understood something I guess you’d call the law of where I’m standing right now. But what is that, really? We’d need to know a lot more in order to find out, even though theoretically a lot of the data is retrievable. [...]

That suggests that before a legal-information retrieval application asks “Where are you?” it should ask, “Who are you?”. And for those purposes I might be different people at different times. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @trbruce

Filed under: Applications, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: b-screeds, Citationer, Google Glass apps, Google Glass legal apps, Innovation in legal technology, Legal apps, Legal apps for Google Glass, Legal citation, Legal citation tools, Legal Information Institute, Legal Information Institute at Cornell University, Legal information retrieval, Legal mobile apps, Legal technology innovation, Mobile legal apps, Sara Frug, Signtater, Tom Bruce, Wayne Weibel



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/24/bruce-weibel-and-frug-new-google-glass-legal-app-signtater/

Brilliantly Confusing Lawyer Ad Brings Viral Fame, More Business?

My first reaction to this ad was, "Huh?" You'll probably react that way as well. Heck, the entire Internet already did. AdWeek first highlighted Scott Hoy's commercial earlier this month. Yesterday, he took the final spot on their list of...



Continue reading this article, and get more law firm business news and information, at FindLaw.com.



via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2013/12/brilliantly-confusing-lawyer-ad-brings-viral-fame-more-business.html

Legal Informatics Conference Calendar: Updated as of December 2013

The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.

The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, legal communication, legal/forensic linguistics, or egovernment (as applied to legal information), or that are known to welcome papers on those topics. The calendar also lists legal hackathons and other legal hacking events.

Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.

Valentino Spataro’s enhanced version of the calendar is available at http://www.gloxa.it/rr/

If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.

Filed under: Calls for papers, Calls for participation, Calls for proposals, Conference Announcements, Hackathons, Hacking Tagged: egovernment conferences, Forensic linguistics conferences, Legal argumentation conferences, Legal communication studies conferences, Legal hackathons, Legal hacking, Legal hacking events, Legal informatics conference calendar, Legal informatics conferences, Legal information science conferences, Legal linguistics conferences, Legal rhetoric conferences, Legal translation conferences



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/legal-informatics-conference-calendar-updated-as-of-december-2013/

Fors and Skoglund: A Pilot Study of Virtual Cases in Law Education

Professor Dr. Uno GH Fors and Åsa Skoglund of Stockholm University have published A pilot study of virtual cases in law education , European Journal of Law and Technology , 4(3) (2013).

Here is the abstract:

This study aimed to investigate the possibility to create and use virtual law cases/virtual clients for training Contract Law for undergraduate students. The study also investigated the attitudes of the learners of using such cases.

A previously wide-spread case system for healthcare education, Web-SP, was adapted to be used for legal cases. One case was developed by a senior legal expert and teacher, which was subsequently used by 52 students in a course on contract law during a seminar. A questionnaire was used to gather students’ opinions on the use of the virtual cases.

Most students were positive to the use of virtual law cases to practice their legal decision making. Almost all learners believed that the virtual cases were realistic and engaging and that they also found the interactive Web-SP cases to be good for their learning.

Future studies need to look into concrete learning outcomes as well as the potential of using virtual law cases for exams. [...]

The Web-SP system is developed by Uno Fors at Stockholm University.

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Case studies, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Åsa Skoglund, Contract law information systems, Contract law instructional systems, European Journal of Law and Technology, Legal educational technology, Legal instructional technology, Medical educational technology applied to legal education, Medical instructional technology applied to legal instruction, Simulations in legal education, Simulations in legal instruction, Uno GH Fors, Virtual cases in legal education, Virtual clients in legal education, Virtual legal cases, Virtual legal clients, Web-SP



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/fors-and-skoglund-a-pilot-study-of-virtual-cases-in-law-education/

Scalia 101: Why Attorneys Shouldn't Be Sarcastic or Hyperbolic

In a strange turn of events on Friday, a federal district judge struck down Utah's gay marriage ban on due process and equal protection grounds. While the case mapped fairly closely with another fedreal judge's opinion overturning California's Proposition 8,...



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via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2013/12/scalia-101-why-attorneys-shouldnt-be-sarcastic-or-hyperbolic.html

Hamilton: Social Media and the Tyranny of Distance – Pacific Access to Legal Information

Lenore Hamilton of the Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute has published Social Media and the Tyranny of Distance – Pacific Access to Legal Information , Journal of Open Access to Law , 1(1) (2013).

Here is the abstract:

The track assumes that the use of social media is widespread and can advance the professional and public need to understand or engage with the law. Is this a presumption that underpins the context of the ‘developing’ world?

PacLII is the Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute. Its work started in the mid 90’s and it became a LII in 2003. In the 15 years of its activity, PacLII has begun to host legal material from 20 jurisdictions with common and civil law backgrounds. All could be labelled ‘developing countries’. PacLII’s work covers a vast geographic area and is hostage to the tyrannies of literal distance.

PacLII’s work has been underpinned by great strides in the spread of internet access and a growing commitment to free access to online legal information. Yet we do not use social media.

Is PacLII exhibiting Luddite tendencies in our thinking – are we missing out on a new revolution in communication? Perhaps the audience can challenge our presumptions on the ineffectiveness of social media.

We therefore seek to ask the following questions in the hope of stimulating discussion of whether and how social media could promote a further commitment to online legal information in the developing world:

‐ How would we use it and to what end?

‐ What would be the challenge / benefit ratio to our users?

‐ How does it improve upon other communication tools such as newsletters and emails?

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Technology developments Tagged: Communication about free access to law, Communication about public access to legal information, Free access to law, JOAL, Journal of Open Access to Law, Legal communication, Legal information institutes, Legal information institutes' use of social media, Legal social media, Legal Web 2.0, Lenore Hamilton, Online legal communication, Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute, PacLII, Public access to legal information, Social media and free access to law, Social media and law, Social media and legal communication, Social media and legal information institutes, Social media and public access to legal information, Web 2.0 and law



via Legal Informatics Blog http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/hamilton-social-media-and-the-tyranny-of-distance-pacific-access-to-legal-information/