Vergottini: XML, HTML, JSON – Choosing the Right Format for Legislative Text

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has posted XML, HTML, JSON – Choosing the Right Format for Legislative Text, at Legix.info.

Here are excerpts:

I find I’m often talking about an information model and XML as if they’re the same thing. However, there is no reason to tie these two things together as one. Instead, we should look at the information model in terms of the information it represents and let the manner in which we express that information be a separate concern. In the last few weeks I have found myself discussing alternative forms of representing legislative information with three people – chatting with Eric Mill at the Sunlight Foundation about HTML microformats (look for a blog from him on this topic soon), Daniel Bennett regarding microdata, and Ari Hershowitz regarding JSON.

I thought I would try and open up a discussion on this topic by shedding some light on it. If we can strip away the discussion of the information model and instead focus on the representation, perhaps we can agree on which formats are better for which applications. Is a format a good storage format, a good transport format, a good analysis/programming format, or a good all-around format? [...]

Several examples are given. Then, Grant writes:

[...] There are many different ways of representing the same legislative model – each with its own strength and weaknesses. Different consumers have different needs. While XML is a good all-around format, it also brings with it some degree of sophistication and complexity that many information consumers simply don’t need to tackle. It should be possible, as a consumer, to specify the form of the information that most closely fits my need and have the legislative data source deliver it to me in that format. [...]

What do you think?

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @arihersh

Mill: Integrating the US’s Documents

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation has posted Integrating the US’ Documents, at the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

Here is an excerpt:

A few weeks ago, we integrated the full text of federal bills and regulations into our alert system, Scout. Now, if you visit CISPA or a fascinating cotton rule, you’ll see the original document – nicely formatted, but also well-integrated into Scout’s layout. There are a lot of good reasons to integrate the text this way: we want you to see why we alerted you to a document without having to jump off-site, and without clunky iframes.

As importantly, we wanted to do this in a way that would be easily reusable by other projects and people. So we built a tool called us-documents that makes it possible for anyone to do this with federal bills and regulations. It’s available as a Ruby gem, and comes with a command line tool so that you can use it with Python, Node, or any other language. It lives inside the unitedstates project at unitedstates/documents, and is entirely public domain. [..]

For more details, including an example of the HTML, please see the complete post.

HT @konklone

May 22: House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference 2013

The U.S. House of Representatives will hold its second Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, 22 May 2013, in Washington, DC.

Click here for the conference agenda.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #ldtc

Here is an excerpt from Daniel Schuman’s description of the event:

The House of Representatives will hold its second annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference on Wednesday, May 22, in the Capitol Visitor Center Auditorium. Last year’s conference was a tremendous success, bringing together the government insiders that create and publish legislative data with the public that consumes and reuses the information. Here’s video from the 2012 conference.

The 2013 conference is expected to address the “use and future of legislative data,” and will cover topics including electronic legislative archiving, XML and metadata standards, and updates on beta.congress.gov. Of course, like last year, the most important part of the conference will be the conversations that take place among the participants. The House’s leadership deserves real credit for holding the conference and inviting the public to participate.

Like last year, this year’s all-day event is open to the public. [...]

r Dr. Joshua Tauberer tells us: “I’ll be formally introducing my #OpenGovData Maturity Model at the conference.”

After the conference, several organizations presenting at the conference, including the Sunlight Foundation, will hold a happy hour, for which you can RSVP here.

HT @danielschuman

FuzzyLaw: Collection of lay citizens’ understandings of legal terminology

The Cardiff University Centre for Language and Communication has made available FuzzyLaw, an online collection of “lay-people’s explanations of legal terms.”

Here is the description from the project’s Website:

FuzzyLaw has gathered explanations of legal terms from members of the public in order to get a sense of what the ‘person on the street’ has in mind when they think of a legal term. By making lay-people’s explanations of legal terms available to interpreters, police and other legal professionals, we hope to stimulate debate and learning about word meaning, public understanding of law and the nature of explanation.

The explanations gathered in FuzzyLaw are unusual in that they are provided by members of the public. These people, all aged over 18, regard themselves as ‘native speakers’, ‘first language speakers’ and ‘mother tongue’ speakers of English and have lived in England and/or Wales for 10 years or more. We might therefore expect that they will understand English legal terminology as well as any member of the public might. No one who has contributed has ever worked in the criminal law system or as an interpreter or translator. They therefore bring no special expertise to the task of explanation, beyond whatever their daily life has provided.

