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via Strategist http://blogs.findlaw.com/strategist/2013/10/5-reasons-to-walk-away-from-the-law.html
Dr. Margaret Hagan of Stanford University has posted Judgepedia & crowdsourcing court-user info , at Open Law Lab .
Here are excerpts:
[... Judgepedia] is great in that it compiles disparate information that is available on lots of random sites around the web, and then creates a standard & searchable single experience for a user to more easily navigate. The standardization is a great benefit.
Still, there is lots of potential to expand from this basic educational information & get to a new service for consumers of court services. When I first saw the title Judgepedia, I was expecting more info for the legal user — for someone who will be encountering the judicial system and wanting to know how to deal with a certain judge.
That kind of product would provide stats & metrics about lawyers and judges — which seems like a forbidden territory in the legal domain. Even if such an evaluative product could be developed, it seems there would be serious vested interests that would block its implementation.
But still, that seems to be where the real need is.
The more I study legal consumers, the more it becomes clear that a main unmet need of lawyers & clients is to build better strategies to get legal tasks done. This is where there is huge promise in crowdsourced information. If we can share information on what strategies work best within specific parts of the legal system & with certain judges — and which ones fail — this would be a huge benefit to litigants. Or if we could build a stats system that tracks judges’ behavior & preferences, this would similarly equip legal users with ways to better prepare their strategies.
The outstanding challenge, then, is how to gather, check, & share this crowdsourced information (which would be a huge undertaking in itself) — and to do it in a way that would survive challenges by lawyers, judges, and others who have a vested interest in resisting evaluation. [...]
For more details, please see the complete post.
Free Law Project has added 1.5 million court decisions to its collection, due to a donation from Lawbox LLC , according to an announcement on 30 October 2013 by the project’s principals, Professor Dr. Brian Carver and Michael Lissner .
Here are excerpts of the announcement:
After many years of collecting and curating data, today CourtListener crossed some incredible boundaries. Thanks to a generous data donation from Lawbox LLC, our computers are currently adding more than 1.5M new opinions to CourtListener, expanding our coverage to a total of more than 350 jurisdictions. This new data enables legal professionals and researchers insight into data that has never before been available in bulk and greatly enhances the data we previously had. This data will be slowly rolling out in our front end, and will soon be available in bulk from our bulk downloads page. A new version of our coverage page was developed, and, as always, you can see our current coverage for any jurisdiction we support.
[...] In addition to being a massive expansion of our coverage, [this new data] also brings some notable improvements to the project:
For all of the new data and much of our old data, we have added star pagination throughout. For the first time, this will make pinpoint citations possible using the CourtListener platform.
We’ve re-organized our database for more accurate citations enabling for the first time the creation of a citation cross walk. We will soon be releasing an API for our data and when we do, a simple query for a citation could tell you equivalent citations for that opinion. For example, a query for a Supreme Court opinion could tell you its citation in West’s Federal Reporter, Lawyers’ Edition, and a historical citation, like one to Howard’s Supreme Court Reports. Similarly, for courts with neutral citations, one could query the neutral citation and get back the citation in the regional reporter and state reporter or vice versa. This has long been a pipe dream for numerous legal professionals and will soon be a reality.
This fills in previously unknown gaps in the data available from Resource.org. Although it is often considered complete, we have identified a few small gaps, which this donation has corrected.
We’ve completed a first pass at extracting judge information from all of the new opinions. This feature is still in beta since our extraction is not comprehensive, but this feature can be used for rough queries starting immediately.
We’ve created a massive database of all known reporters and released it for free to the public. In addition to containing all of the reporters we found when working with this donation, it contains variations for their names as found in our corpus and in the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations. This database can be used in citation finders or other tools, like the Free Law Ferret.
We’ve created a new database of American jurisdictions. It currently contains 351 jurisdictions and can be used to create systems such as CourtListener. The data is not yet complete and we welcome your contributions.
[...] Over the remainder of the week we will be writing two additional posts about this topic, explaining the design work behind our new jurisdiction picker, and the process we use to merge new corpuses in with our existing data. [...]
For more details, please see the complete announcement.
The Sunlight Foundation announced on 29 October 2013 that it had acquired OpenCongress , the free-access-to-law and eparticipation service, from the Participatory Politics Foundation.
Tom Lee of the Sunlight Foundation says that the principal Sunlight Foundation personnel working on OpenCongress are Dan Drinkard , Drew Vogel , Kaitlin Devine , and Olivia Cheng .
Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation says that several of his legislative tools support OpenCongress.
Yesterday the American National Standards Institute issued an announcement: ANSI Launches Online Portal for Standards Incorporated by Reference: Website Provides Free, Read-Only Access to Private-Sector Documents That Have Been Incorporated into U.S. Government Regulations .
