Call for Proposals: Institute for Law Teaching and Learning 2010

A call for proposals, with submission deadline of February 12, 2010, has been issued for The Institute for Law Teaching and Learning 2010, “Teaching Law Practice Across the Curriculum,” to be held June 16-18, 2009 at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kansas, USA. Here is a description of the topics to be addressed, which appear to include a number of legal informatics topics:

“The Institute invites proposals for 75-minute workshops consistent with a broad interpretation of the conference theme, ‘Teaching Law Practice Across the Curriculum.’ The workshops can address teaching and learning in first-year courses, upper-level courses, clinical courses, writing courses, and academic support. The workshops can deal with innovative materials, alternative teaching methods, ways to enhance student learning, formative feedback to students, evaluation of student performance, etc. Each workshop should include materials that participants can use during the workshop and when they return to their campuses. Presenters should not read papers, but should model effective teaching methods by actively engaging the participants. The co-directors would be glad to work with anyone who would like advice in designing their presentations to be interactive.”

For more information, please see the call for proposals.

Civil Justice, Case Management, & Discovery Reform Tools from ACTL & IAALS

Two new resources to assist U.S. courts and lawyers in implementing civil justice reform have been issued by the Joint Project of The American College of Trial Lawyers (ACTL) Task Force on Discovery and Civil Justice and The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver (IAALS):

• 21st Century Civil Justice System: A Roadmap for Reform: Pilot Project Rules (2009). Here is a summary:
• “In March 2009, we published a joint Final Report that contains 29 Principles. Those Principles suggest changes to the civil justice system that would address costs by simplifying and expediting the system. The Final Report can be found on both of our websites at www.actl.com and www.du.edu/legalinstitute. The Principles represent the best thinking of the individuals involved in our project, in collaboration with the broader membership of the ACTL and with experts across the nation. Nonetheless, we understand how important it is to test our proposed solutions before suggesting that they be widely implemented. Accordingly, it is our intention that the Principles be tested in pilot projects in courts around the country, with the projects monitored and measured to determine what works and what does not. In order to be able to apply the Principles in those pilot projects, we have undertaken the task of reducing them to operational Rules. We urge jurisdictions to use these Rules as a roadmap for consideration in creating and implementing a pilot project. IAALS has dedicated a portion of its website to these pilot projects (www.du.edu/legalinstitute/tcri2.html), and will be collecting information as we move forward. IAALS will also be developing metrics to gauge the impact of the pilot projects.”
• 21st Century Civil Justice System: A Roadmap for Reform: Civil Caseflow Management Guidelines (2009). Here is a summary:
• “Excessive litigation costs and delay (separate but closely interrelated concerns) are two of the most serious problems in the civil justice system. These problems not only plague litigants whose cases do get into court, but also negatively affect access to justice, not just for the indigent, but perhaps even for the middle class. These concerns can be addressed meaningfully through caseflow management practices. Effective caseflow management involves much more than reducing time to disposition; it involves timeliness throughout the life of the case. … Another goal of caseflow management is to ensure that each event is meaningful, in that ‘the activity and preparation required for the event to take place on the scheduled date is completed before that date by all involved stakeholders.’ A corollary goal is to assure that effort is not duplicated. When the parties, counsel and the court prepare for an event, that event should occur. Otherwise, the preparation will have to be repeated. Additionally, the event itself should advance the resolution of the case in some way. The Guidelines that follow were drawn from a number of sources, including the Interim and Final Reports of the American College of Trial Lawyers (ACTL) and the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS), and a recent and extensive IAALS civil case processing study [i.e., Civil Case Processing in the Federal District Courts: A 21st Century Analysis (2009)]. These Guidelines and the discussion of specific suggestions for applying the Guidelines are designed to assist judges in effectively managing the flow of civil cases to ensure that all events in the life of a case are timely and meaningful. … The Operational Protocols accompanying the Guidelines are intended to breathe life into the Guidelines. The Protocols are recommended practices and procedures that will assist judges in implementing the Guidelines. As is true with the Guidelines, not all of the Operational Protocols will be applicable to every case and judges exercising active caseflow management will be best positioned to determine which Protocols should be adopted in each case.” (footnotes omitted)

Both the Rules and the Guidelines include provisions for limiting pretrial discovery.

