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...



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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/