We have gathered explanations for 37 words in total. You can see a sample of these explanations on FuzzyLaw. The sample of explanations is regularly updated. You can also read responses to the terms and the explanations from mainly interpreters, police officers and academics. You are warmly invited to add your own responses and join in the discussion of each and every word. Check back regularly to see how discussions develop and consider bookmarking the site for future visits. The site also contains commentaries on interesting phenomena which have emerged through the site. You can respond to the commentaries too on that page, contributing to the developing research project.

FuzzyLaw is based in Cardiff, Wales, and explores English words as they are used in the criminal legal system of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The examples and discussions that you will find here are, however, also relevant to languages other than English, legal jurisdictions around the world, and legal settings beyond only criminal law. This is because these examples and discussions concern meaning and explore words in a variety of contexts of use in the law. [...]

For more details please see the FuzzyLaw Website.

HT @SquareLaw

Hoekstra: Dataset: A Network Analysis of Dutch Regulations

Dr. Rinke Hoekstra of the Leibniz Center for Law has posted a dataset entitled A Network Analysis of Dutch Regulations.

Here is the description:

This fileset contains two networks (CSV files) of citations between Dutch regulations stored on the MetaLex Document Server, at the document level, and at the article level. We ran several network analysis measures over these networks (stored again in two CSV files) and provide two visualisations of the networks (size is PageRank, color is given by Module).

This is an accompaniment to a submission to the Network Analysis in Law workshop of ICAIL 2013.

Raman: Ethnographic study of Indian land record digitization project

Bhuvaneswari Raman of the French Institute of Pondicherry has published The Rhetoric and Reality of Transparency: Transparent Information, Opaque City Spaces and the Empowerment Question, Journal of Community Informatics, 8(2), article 866 (2012).

The paper reports results of, among other things, an ethnographic study of an Indian project to digitize land title records.

Here is the abstract:

This paper examines the purported links between transparency, citizens’ participation and empowerment through a focus on the governance of spatial information in Indian cities. It suggests that the data transparency paradigm need to be critically examined as the effects of data visibility and mobility differ according to the nature of information disclosed and conflicts surrounding it. Both information and technology that supports it visibility are embedded in power relations. Three themes are elaborated in the paper namely, the continued difficulty with retrieving information on land and territory; the complexities involved in capturing and representing accurately the dynamics of territory use and ownership claims; and the emerging governmentality relating to spatial governance that renders power opaque.

Abstracts: Bayesian Analysis in Law: Papers presented at Conference: The Many Faces of Contemporary Philosophy and Theory of Law

Abstracts have been posted of papers presented at the Conference: The Many Faces of Contemporary Philosophy and Theory of Law, held 23-24 March 2013, at Jagellonian University, Cracow, Poland. The conference included a special working group on Bayesian analysis in law, abstracts of papers of which begin on page 6 of the abstracts volume and are excerpted below:

Dr Jeroen Keppens: Bayesian Perspectives on the Value of Evidence. Abstract:

Given the interdisciplinary audience, I would like to introduce the Bayesian approach to evidential reasoning in Law. Then I plan to move on the Bayesian modeling techniques and the various concerns and difficulties that arise from it.

Paweł Banaś and Krzysztof Kasparek: Some remarks about controversies concerning applying Bayes theorem to criminal policy-making. Abstract:

The following paper aims at summarizing a discussion concerning the exploitation of Baysesian analysis within criminal policy-making, namely problems with the so called postprison civil commitment of sex offenders as sexually violent predators (SVPs) employed currently in some of the US states. During this process it is determined whether a former convict will be “classified” as SVP. Typically, actuarial instruments are used in order to help decide on this issue. Recently, Richard Wollert has pointed out that exploitation of Bayesian theorem may prove useful in this type of cases when addressing at least some of the questions that may arise. However, his ideas were met with much criticism within risk-assessment community. In this paper we want to present main arguments of both sides of the debate and point to some of the possible problems with Bayesian analysis as used in forensic psychology.

