Updates on selected legal informatics developments are now being posted on Legal Informatics tumblr and on Twitter.
In the Web interface to this blog, the Twitter updates are visible to the right under “Twitter updates”.
Dazza Greenwood has posted Law Itself is the Killer Blockchain App.
Excerpts:
[…] On a panel discussion about blockchains and the law at the Legal Hackers Congress in NYC this weekend, I’ll provide a sneak-peek at a new, systematic approach for using open blockchains to open the law. All the law. […]
[…] when the law can is publicly verifiable and openly computational, it will be possible to make more definite legal statements and ensure more predictable legal outcomes. A killer blockchain app to liberate law as verifiable, standard data may also hold the key to render law understandable and usable by people, groups and organizations.
UPDATE: Project site is now up, at: http://LawChain.org
The project’s GitHub repo is at: http://ift.tt/29uoOcB
HT @dazzagreenwood and @thelawchain
SubTech 2016: International Conference on Substantive Technology in Legal Education and Practice was held 7-9 July 2015 at University of Richmond School of Law in Richmond, Virginia, USA.
The conference website is at: http://ift.tt/29C23qr
The conference agenda is at: http://ift.tt/29uim57
Twitter hashtags for the conference included: #subtech16 and #subtech2016
A storify of images, links, and Twitter tweets from the conference is at:
http://ift.tt/29C2sct
HT @weblawlib
A new online group for those who teach technology to law students, called Teaching Technology to Law Students Special Interest Group, is being hosted by CALI.
HT @johnpmayer
Karl Branting and Jack Conrad have posted the proceedings and a report of LTDCA 2016: Legal Text, Document, and Corpus Analytics Workshop, held 17 June 2016 the University of San Diego School of Law.
The event Website and program are at: http://ift.tt/1Y38BC6
A storify of Twitter tweets and photos from the workshop is at: http://ift.tt/26bDvJJ
HT @jackgconrad
Charlotte S. Vlek, Henry Prakken, Silja Renooij, and Bart Verheij have published A method for explaining Bayesian networks for legal evidence with scenarios, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law:
http://ift.tt/29Iwehm
Guido Boella, Luigi Di Caro, Llio Humphreys, Livio Robaldo , Piercarlo Rossi, and Leendert van der Torre have published Eunomos, a legal document and knowledge management system for the Web to provide relevant, reliable and up-to-date information on the law, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law: http://ift.tt/29IvNDM
The legal informatics conference calendar has been updated as of 4 July 2016.
Valentino Spataro’s enhanced version of the calendar is available at http://www.gloxa.it/rr/
Thanks to all who contributed.
If you know of other legal informatics conferences that are not on the calendar, but should be, please feel free to tell us in the comments to this post.
A conference of the Global Legal Technology Laboratory was held 5-6 May 2016 at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
The event was hosted by Computational Law Research and Development at MIT.
Click here for a storify of links, images, and Twitter tweets from the event.
According to the executive summary (a Word document, .docx):
The Global Legal Technology Laboratory (GLTL) is an emerging consortium that brings together the legal education and legal technology communities from around the world to (i) establish a new form of prototyping and development capability for innovative legal technologies and (ii) connect with and draw upon various networks engaged with intersections of law, technology and public policy.
Here are resources related to the event:
Several panels related to legal technology are being presented at SXSW 2016 Conference in Austin, Texas, USA, 11-20 March 2016:
Thanks to friends at New York Legal Hackers for part of this list.
If you know of other legal-technology-related panels being presented at SXSW 2016, please feel free tell us about them in the comments to this post.
There will be a temporary halt to new posts at Legal Informatics Blog until summer 2015, so that I can finish my dissertation. Many thanks for reading, and we’ll see you in a few months.
Molly K. Land of the University of Connecticut has posted Participatory Fact-Finding: Developing New Directions for Human Rights Investigations Through New Technologies , forthcoming in The Future of Human Rights Fact-Finding (Philip Alston & Sarah Knuckey eds., Oxford University Press, 2015).