Here are excerpts:
The American National Standards Institute(ANSI) is proud to announce the official launch of the ANSI IBR Portal, an online tool for free, read-only access to voluntary consensus standards that have been incorporated by reference (IBR) into federal laws and regulations.
In recent years, issues related to IBR have commanded increased attention, particularly in connection to requirements that standards that have been incorporated into federal laws and regulations be “reasonably available” to the U.S. citizens and residents affected by these rules. This requirement had led some to call for the invalidation of copyrights for IBR standards. Others have posted copyrighted standards online without the permission of the organizations that developed them, triggering legal action from standards developing organizations (SDOs).
“In all of our discussions about the IBR issue, the question we are trying to answer is simple. Why aren’t standards free? In the context of IBR, it’s a valid point to raise,” said S. Joe Bhatia, ANSI president and CEO. “A standard that has been incorporated by reference does have the force of law, and it should be available. But the blanket statement that all IBR standards should be free misses a few important considerations.”
As coordinator of the U.S. standardization system, ANSI has taken a lead role in informing the public about the reality of free standards, the economics of standards setting, and how altering this infrastructure will undermine U.S. competitiveness. Specifically, the loss of revenue from the sale of standards could negatively impact the business model supporting many SDOs – potentially disrupting the larger U.S. and international standardization system, a major driver of innovation and economic growth worldwide. In response to concerns raised by ANSI members and partner organizations, government officials, and other stakeholders, ANSI began to develop its IBR Portal, with the goal of providing a single solution to this significant issue that also provides SDOs with the flexibility they require to safeguard their ability to develop standards.
IBR standards hosted on the portal are available exclusively as read-only files. In order to protect the intellectual property rights of the groups holding these standards’ copyrights, the portal has built in security features that prevent users from printing, downloading, or transferring any of the posted standards; in addition, screenshots will be disabled and the standards will contain an identifying watermark. [...]
For more details, please see the complete announcement.
HT @carlmalamud
Waldo Jaquith announced yesterday the founding of the U.S. Open Data Institute, with funding from the Knight Foundation .
Here is an excerpt from Waldo’s post:
I first proposed the idea of the U.S. Open Data Institute to Knight Foundation in the spring. Knight immediately supported the concept and nurtured the organization into existence. And now we’re getting to work.
I’m convinced that we already have many of the right people, organizations and businesses working on open data in the United States. They just don’t know about each other. (The organization certainly won’t duplicate any of the efforts of the folks in this space.) And we have nearly all of the necessary software, but so much of it is only known within its narrow domain, despite its broad applicability. The institute will connect all of these entities, promote the work of those who are leading the way and provide supportive, nonjudgmental assistance to those who need help. We don’t have all the answers, but we know the folks who do. We want to amplify their message and connect them to new collaborators and clients.
There are oceans of information in the hands of government and businesses, information that, if released to the public, could be of great value. Of course, there are the classic examples of the National Weather Service’s data and the nation’s Global Positioning System—information produced by government that has become crucial to the nation’s economy. But it’s time to move beyond those tired examples and create new industries premised on other types of open data: health, transportation, commerce and many others that nobody’s thought of yet.
Groups such as Code for America, the Internet Archive, the OpenGov Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation—many supported by Knight—are doing crucial, foundational work with open data here in the United States. In addition, thousands of specialized organizations and businesses are starting to see the value of open data, and they are doing their best to join the movement.
In a very healthy development, there are businesses sprouting up that specialize in open data. Dozens of small consultancies exist around the nation, and big players, such as Socrata, are providing enterprise open data solutions. But there are also thousands of businesses that produce data that would be valuable to open up.
There are also some laudable government efforts. Significant leadership has come from the White House, with Data.gov and President Obama’s recent open data executive order. Then there are a handful of cities, such as Philadelphia and San Francisco and New York, that are aggressively—and successfully—promoting innovation and economic development through open data.
Knight Foundation’s $250,000 grant will enable us to spend six to nine months trying out the model established by the London-based Open Data Institute to determine how to best work with the many actors in this space. In collaboration with the Aspen Institute, Knight held an event in Aspen, Colo., this summer to bring together leaders in the open data community to discuss if there was a need for a new organization and whether the Open Data Institute’s model was a good one to replicate. That event led to the plan that we’re now executing.
In 2014, we’ll take some major steps. We will test out messaging. We will try to assist the whole range of government agencies, spotlight and contribute to open source projects in the open data space and promote the businesses that offer valuable skills and products in this field. We’ll support the hackers and innovators who have done so much of the technical work that undergirds the infrastructure of open data. [...]