For more information on the joint project, please see the IAALS Website.

Goossenaerts et al. on A Multi-Level Model-Driven Regime for Value-Added Tax Compliance in ERP Systems

Jan B.M. Goossenaerts, Alexander T.M. Zegers of KPMG IT Advisory, & Jan M. Smits of the University of Technology Eindhoven, Department of Law & Technology, have published A Multi-Level Model-Driven Regime for Value-Added Tax Compliance in ERP Systems, 69 Computers in Industry 709 (December 2009). Here is the abstract:

“As the economy becomes global and ICT-reliant, approaches practiced in enterprise software product development and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implementation must cope with increasingly complex situations induced by contemporary supply chain and regulations. Compliance with regulations in the market is one aspect of the requirements that enterprise software must meet. Recent research of KPMG IT Advisory has confirmed that where little attention is being paid to the value-added tax (VAT) issues during large ERP projects, there is a higher VAT-risk exposure. In a design-oriented approach, we first identify the stakeholders and their interests in the VAT compliance of ERP systems. Enterprise architecture (EA) and model driven engineering in a multi-level perspective serve as the source of solution patterns. The efficient solution of compliance problems builds upon stakeholders utilizing a set of interdependent models and methods that are suitably allocated to the public and proprietary domains.”

Curcio on Legal Education Assessment

Professor Andrea Anne Curcio of Georgia State University College of Law has published Assessing Differently and Using Empirical Studies to See If it Makes a Difference: Can Law Schools Do it Better?, forthcoming in Quinnipiac Law Review. Here is the abstract:

“Recent scholarly literature criticizes law school assessment methods as being pedagogically unsound, an ineffective way to develop good lawyers, and as standing as an unjustifiable barrier to diversifying the profession. With the publication of Educating Lawyers, and Best Practices, the academy finally has begun to engage in the kind of scholarly scrutiny of assessment that has long been the practice in other disciplines. This essay seeks to move the discussion from a focus on law school assessment shortcomings, to a discussion of the scholarly work necessary to examine and improve assessments. It does this by providing concrete suggestions for alternative law school assessments which attempt to incorporate into large-section courses the Carnegie apprenticeships of legal analysis, practical skills, and professional identity. The essay acknowledges that whether these alternatives, or even our existing assessment methods, are valid and reliable is an undetermined question. Thus, the essay urges empirical exploration of law school assessments. It provides guidance to those seeking to design empirical assessment research studies and it suggests some empirical assessment studies that can and should be done. It concludes by arguing that given the high stakes of law school assessments, law professors should devote the same level of scrutiny to assessments as is given to other scholarly pursuits.”

HT Professor Gary Rosin at Law by the Numbers.

ICKM 2009: Law-Related Papers

At least two papers on legal information will be presented at ICKM 2009: The 6th International Conference on Knowledge Management, to be held December 3-4, 2009 in Hong Kong. Here are descriptive information and abstracts:

• Associate Dean Joan S. Howland of the University of Minnesota Law School, Legal Intersections and Diversions: The Challenge for Indigenous Populations of Protecting Legal Rights, Honored Traditions and Sacred Knowledge in the 21st Century:
• “The focus of this paper will be the starkly divergent views between indigenous populations, specifically American Indians, and other populations regarding fairness, justice, family and community and property rights. The paper will include a discussion of the theoretical and practical intersections of indigenous traditions and other cultures’s concepts of civil and criminal law. The paper also will touch on the critical importance of traditional values in determining equitable resolution of legal conflicts within American Indian communities. The paper will discuss indigenous populations attitudes toward the ownership and management of knowledge, and how these attitudes may be at times be in conflict with those of other segments of society, including government entities and court systems. The paper will open with a review of the historical underpinnings of American Indian law and then move on to a discussion of intellectual property rights, protection of and appropriate dissemination of indigenous knowledge, and sovereignty concerns. Issues associated with the dissemination of indigenous knowledge within a culture based on oral, rather than written, traditions will also be discussed.”
• Guicai Wang, Jiangning Wu & Zhaoguo Xuan, all of the Dalian University of Technology, Institute of Systems Engineering, Multi-View of Patent Knowledge Visualization:
• “Patent knowledge is the key drive to the technology innovation and product innovation of enterprises. Presenting patent knowledge in a visual way can facilitate many decision-making tasks, such as revealing business trends, inspiring novel industrial solutions, making investment policies, and so on. Current visualization technologies for patent knowledge, however, provide only one perspective including statistic graphs, citation networks, topic maps, etc. In this paper, we propose a combined visualization method for patent knowledge presentation with thematic map, domain ontology tree map and geographic map. It visualizes patent content and the corresponding analysis results in different dimensions, and provides multiple views on patent knowledge and cross-mapping between different views. As a result, the proposed visualization method contributes an overview of patent relations in a particular domain in a comprehensible way, through which new business trends or threats and new technology innovation opportunities can be discovered easily.”

For more information, please see the conference program.

If you identify other papers on legal information to be presented at ICKM 2009, please mention them in the comments.

Peoples on the Citation of Blogs in Judicial Opinions

Professor Lee F. Peoples of the Oklahoma City University School of Law has posted the abstract of his new article, entitled The Citation of Blogs in Judicial Opinions, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

“This article reports the results of an exhaustive study examining the citation of blogs in judicial opinions. The article begins with an exploration of opinions citing blogs for their discussion of substantive legal issues. The unique status enjoyed by several boutique blogs is examined including the importance of Douglas Berman’s Sentencing Law and Policy blog in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Blakely and Booker decisions. The citation of blogs for factual information is discussed and the impact of these citations on litigants’ constitutional and procedural rights, the law of evidence, judicial ethics, and the judicial role in the common law adversarial system are explored.

“Serious questions about the preservation of blogs cited in judicial opinions have yet to be answered. They way that blogs are cited in judicial opinions varies widely. Some judges do not provide enough information to accurately retrieve the blog post viewed by the court. Blog entries frequently change after they are posted. Some blog entries and entire blogs disappear without warning. There is currently no uniform approach to archiving or preserving blogs. Detailed statistics on the completeness and accuracy of citations to blogs in judicial opinions are provided. A set of best practices detailing when and how blogs should be cited is proposed. The Judicial Conference’s recently released Guidelines on Citing To, Capturing, and Maintaining Internet Resources in Judicial Opinions are discussed and critiqued. Solutions explored at the Future of Today’s Legal Scholarship Symposium held at the Georgetown Law Center in July of 2009 are evaluated. The article concludes with a discussion of the impact of blogs on the future of the law.”

Debate on Free Access to Law

[NOTE: Updated on 8 November 2009 to link to Professor Bruce's post entitled The West Video and the Free Market. Updated on 4 November 2009 to link to Professor Berring's Nov. 3 reply, on sLaw.]

An interesting debate over free access to law is now occurring in the legal blogosphere.

Thomson Reuters, owners of West Publishing, a major U.S. legal publisher, and the Westlaw computer assisted legal research (CALR) service, recently published video comments about the free access to law movement by Professor Robert Berring of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, and a well respected expert on legal research. In the video Professor Berring praises the free access to law movement for increasing competition in the CALR market and compelling Westlaw and its main rival in the U.S. market, Lexis.com, to innovate. Yet Professor Berring also criticizes the free access to law movement as fleeting, and as providing insufficient metadata to enable high quality legal research.

This week Professor Daniel Poulin, Director of CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute, responded to Professor Berring’s comments, on the sLaw blog, and yesterday Professor Tom Bruce, Director of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, published his response on his B-Screeds blog.

Ed Walters, Esq., CEO of Fastcase, Inc., has offered to convene a meeting of the participants of this debate.