Here is the abstract:
This chapter considers the way in which broader participation in human rights fact-finding, enabled by the introduction of new technologies, will change the nature of fact-finding itself. Using the example of a participatory mapping project called Map Kibera, the chapter argues that new technologies will change human rights fact-finding by providing opportunities for ordinary individuals to investigate the human rights issues that affect them. ‘Those who were formerly the ‘subjects’ of human rights investigations now have the potential to be agents in their own right. This ‘participatory fact-finding’ may not be as effective in ‘naming and shaming’ states and companies that violate human rights because the absence of the imprimatur of an established organization may render the information collected vulnerable to critique. At the same time, new and more participatory techniques of investigation will be better suited to other forms of accountability. Participatory fact-finding has the potential to be fact-finding as empowerment — the collection of information and documentation of facts as means for empowering those affected by abuses to advocate for their change. Participatory fact-finding will also be more effective in documenting violations of the positive obligation to fulfill rights than traditional fact-finding methods because they offer opportunities for gathering more data than is possible through victim and witness interviewing.
By supporting local participation, new technologies provide an opportunity to bring the practice of human rights fact-finding into greater alignment with human rights principles. Utilizing new technologies to achieve greater participation in human rights fact-finding will allow human rights organizations to ‘practice what they preach’ — to integrate the principle of participation into their own work in addition to recommending it to states and other duty-bearers. There is and will continue to be a significant need for the kind of fact-finding done by large and established international human rights organizations. Yet documentation projects involving citizens have the potential to be a new kind of fact-finding — to look and function differently than fact-finding as generally practiced by the major international non-governmental organizations and the United Nations. By opening up who can participate in investigation, new technologies will not replace established methodologies, but will instead broaden our understanding of what counts as human rights documentation and the purposes such investigations serve.
Tech for Justice Hackathon+ Austin was held February 21-22, 2015 in Austin, Texas, USA.
The event was organized by the Internet Bar Organization.
Video describing the results and winners of the event is available at: http://ift.tt/1afvsDX
Video of the project presentations at the event is at: http://ift.tt/1afvtYv
The Twitter account for the event is @TechForJustice
One Twitter hashtag for the event was #techforjustice
Click here for a storify of images and Twitter tweets from the event.
Here is a description of the event, from the registration site:
[…] This legal hackathon will gather programmers, lawyers, technologists, UI& UE designers, public and private sector organizations and government agencies to tackle how to allow EVERYONE to avail themselves of our justice system, or to find methods of achieving informal justice.
TECH FOR JUSTICE Hackathon+ Austin is working in partnership with the Texas Supreme Court, the Texas Judicial Council, Texas Legal Services Center, Legal Services Corporation, and more. This hackathon is unique in its direct partnerships with legal and judicial institutions, and will focus on the creation of solutions that will directly apply to the improvement of state court systems, as well as private justice mechanisms.
Participants will spend the weekend of February 21st and 22nd tackling problems and producing proof of concepts and prototypes that will be curated and presented to worldwide audiences. After the Hackathon, participants will be incentivized to continue to develop their ideas through mentoring, data sharing, and public-private partnerships to bring ideas to fruition. […]
Want to attend? Reserve your spot now and let us know if you’re a coder, legal professional, or just want to participate in general.
Want to participate remotely? Sign-up to participate from anywhere in the world.
All registrants will be the first to receive the latest info on the Hackathon and have the opportunity to take part in events prior to the Hackathon.
Want to watch the livestream? Sign up to take a front row virtual seat via our live webcast of the event in Austin. Livestream registration does not allow for participation in the event. If you want to participate, we recommend you sign up for remote participate as soon as possible, as participant numbers will be capped. […]
Here is a description of the event, from the registration site:
[…] This legal hackathon will gather programmers, lawyers, technologists, UI& UE designers, public and private sector organizations and government agencies to tackle how to allow EVERYONE to avail themselves of our justice system, or to find methods of achieving informal justice.
