Call for papers: New refereed legal informatics journal: Legal Information Review

A call for papers has been issued for a new refereed legal informatics journal entitled Legal Information Review.

The journal’s Website is at: http://ift.tt/1BfQygf

The editor in chief of the journal is Susan Nevelow Mart of the University of Colorado.

The journal is published by William S. Hein and Co.

Here are descriptions of the editorial and advisory boards, from the call:

The Editorial Board: Editor-in-Chief: Susan Nevelow Mart, and Editors Paul Callister, Dennis Kim-Prieto, Lee Peoples, Shawn Nevers, Vickie Szymczak, Erika Wayne, and Ron Wheeler.

The Advisory Board: Advisor-in-Chief: Barbara Bintliff, and Advisors Andrea Hamilton, Coral Henning, Diane Rodriguez, and Kathy Skinner.

Here are excerpts from the call:

William S. Hein & Co., Inc. and Susan Nevelow Mart are pleased to announce the launch of the Legal Information Review, a new journal at the intersection of law librarianship and legal information. The journal will be published once a year.

The Legal Information Review encourages submissions of applied or theoretical work on the intersection of law librarianship and legal information, including:

• the theoretical framework for teaching legal research (issues such as information literacy theory, adult learning theory, network theory, or other educational, social science, or psychology theories);


• information retrieval (both manual and automated systems such as artificial intelligence and law);


• law and policy (issues such as privacy, copyright, and security);


• information access issues (such as making legal and government information more accessible to the public, both physically and intellectually); and


• practice issues (analyses or applications which help lawyers in their day-to-day operations).

Legal Information Review encourages manuscripts with links to author-produced videos, PowerPoints, or other media. Articles will be available in both online and print versions. The first volume is planned for December 2015. […]

For more details, please see the complete call.

HT NELLCO

Filed under: Calls for papers, Journals Tagged: Barbara Bintliff, Call for papers, Legal informatics journals, Legal Information Review, Peer reviewed legal informatics journals, Refereed legal informatics journals, Susan Nevelow Mart, University of Colorado School of Law, William S. Hein



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Chen: Weighted-Average Methodologies for Evaluating Bar Examination Passage Rates

James Ming Chen of Michigan State University has posted Weighted-Average Methodologies for Evaluating Bar Examination Passage Rates , at SSRN .

Here is part of the abstract:

[…] The American Bar Association and U.S. News and World Report’s law school rankings rely on bar passage rates for the single largest cohort within any school’s graduating class. But the modal passage rate is misleading as a measure of any one school’s overall bar passage rates. The modal passage rate also fails to facilitate direct comparisons of bar examination performance at different schools.

To evaluate the overall bar examination performance of the graduates of any law school, I propose the use of weighted-average methodologies. Ideally, we should be able to measure, by use of weighted averages, each school’s bar passage z-score. Since the data needed to conduct proper standard scoring is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to procure, I propose a simplified weighted-average methodology. The weighted average of school-specific bar passage rates by jurisdiction, minus the weighted average of passage rates from all jurisdictions where its graduates, enables us to evaluate each school’s bar exam performance, relative to the bar passage rate in its modal state, and relative to the weighted average bar passage rate across the entire United States. […]

Professor Chen has also published a post about this paper at MoneyLaw .

HT @chenx064 [here and here]

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Methodology, Statistics Tagged: Bar passage rates, Bar passage statistics, James Ming Chen, Jim Chen, Legal educational statistics, Output measures for legal education, SSRN, Statistical methods in legal informatics, Statistical methods in legal information studies



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The Constitute Project: Comparative constitutional linked data for display, download, and analysis

The Constitute Project is a database of comparative national constitutions, with an interface enabling comparison of provisions, and Linked Data available for querying or for download.

In addition to display of comparative data through the user interface, the system enables downloads of certain data and metadata, including an OWL ontology of constitutions, and querying of Linked Data through a SPARQL endpoint.

Here is a description of the project, from the project’s About page:

Constitute includes the constitution that was in force in September of 2013 for nearly every independent state in the world, but we continue to update these texts as they are amended or replaced. Soon we hope to include a version of many constitutions written since 1789. […]

Constitute was developed by the Comparative Constitutions Project at the University of Texas at Austin. It was seeded with a grant from Google Ideas, with additional financial support from the Indigo Trust and IC2. Semantic data structures were created by the Miranker Lab at the University of Texas using Capsenta‘s Ultrawrap. Site architecture, engineering, and design are provided by Psycle Interactive.

The following organizations have made important investments in the Comparative Constitutions Project since 2005: the National Science Foundation (SES 0648288, IIS 1018554), the Cline Center for Democracy, the United States Institute of Peace, the University of Texas, the University of Chicago, and the Constitution Unit at University College London. […]

Here are descriptions of the data, from the project’s Data page:

We provide Linked Data dumps in three forms:

• The ontology includes the project’s conceptual inventory together with the constitutional excerpts, and is available as an .owl file


• The metadata, includes selected attributes the constitutions is available as an .nt file


• Each country page includes data on the constitutional excerpts of the country with the corresponding topics available as N-Triples (.nt), Turtle (.ttl) and RDF/XML (.xml) files.

[…]

All of the data are from, or were collected for, the Comparative Constitutions Project. Some translations are used with permission from HeinOnline and the Oxford Constitutions of the World. […]

Google’s Blog published a post about the project, entitled: Explore the world’s constitutions with a new online tool .

HT @johnlsheridan

Filed under: Applications, Data sets, Technology developments, Technology tools Tagged: Comparative Constitutions Project, Constitute, Constitutional law information systems, Legal Linked Data, Legal ontologies, Linked Data and law, Ontologies of constitutions, Ontologies of legal constitutions



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