Legal Information Behavior Study: Latour, The Making of Law

[NOTE: Updated on 6-28-2009 to qualify the publication date, and on 6-27-2009 to add comments respecting relevance of Dr. Latour's book to the concept of legal interpretive communities.]

Thanks to Judith Lihosit for the news of the publication later in 2009 of an English translation, entitled The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil D’Etat, of Dr. Bruno Latour‘s La Fabrique du droit. Une ethnographie du Conseil d’Etat (2002). (Amazon and Barnes & Noble identify the U.S. publication date as August 31, 2009, but Professor Jack Balkin tells us that early 2010 is a more likely publication date for the English translation.) This work is an important empirical study of legal information behavior, as well as a significant contribution to legal ethnography.

This work also appears to provide empirical support, and a social-scientific theoretical and methodological framework, for certain arguments respecting the importance of social groups in law in connection with the interpretation of legal language and other aspects of adjudication. For example, Dr. Latour’s work appears to provide a social-scientific justification for Professor Stanley Fish‘s theory of legal interpretive communities (as expressed, e.g., in his 1989 book Doing What Comes Naturally) as constituting a key component of the context that determines the meaning of legal language, and as furnishing constraints on the interpretation of such language. Dr. Latour’s work thus seems of interest not only to legal informaticists, sociologists of law, and others interested in the empirical study of law-related behavior, but also to law & literature scholars and to others who study the interpretation of legal language.

Digital Legal Information Preservation: Chesapeake Project at 2

The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive has released its Two-Year Pilot Project Evaluation report. Chesapeake, a leading testbed project respecting preservation of born-digital legal information, is a joint effort between the Georgetown University Law Library, the Maryland State Law Library, the Virginia State Law Library, and the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA). Sarah Rhodes, Digital Preservation Librarian at Georgetown University Law Library, is the Chesapeake Project Manager. Background on the project is available in Sarah’s and Dana Neacsu’s recent article, linked from here.

Among the pilot project report’s findings:

• During the two year pilot project, Chesapeake harvested and archived “4,306 digital items representing roughly 1,872 titles”;
• After switching from the original OCLC Digital Archive platform to
  “a new CONTENTdm/Digital Archive” platform, usage increased dramatically, from 6,612 total accesses during the first 15 months of the pilot, to 177,152 total accesses during the period June 2008-February 2009;
• Broken links (i.e., “link rot”) among archived materials rose “from 8.3 percent in 2008 to 14.3 percent in 2009″;
• “Staffing and time commitments varied according to institution size, with hours per week devoted to the project ranging by institution from two to 25″;
• The most time-consuming project activities were (in descending order):
  • “[c]ataloging archived items”;
  • “archive metadata entry and editing”;
  • “selecting and monitoring Web-based publications for archiving”;
  • “Web harvesting”; and
  • “general project coordination”;
• The major challenges faced during the pilot included:
  • the transition to the new platform;
  • “changes in harvesting, indexing, and metadata editing functionality with an updated release of CONTENTdm”;
  • “the time and effort required to catalog titles selected for the digital archive”; and
  • “expanding the project and generating interest in its efforts as it moves into the post-pilot phase.”

The reports announces that “[h]aving successfully completed its initial two-year pilot phase, The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive is currently expanding. Law libraries nationwide are encouraged to join this collaborative digital archive or establish similar preservation initiatives under the auspices of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA).”

Congratulations to the Chesapeake team on a successful pilot and thanks for providing such thorough documentation of the project. For more information on Chesapeake, see the Chesapeake Website. For more information on LIPA’s digital preservation activities, see the LIPA Website.

Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching: Conference

[Updated 6-24-2009 to remove link to conference papers page, which is no longer available, and to add comments on the conference and thanks to Professor Barbara Bintliff. Updated on 6-20-2009 to clarify the nature of the social networks topic.]

This weekend I’ll be attending a conference entitled Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching, held at the University of Colorado at Boulder, School of Law, June 21-22, 2009. Conference papers are available here. [The conference papers are no longer available.] Topics include:

• the information behavior of lawyers and law professors;
• legal research instruction;
• law library directors’ roles in legal education reform generally and in skills-based instruction particularly;
• libraries and freedom of expression;
• social networks hosted by academic institutions law schools;
• automated versus human indexing of case law;
• the role of digests in case law research; and
• the definition of “legal information.”

In my view, this was a very fine workshop conference, enabling all of the presenters to receive valuable feedback on their papers, and fostering a lively and interesting discussion of legal research pedagogy. Many thanks to Professor Barbara Bintliff for organizing and hosting the conference.

BIALL 2009

[NOTE: Updated on 7-6-2009 to correct link to conference program. Updated 6-24-2009 to link to BIALL Blog entries on the 2009 conference.]

The 2009 Annual Meeting of the British & Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL 2009), is taking place June 18-20, 2009, at University Place Conference Centre, Manchester, England. The theme is “Locks and Keys: Safeguarding Legal Information.” The conference program is available here. According to BIALL President Jackie Fishleigh, the conference “will consider among other issues how the developing technologies of Web 2.0 such as wikis and blogs . . . are affecting the operation of libraries, legal information services, knowledge management and legal publishing. Plenary sessions will examine how we can safeguard legal information assets from books to databases amid the increasing appetite for free and easily accessible resources.”

The Twitter feed for the conference is http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23biall2009.  Postings on the conference are available on the BIALL Blog. Conference-related news is also available on the BIALL Conference Website. We send our best wishes to our colleagues attending the conference.