TECH FOR JUSTICE Hackathon+ Austin is working in partnership with the Texas Supreme Court, the Texas Judicial Council, Texas Legal Services Center, Legal Services Corporation, and more. This hackathon is unique in its direct partnerships with legal and judicial institutions, and will focus on the creation of solutions that will directly apply to the improvement of state court systems, as well as private justice mechanisms.
Participants will spend the weekend of February 21st and 22nd tackling problems and producing proof of concepts and prototypes that will be curated and presented to worldwide audiences. After the Hackathon, participants will be incentivized to continue to develop their ideas through mentoring, data sharing, and public-private partnerships to bring ideas to fruition. […]
Want to attend? Reserve your spot now and let us know if you’re a coder, legal professional, or just want to particpate in general.
Want to participate remotely? Sign-up to participate from anywhere in the world.
All registrants will be the first to receive the latest info on the Hackathon and have the opportunity to take part in events prior to the Hackathon.
Want to watch the livestream? Sign up to take a front row virtual seat via our live webcast of the event in Austin. Livestream registration does not allow for participation in the event. If you want to participate, we recommend you sign up for remote participate as soon as possible, as participant numbers will be capped. […]
Here is a description from the announcement:
During the weekend of February 21-22, 2015, please join Code for Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and municipal partners at the MIT Media Lab for a weekend of discussion, civic hacking, and data-driven exploration. The event will take place at the MIT Media Lab in the “Atrium” on the third floor.
The event will bring together government employees, technologists, and community members to focus on civic and social issues that face our local communities including public safety and justice, health and human services, economic development, and citizen engagement. We will also be celebrating open data in MA as part of International Open Data Day.
The Human Dynamics Lab will convene a special interest group both days exploring how Computational Law and Legal Informatics can provide applied solutions for CodeAcross civic and social issues. The Legal group will feature break out sessions to rapid prototype approaches and options. For more information on this special interest group, please contact Dazza Greenwood or contact us here.
Click here for the registration site.
J. B. Ruhl and Daniel Martin Katz have posted Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Legal Complexity , forthcoming in Iowa Law Review.
Here is the abstract:
The American legal system is often accused of being “too complex.” For example, most Americans believe the Tax Code is too complex. But what does that mean, and how would one prove the Tax Code is too complex? The descriptive claim that an element of law is complex, and the normative claim that it is too complex, should be empirically testable hypotheses, yet in fact very little is known about how to measure legal complexity, much less to monitor and manage it.
Legal scholars have begun to employ the science of complex adaptive systems, also known as complexity science, to probe these kinds of descriptive and normative questions about the legal system. This body of work has focused primarily on developing theories of legal complexity and positing reasons for, and ways of, managing it. Legal scholars thus have skipped the hard part — developing quantitative metrics and methods for measuring and monitoring law’s complexity. But the theory of legal complexity will remain stuck in theory until it moves to the empirical phase of study, and thinking about ways of managing legal complexity is pointless if there is no yardstick for deciding how complex the law should be. In short, the theory of legal complexity cannot be put to work without more robust empirical tools for identifying and keeping track of complexity in legal systems.
This Article explores legal complexity at a depth not previously undertaken in legal scholarship. Part I orients the discussion by briefly reviewing the scholarship using complexity science to develop descriptive, prescriptive, and ethical theories of legal complexity. Parts II through IV then shift to the empirical front, identifying potentially useful metrics and methods for studying legal complexity. Part II draws from complexity science to develop methods that have or might be applied to measure different features of legal complexity, including metrics for agents, trees, networks, computation, feedback, and emergence. Part III proposes methods for monitoring legal complexity over time, in particular by conceptualizing what we call Legal Maps — a multi-layered, active representation of the legal system network at work. Part IV concludes with a preliminary examination of how the measurement and monitoring techniques could inform interventions designed to manage legal complexity through use of currently available machine learning and user interface design technologies.
Alan deLevie of 18F has launched two tools for working with legal data from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC):
Provides permalinks to the FCC Record
A tool for exporting filings from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission as structured data
HT @adelevie (here, here, and here)
Cynthia Farina , Hoi Kong , Cheryl Blake , Mary Newhart , and Nik Luka have published Democratic Deliberation in the Wild: The McGill Online Design Studio and the RegulationRoom Project, Fordham Urban Law Journal, 41, 1527-1580 (2014).