The Knight Foundation has also posted an announcement: Data transparency effort – successful in U.K. – to be tested in U.S.
The U.S. Open Data Institute could enable information sharing between the open legal data community and other parts of the open data community, and also provide funding opportunities for open legal data projects and research.
Dr. Andrew Whitby of Nesta has posted UK Hansard Archive Bulk Download URL File (or When is Open Data Not) .
Here are excerpts:
I am currently working on a project that involves large scale analysis of various countries’ Hansards (this is, transcripts of parliamentary debate). [...]
The UK Parliament has such a digitised archive, here.
Frustratingly though, although these zipped XML files are available, there is no bulk download option or simple FTP archive of them. [...]
So, to save anyone else the pain, here is a link to a file I built that contains links to every file in this archive. I used the handy FormRequest feature of Scrapy, my favourite, heavily used, scraping tool.
https://github.com/econandrew/uk-hansard-archive-urls/blob/master/urls.txt [...]
For more details, please see the complete post.
Dr. Margaret Hagan of Stanford University has posted Legal Design Jam: a sketchnote , at Open Law Lab .
The post describes the organization, events, and conclusions regarding the Legal Design Jams in Northern California, held 11 October 2013 at Stanford d.school, and 12 October 2013 at The Embassy Network in San Francisco.
The event was organized by Dr. Hagan, Stefania Passera, M.A., of Aalto University School of Science, and Helena Haapio, LL.M., of Lexpert Ltd.
The post concludes:
If you are interested in hosting your own Legal Design Jam — getting people together to work on how to redesign the look and interactions of a legal document — reach out to Stefania at stefania.passera (at) aalto.fi
Ms. Passera lists upcoming legal design jams here at MIND.
Click here for other upcoming legal hacking events.
Eric Mill , Joshua Tauberer , and Derek Willis announced last week a new site for The unitedstates Project : http://theunitedstates.io/
The site covers:
congress-legislators: Detailed data on members of Congress, past and present.
congress: Scrapers and parsers for the work of Congress, all day, every day.
citation: Stand-alone legal citation detector. Text in, citations out.
uscode: Parser for the US Code.
bill-nicknames: Tiny spreadsheet of common nicknames for bills and laws.
glossary: A public domain glossary for the United States.
licensing: Policy guidelines for the licensing of US government information.
wish-list: Post ideas for new projects.
Eric has written a post explaining the project.
Click here for earlier posts about the project.
HT @konklone
Professor Dr. Brian Carver of the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael Lissner , have announced the availability of Free Law Virtual Machine , a new set of tools from Free Law Project.
Here are excerpts of the announcement:
A goal of the Free Law Project is to make development of legal tools as easy as possible. In that vein, we’re excited to share that as of today we’re officially taking the wraps off what we’re calling the Free Law Virtual Machine.
For those not familiar with this, a virtual machine is a snapshot of a computer that can be run by anybody, anywhere. With this release, we’ve created a computer running Ubuntu Linux that our developers or academics can download, and which has all of the Free Law Project’s efforts pre-loaded and ready to go.
In addition to a number of minor improvements, the following are installed and configured:
- Courtlistener
- Juriscraper
- Development tools such as Intellij, Meld, vim, and Kiki
- Bookmarks of all American courts
In addition to providing a simple virtual machine that you can install, we’re also releasing sample data that can easily be imported into the CourtListener platform. This data is available in groups of 50, 500, 5,000 or 50,000 records so that anybody can easily begin working or experimenting with our platform.
If you’re interested in using the Free Law Virtual Machine, feel free to download and use it, and please get in touch in our developer forum. [...]
For more details, please see the complete announcement.
HT Legal Informatics subreddit
Dr. Margaret Hagan of Stanford University has launched a redesigned version of Open Law Lab , “an initiative to design law:
to make it more accessible, more usable, and more engaging.”
The site highlights the topics of legal design process, visual law, access to justice, and legal education and practice.
The Resources section provides access to a great set of resources on user research in legal information system design.
For more details, please see the site.
Dr. Victor Rodriguez Doncel , María Poveda-Villalón , Professor Dr. Mari Carmen Suarez , and Professor Dr. Asuncion Gomez , all of the Ontology Engineering Group at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, have posted Linked Data Rights .
Here is the abstract:
The Linked Data Rights ontology provides the vocabulary for creating rights expressions for Linked Data resources.
Victor says he and his team presented the specification at ISWC 2013: International Semantic Web Conference, held 21-25 October 2013 in Sydney.
HT @vroddon
Several papers or posters on legal informatics are being presented at ICEGOV 2013: 7th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance , being held 22-25 October 2013 in Seoul:
For abstracts or full text of papers, please contact the authors.