Piotr Bystranowski: Czy da się nauczyć prawników statystyki? Sieci bayesowskie a unikanie błędów probabilistycznych w rozumowaniach prawniczych. Abstract:

Od lat siedemdziesiątych i czasów przełomowych eksperymentów Kahnemana i Tversky’ego powszechnym stało się przekonanie, iż ludzkie osądy w warunkach niepewności często dają rezultaty systematycznie i rażąco niezgodne z regułami matematycznego rachunku prawdopodobieństwa, w tym zwłaszcza z tzw. wzorem Bayesa. Od błędów tego rodzaju nie jest wolna sala sądowa. Przeciwnie – wyniki szeregu procesów karnych pokazują, że wymiar sprawiedliwości jest podatny na wiele błędów w rozumowaniach probabilistycznych (z tzw. złudzeniem prokuratora na czele). Ich skutkiem bywa, na przykład, przypisanie zbyt dużej pewności materiałowi dowodowemu, który z formalnego punktu widzenia zdaje się być dalece nierozstrzygający. Pociąga to za sobą pytanie, w jaki sposób rozwiązać ową ewidentną niezgodność mię-dzy intuicyjnymi rozumowaniami w warunkach niepewności a formalnymi metodami probabilistycznymi. [...] Tych mankamentów zdaje się unikać proponowana przez Normana Fentona i Martina Neila wizualizacja przy pomocy sieci bayesowskich. W ten sposób można modelować nawet najbardziej skomplikowany materiał dowodowy w sposób przejrzysty dla laika. Rola stron procesu ograniczałaby się tu do sprecyzowania prawdopodobieństw a priori i zależności między poszczególnymi zmiennymi, zaś zadanie skonstruowania architektury sieci pozostawiano by ekspertom. O prawomocności obliczeń dokonywanych „pod spodem” można by przekonać strony na prostych przykładach, z wykorzystaniem np. drzewek zdarzeniowych. Zatem zastosowanie sieci bayesowskich w procesie miałoby być, zdaniem Fentona i Neila, najprostszym sposobem uniknięcia błędów probabilistycznych bez konieczności podejmowania beznadziejnego zadania, jakim jest nauczenie prawników statystyki.

Bartosz Janik: Some remarks concerning Bayesian rationality in Law. Abstract:

This paper aims at providing some remarks concerning Bayesian decision theory (BDT) and rationality in the legal perspective. As a first point I would like to provide a philosophical account of rationality and I will try to, while focusing on most appropriate meaning of it, to judge it from a legal point of view. It will be clear that the general notion of legal rationality is very complicated and we must set some particular goals to achieve a more global perspective. In my paper, I will focus on legal reasoning and will try to adopt Rescher’s distinction of cognitive/practical/evaluative rationality for the purpose of this analysis. The main point of this part will be the evaluation, to what extent risk aversion is connected with rationality. The thesis will be formulated in the following manner: the mechanisms of risk avoidance could serve as local rationality–triggers (as to oppose skepticism in Rescher’s terminology and deal with imperfection of our cognitive resources). The second point will be the attempt to show the connection between Bayesian decision theory (which focuses on error minimizing and thus, risk avoidance) and rationality. I will introduce basic formalism of BDT and show how, on that basis, we could formulate the local rationality for legal decision making. Again, the central notion will be the risk and I will present formal mechanism of risk avoidance in BDT. The notion of rationality, as a risk optimizer, will be proposed for this local environment. The last point of the analysis will be the answer to the question to what extent we are free from legal–theoretic assumptions in formulations of rationality. It turns out that the choice of an underlying theory of law will always determine our global notion of rationality but in the local perspective we could formulate general tools and concepts.

Izabela Skoczeń: Why should a lawyer calculate the probability of implicature formation? Abstract:

This paper aims at providing examples of possible applications of methods for calculating the probability of implicature formation (with the use of the bayesian method) in legal situations. The basis for the present considerations will be the notion of scalar implicatures, based on the gricean approach to Pragmatics. Scalars are based on conventional meanings attributed to words with the use of lexical scales (Horn). Placing a word in a definite position in a scale enables the speakers to attribute it a definite meaning, that does not have to be consistent with the lexical meaning that would be understood with the use of classical logic. [...] As experiments have proven, in contexts with data deficit the probability of definite implicature formation is rather not intuitive. A quite striking example is the following situation: if while describing three objects, the speakers has information concerning the features of only two of them, the hearer seems more prone to infer, that the third item disposes of the same feature while hearing an utterance with the numeral “two”, rather than “some”. This surprising result seems most vital for lawyers, as it conveys a hidden pattern of linguistic manipulation. The conventional implicature that should be cancelled due to pragmatic reasons is so strong, that it still influences the meaning. Imagine, that we have three suspects A,B,C and we know that A and B were at the crime scene that day. We don’t know, whether C was at the crime scene. If the probability of omitting scalar implicature cancellation is higher when using expressions like some, rather than numerals, C’s defendant should rather say “Some of the suspects were at the crime scene.” rather than “Two were at the crime scene.”. The later formulation, according to Goodman and Stuhlm¨uller calculations, would boost the probability of the court inferring the implicature that C was also at the crime scene that day. This observation opens an entire new range of possibilities of manipulating implicature formation in contexts, where the hearer is aware of the speaker’s data being insufficient. It is often the in judicial environments, when the provided evidence is too scarce.