The full text appears to be available from commercial vendors.
Here are excerpts from the introduction:
[…] Here we describe two projects, both being conducted by university researchers, that use innovative technological tools to motivate and support broader, better citizen engagement in government decision making. One is a digitally-mediated community-based urban design studio. […] A collaboration among law and urban planning faculty of McGill University and a Montréal community organization, this project aims to involve area residents in the redevelopment of a forty-five acre post-industrial site in Montréal’s midtown Bellechasse sector. […] The second is RegulationRoom.org, an online website that supports informed public participation in the process of making government regulations (rulemaking). […]
[…] the projects […] aim to discover how the digitally empowered citizen-participant can be meaningfully engaged through processes designed to prime deliberative discussion and knowledge production, rather than mere voting and venting.
The Article proceeds as follows: Part I discusses the problematic yet promising relationship between the theory of deliberative democracy and the practice of public participation in government decision making. Part II gives an overview of the MODS Bellechasse project and the RegulationRoom project, and then focuses on how each project uses technology and human effort to lower the principal barriers to broader, better public participation. Part III discusses lessons learned from the projects and identifies challenges that remain. […]
Colin Starger of the University of Baltimore has posted Hacking Mass Incarceration , at In Progress .
Here are excerpts from the post:
[…] Here at In Progress, we hope to contribute to collective efforts by hacking Supreme Court doctrine. The idea is to open up the law around prisons and make connections to help generate anti-mass incarceration constitutional arguments. What’s more, the goal is to crowdsource the connection-making process. To do this, I am experimenting with doctrinal map designs to facilitate non-specialist learning of complex doctrinal systems.
Last time, I charted out a series of Eighth Amendment doctrinal networks and found them large and unwieldy. It’s not realistic to expect anybody to read over 100 Supreme Court cases while mining for anti-mass-incarceration arguments. So this time, I want to narrow the focus. Below find the 2-degree citation network linking the Court’s 2011 prisoner overcrowding decision Brown v. Plata to 1958′s Trop v. Dulles, a seminal pronouncement about the Eighth Amendment’s meaning as a guarantee of human dignity in light of evolving standards of decency. […]
Note the new design feature of the map above: its interactivity. Click on the map and then click on any of the opinions. You’ll find yourself looking an HTML deck that (a) has a very quick summary of the case holding; and (b) contains links to open resources about the case provided by CourtListener, Cornell Legal Information Institute, Oyez, and the Supreme Court Database. Some of the decks also contain other potentially useful information — check out the Brown v. Plata deck as an example (make sure you tap your right arrow key!).
As the above map demonstrates, legal hacking is a collective activity. If the map helps at all, it is only because it leverages free resources provided by great organizations doing great work. The HTML Deck platform is an especially cool free resource created by Dave Zvenyach, the 2014 DC Legal Hacker of the Year. His example should inspire us all to tinker and build and seek creative solutions. […]
For the map and more details, please see the complete post.
Chris Marsden of the University of Sussex has posted Open Access to Law – How Soon? at the site of the Society for Computers and Law.
Here is the introduction to the post:
Professor Chris Marsden explains what is behind the Openlaws.eu project and explores the current landscape of access to law in the UK.
The law is a slow-moving beast, as are most lawyers (members of this august Society obviously excepted). Yet with more non-professionals appearing before the courts, in an ever more litigious society, but with fewer resources to engage legal professionals, learning something of the law is more important than ever. In a Knowledge Society, citizens can now access information about their surgeon, their school, their university professor, their neighbours – but not the law, with few exceptions. This is untenable; governments worldwide, together with legal professionals and scholars, have in the past two decades made plans to move towards open access to law via the Internet. This article explores how far the English law has moved, and what remains to be done. It concludes by explaining the pan-European openlaws.eu project, which is releasing its beta version in a Salzburg code camp on 20-21 March (the hills may well be alive with the sound of legal hacking). […]