CALI 2009: Conference for Law School Computing

[NOTE: Updated 6-16-2009 to include information about the "Web sessions" listed on the conference program.]

CALI: the 2009 Conference for Law School Computing, is taking place June 18-20, 2009, at the University of Colorado School of Law. The conference program is available here. Elmer Masters, CALI’s Director of Internet Development, tells us that anyone may participate free-of-charge in the “Web sessions” listed on the conference program. The Twitter feed for the conference is http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23calicon09. Conference-related news is also available on the CALI Blog. We send our best wishes to our colleagues attending the conference.

Makri UIUC Lecture on Legal Information Behavior

Dr. Stephann Makri‘s June 9, 2009 lecture on lawyers’ information behavior — at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) — is now available: audio, slides, and video demonstration. In this lecture Dr. Makri discusses the research respecting his recent dissertation, which is summarized here (scroll down). He also describes his future research plans, which include “examining [lawyers'] ‘monitoring’ behaviour in more detail.” HT Stephanie Davidson & the UIUC Graduate School of Library & Information Science.

Legal Informatics & Law Librarians

My post on legal informatics & law librarians is now available on the VoxPopuLII blog. The post provides links to major information resources in legal informatics on our sister site, Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources, and describes the principal topics in current legal informatics research. The post also notes a lack of communication between legal informaticists and law librarians, and suggests ways that law librarians could make meaningful contributions to legal informatics research. Many thanks to Dr. Tom Bruce of Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute for the opportunity to write for VoxPopuLII, and to Judith Pratt for her careful editing.

Legal Information Papers at ISNIE 2009

Many interesting papers on legal information are to be presented at the 13th Annual Conference of The International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE 2009) at the University of California at Berkeley, Walter A. Haas School of Business, June 18-20, 2009.

Among those papers are:

• Decio Zylbersztajn, Empirical Research in Contracts: Watch Your Step (an assessment of research databases of business contracts);
• Eduardo Araral, How Do Property Rights Affect the Provision of Collective Goods Under Conditions of Missing Information and Path Dependence? (finding, respecting an empirical study of irrigation systems in the Philippines, “that land tenure security has positive and statistically significant effects on monetary free riding” and that a lack of information about landownership and liens resulting from the absence of a “land registry to serve as a monitoring instrument of ownership transfers” is a possible explanation of those effects);
• Jean-Philippe Colin & François Ruf, The “Plant & Share” Contract in Côte d’Ivoire: Incomplete Contracting and Land Conflicts (providing a rich description of the incompleteness of “plant & share” contracts in rural Côte d’Ivoire, “[a] discussion of the socio-political embeddedness of contractual practice,” and an explanation of the evident effectiveness of those contracts notwithstanding incompleteness).

In addition to studies of legal information, the conference features several papers exhibiting interesting analyses of legal information to support arguments respecting topics other than legal information (scroll down and browse).

ICAIL 2009 in Barcelona

[Updated on 16 September 2009 to link to the proceedings. Updated on 6-18-2009 to link to Dr. Adam Wyner's comments on the workshops at ICAIL 2009. Updated on 6-10-2009 to add link to LOAIT 2009 papers and on 6-9-2009 to add link to DESI III papers.]

The Twelfth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2009) takes place this week, June 8-12, 2009, in Barcelona. This is the major international conference on legal informatics. The proceedings are available here. The program is available here. Some of the programs will be reported on Twitter at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=#icail2009. Argumentation is a principal theme of the conference, though the conference programs cover a wide range of legal informatics issues. Papers from the DESI III Global E-Discovery/E-Disclosure Workshop are available here, and papers from the LOAIT Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques/Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts are available here. Dr. Adam Wyner has posted valuable comments on the workshops held at ICAIL 2009. HT to Dr. Rinke Hoekstra. We send our best wishes to our colleagues in Barcelona and look forward to reports on the conference events.

Wyner on Legal Ontologies

[NOTE: Updated on 29 December 2009 to correct the link to the article.]

Dr. Adam Wyner has published an interesting new article (at Law.com) about legal ontologies: Legal Ontologies Spin a Semantic Web.

Dr. Wyner’s article provides an introduction to ontologies and the OWL Web Ontology Language, explains the role of ontologies in the Semantic Web (i.e., a machine-readable Web), and discusses a hypothetical application of an ontology to case law.

Dr. Wyner then explores several practical issues in connection with applying a legal ontology to a collection of legal documents. First, he discusses choosing the level of specificity for the ontology, and suggests that, if multiple such levels must be accommodated, one could utilize multiple or integrated ontologies.

Second, Dr. Wyner discusses deciding who will construct the ontology and how; he recommends Web-based collaboration, as exemplified by Stanford University’s WebProtege system. That system is used to build the LKIF-Core Ontology, a major European legal ontology being developed within the ESTRELLA Project (European Project for Standardized Transparent Representations in Order to Extend Legal Accessibility) based at the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law.

Finally, Dr. Wyner discusses deciding who will mark up documents with terms from the ontology and how; he suggests that, in an educational environment, students could use Semantic MediaWikis, while in a publisher- or government-setting, employees could use “tool bars integrated with word processing software.” Dr. Wyner concludes by encouraging “an open-source, collaborative approach” to legal ontology development, as this should contribute meaningfully to the growth of the Semantic Web respecting legal information.