For full text of the papers, please contact the authors.

HT Bartosz Janik

Mendelson: Private Control Over Access to Public Law: Federal Regulatory Use of Private Standards

Professor Nina A. Mendelson of University of Michigan Law School has posted Private Control Over Access to Public Law: The Puzzling Federal Regulatory Use of Private Standards, forthcoming in Michigan Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

To save resources and build on private expertise, federal agencies have incorporated private standards into thousands of federal regulations – but only by “reference.” An individual who wishes to read this binding federal regulatory law cannot access it for free online or in a government depository library, as she can the U.S. Code or Code of Federal Regulations. Instead, the individual is referred to the private organization that prepared the standard, which typically asserts a copyright and charges a significant access fee. Or else she must travel to Washington, D.C. Thus, this category of law has come under largely private control.

In assessing the arguments why law needs to be public, previous analyses have focused almost wholly on whether regulated entities have notice of their obligations. This article evaluates several other considerations, including notice to those who expect to benefit from the way government regulates others, such as consumers of dangerous products, neighbors of natural gas pipelines, and Medicare beneficiaries. Ready public access also is critical to ensure that federal agencies are accountable to the courts, Congress, and the electorate for the regulatory power they exercise. As shown by an assessment of the institutional dynamics surrounding public and private interaction to define the scope of federal regulation, the need for ready public access is at least as strong in this collaborative governance setting as when agencies act alone. Finally, expressive harm is likely to flow from government adopting regulatory law that is, in contrast to American law in general, more costly to access and harder to find. Full consideration of the importance of public access both strengthens the case for reform and limits the range of acceptable reform measures.

Haapio & Passera: Visual Law: What Lawyers Need to Learn from Information Designers

Helena Haapio, LL.M., of Lexpert Ltd., and Stefania Passera, M.A., of Aalto University School of Science, have posted Visual Law: What Lawyers Need to Learn from Information Designers, at VoxPopuLII.

The post gives several interesting examples of visualization of legal information, including:

• Candy Chang’s Vendor Power!
• Susanne Hoogwater’s Legal Visuals
• Olivia Zarcate’s Imagidroit
• Dr. Margaret Hagan’s Open Law Lab, and
• Professor Seth Chandler’s Visualizing Legal Rules: Battle of the Forms.

The authors then conclude:

Once the visual turn has begun, we do not think it can be stopped; the benefits are just too many. As lawyers, we have a lot to learn and we could do our job better in so many respects if we indeed started to get into the mode of thinking and acting like a designer and not just like a lawyer. This applies not only to purely legal information, but everything else we produce: contracts, memos, corporate governance materials, policies, manuals, employee handbooks, and guidance.

Legal information tends to be complex, and information design(ers) can help us make it easier to understand and act upon. The goal is accomplishing the writer’s goals by meeting the readers’ needs. [...]

With new tools and services being developed, it will become easier to convey our content and documents in more usable and more engaging ways. As the work progresses and new tools and apps appear, we are likely to see a major change in the legal industry. Meanwhile, let us know your views and ideas and what you are doing or interested in doing with visuals.

For more details, please see the complete post.

Slides: Legal Informatics Research Today: Implications for Legal Prediction, 3D Printing, and eDiscovery

I’ve posted slides of my presentation entitled Legal Informatics Research Today: Implications for Legal Prediction, 3D Printing, and eDiscovery, given 16 May 2013 at CICL 2013: The Fifth Conference on Innovation and Communications Law, 16 May 2013, Glen Arbor, Michigan, sponsored by Michigan State University College of Law.

Here is the abstract:

This presentation describes methodologies and results of recent legal informatics research on eDiscovery and legal prediction, and describes two possible scenarios for the application of legal technology to 3D printing. In addition, the presentation describes a four-level framework that enables comparison of legal informatics research studies in different areas.

I thank Professor Adam Candeub of Michigan State University College of Law for inviting me to give this presentation.