On November 3, Professor Berring posted a reply, on sLaw.

On November 8, Professor Bruce responded with a post entitled The West Video and the Free Market.

Those interested in digital legal information or public access to legal information may find this debate particularly informative and timely.

HT @caminick for tweeting Prof. Poulin’s post.

Call for Papers: ISIC 2010: Information Seeking in Context

A call for papers, with submission deadline of February 1, 2010, has been issued for ISIC 2010: The Information Seeking in Context Conference, to be held September 28-October 2, 2010, at Universidad di Murcia, Facultad de Comunicación y Documentación, Murcia, Spain. Papers are invited on the following topics, several of which appear to include legal informatics:

• Theories and models of information seeking and searching: particular theoretical frameworks that are currently of interest include (but are not restricted to) social network theory, actor network theory, cultural-historical activity theory, genre theory, etc.
• Research approaches and methodologies, both interpretative and positivist, employing either qualitative or quantitative methods.
• Information seeking, searching and use in specific contexts, e.g., health care, education, business, industry, the public services and government, the emergency services, etc.
• Organizational structures and processes and information seeking, searching and use.
• Information seeking and searching in virtual social networks, including gaming and virtual worlds as arenas for information exchange.
• Information behaviour in everyday life; in communities both real and virtual, including its role in indigenous communities.
• Integrating studies on information seeking and interactive retrieval.
• Information use: the nature of information and how information is used to help solve problems, aid decision making or satisfy an initial need.
• The mediation of information behaviour: how human or software agents can respond to information needs.
• The design of information delivery systems to meet information needs generally, or in organizational or disciplinary contexts, including Web 2.0 developments such as blogs, wikis, e-learning platforms and open access information resources.
• Information seeking and information requirements – integrating information science and information systems.
• The communication of information to users: relationship between communication theory and information behaviour, including, for example, the relationship of information architectures to information seeking behaviour and the design of information products on sound communication principles; including audio and visual communication media.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Coulson, Legal Writing and Disciplinary Knowledge-Building: A Comparative Study

Douglas M. Coulson, Esq., Assistant Instructor at the University of Texas at Austin Department of Rhetoric & Writing has published Legal Writing and Disciplinary Knowledge-Building: A Comparative Study in 6 Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (JALWD) 160 (2009). Here is a summary:

“In this article, I examine Susan Peck MacDonald’s recent study of
disciplinary knowledge-building in Professional Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences [(1995)] and apply the methods used in her study and other studies of professional writing in the disciplines to analyze a sample of law review and journal articles involving a discrete legal question that is currently emerging in the United States and internationally, specifically, how and when arbitration may be compelled in disputes involving nonsignatories to an arbitration agreement. The purpose of this study is to identify the knowledge-building activities of a discrete legal discourse community and to compare the knowledge-building activities of that community to the knowledge-building activities of professional writing in other disciplines in order to identify the position the law review and journal articles occupy on the disciplinary knowledge-building continuum. In my conclusion, I also offer reflections on the findings of the study and its implications for the application of interdisciplinary studies to legal writing.” (citations omitted)

Stanchi, Annotated Bibliography of Persuasion in Law

Professor Kathryn M. Stanchi of Temple University Beasley School of Law has published Persuasion: An Annotated Bibliography in 6 Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (JALWD) 75 (2009). Here is a summary:

“In keeping with the mission of J. ALWD, this bibliography focuses on books and articles that tell us something about how to persuade in legal writing. The backbone of the bibliography is scholarship that dedicates itself explicitly to the task of illuminating something about the mysterious phenomenon of persuasion in legal communication. Included here are articles such as those addressing the use of policy arguments, classical rhetoric, and metaphors in legal writing. But also included are articles and books that can tell us something important about persuasion in legal writing but that have, for whatever reason, not discussed writing or law practice explicitly. These include ruminations on argumentation theory, ‘framing’ of legal arguments, and semiotics. Together, they tell a riveting story of how lawyers go about the business of convincing people.”