Click here for the complete conference program.
Twitter hashtags for the conference appear to be #icegov2013 and #icegov
If you know of other legal informatics papers being presented at the conference, please let us know in the comments to this post.
Professor Dr. Jan M. Smits of Maastricht University has posted a paper entitled Of the Vocation of Our Age Against Codification: On Civil Codes in the Information Society .
Here is the abstract:
The belief in presenting the law by way of comprehensive systematisation by national states seems to be as important today as it was 200 years ago. In this contribution it is investigated whether this belief in codification is still accurate. It is at least surprising that an institution that was invented more than two centuries ago still has such a prominent place in the (civil) law. It is argued that the most important function of codification, namely to provide information about the law, can today be achieved in a much better way than through state-made systematisations. This calls for a different way of presenting the law to the general audience: not by way of national codification or through legal science, but by creating alternative models of legal information management.
Professor Dr. Christopher Zorn of Penn State University has posted slides of his presentation, entitled The Legal Industry 2013 , given 18 October 2013, at the Campbell University Law Review Symposium 2013: The Evolving Role of the Corporate Counsel: How Information Technology is Reinventing Legal Practice , in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.
The presentation covers recent developments in U.S. law firm revenue, technology, and personnel.
HT @prisonrodeo
Professor Dr. Norman Fenton , Professor Dr. Martin Neil , and Dr. Anne Hsu , all of Queen Mary University of London, have published Calculating and understanding the value of any type of match evidence when there are potential testing errors , forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law .
Here is the abstract:
It is well known that Bayes’ theorem (with likelihood ratios) can be used to calculate the impact of evidence, such as a ‘match’ of some feature of a person. Typically the feature of interest is the DNA profile, but the method applies in principle to any feature of a person or object, including not just DNA, fingerprints, or footprints, but also more basic features such as skin colour, height, hair colour or even name. Notwithstanding concerns about the extensiveness of databases of such features, a serious challenge to the use of Bayes in such legal contexts is that its standard formulaic representations are not readily understandable to non-statisticians. Attempts to get round this problem usually involve representations based around some variation of an event tree. While this approach works well in explaining the most trivial instance of Bayes’ theorem (involving a single hypothesis and a single piece of evidence) it does not scale up to realistic situations. In particular, even with a single piece of match evidence, if we wish to incorporate the possibility that there are potential errors (both false positives and false negatives) introduced at any stage in the investigative process, matters become very complex. As a result we have observed expert witnesses (in different areas of speciality) routinely ignore the possibility of errors when presenting their evidence. To counter this, we produce what we believe is the first full probabilistic solution of the simple case of generic match evidence incorporating both classes of testing errors. Unfortunately, the resultant event tree solution is too complex for intuitive comprehension. And, crucially, the event tree also fails to represent the causal information that underpins the argument. In contrast, we also present a simple-to-construct graphical Bayesian Network (BN) solution that automatically performs the calculations and may also be intuitively simpler to understand. Although there have been multiple previous applications of BNs for analysing forensic evidence — including very detailed models for the DNA matching problem — these models have not widely penetrated the expert witness community. Nor have they addressed the basic generic match problem incorporating the two types of testing error. Hence we believe our basic BN solution provides an important mechanism for convincing experts — and eventually the legal community — that it is possible to rigorously analyse and communicate the full impact of match evidence on a case, in the presence of possible errors.
Professor Dr. Jean D’Aspremont of the University of Manchester and Professor Dr. Larissa van den Herik of Leiden University have posted a paper entitled The Digitalization of the Assembly Line of Knowledge About Law: A Reinvention of the Confrontational Nature of Legal Scholarship?
Here is the abstract:
This paper reflects upon the rise of new tools of production and dissemination of knowledge about law as well as their impact on the dynamics and the nature of the profession of legal scholar. Taking the contemporary international legal scholarship as a case-study, it discusses the potentially dramatic changes brought about by the new media of communication, not only with respect to the configuration of the assembly line of knowledge about law in the 21st century but also regarding the profession of legal academic as a whole.
This paper starts by distinguishing modes of law-making and modes of knowledge-production with a view to showing that these two modes of production of authoritative statements share are not always following radically different dynamics. It then recalls that the production of knowledge about law has always been estranged from the State and rested on a competitive social process between professionals. The paper subsequently makes the point that knowledge-producing processes in international legal scholarship have been dramatically altered in the cyber-age. Knowledge about international law is now created, selected and disseminated through previously unknown channels that cannot be influenced by the State. These mutations have required legal scholars to change how they envisage and construe their contribution to the production of knowledge and thus how they see their own profession. The paper finally formulates some concluding remarks about what it means for the discipline as a whole.
HT @JdA_IntLaw