Visualization of Quantitative Legal Information

[NOTE: Updated on 8-1-2009 to include a reference to continuing legal education.]

A recent trend in legal information systems development & scholarship is the use of software to generate graphical representations, often referred to as “visualizations,” of quantitative law-related information.

Wolfram Research‘s Wolfram Demonstration Project currently features more than five dozen software applications that generate graphical depictions of various types of legal statistics. After downloading the free Mathematica 7 software, users can interact with each application by adjusting variables or other parameters, and then viewing the altered graphical display. Development of new applications utilizes crowdsourcing: Wolfram grants users free access to the software, with which users may develop new applications, provided the users agree to license those applications back to Wolfram, pursuant to Wolfram’s Submission Policy. Wolfram provides guidelines and free online seminars on authoring applications. HT to Jim McMillan of Court Technology Bulletin for notifying the legal community of this project.

Another example of innovation in the use of visualization techniques respecting legal information is the work of Daniel Martin Katz & Michael Bommarito, at the Computational Legal Studies blog. Both researchers are Ph.D. students in the University of Michigan’s Political Science Department and both are affiliated with the university’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems. At their blog, Katz & Bommarito highlight their recent work involving the graphical display of quantitative legal information, including visualizations of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code and of citations and semantic relationships in U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The authors also discuss and provide examples of some of their code. Further, Katz & Bommarito frequently discuss interesting visualizations produced by others, such as Good’s interactive visualization of public corruption convictions and Dr. Will Lowe’s presentation on Computational Linguistics and Law.

The applications and techniques featured in the Wolfram Demonstration Project and the Computational Legal Studies blog appear to have a number of potential uses, including courtroom display, empirical legal research, law school instruction, continuing legal education, and public policy work. These projects also exemplify the current, fruitful interaction among scholars and programmers collaborating at the intersections of law, political science, computer science, information science, and linguistics.

Conference: The Future of Today’s Legal Scholarship: Webcast Available

[NOTE: Updated on 7-30-2009 @ 11:12 p.m. to add links to Prof. Tushnet's notes.]

Webcasts and Professor Rebecca Tushnet‘s notes (here, here, & here) of the sessions from the conference entitled “The Future of Today’s Legal Scholarship: A Symposium in Honor of Bob Oakley,” held July 25, 2009 at Georgetown University Law Library, and described in an earlier post, are now available. (HT to @montserratlj & @ecarr42 for the links.) Here are links to Webcasts (in QuickTime format; free download available here) and to Professor Tushnet’s notes on each presentation:

• Welcome and Opening Remarks: Professor Robert Berring (video here [click on "Click here to Play Media"], notes here);
• Panel I: The Future Research Value of Blogs: Professor Chris Borgen, Professor Lee Peoples, Professor Margaret Schilt (video here [click on "Click here to Play Media"], notes here);
• Panel II: Blogs and Reliability: Tom Goldstein, Toby McIntosh, Mike Wash (video here [click on "Click here to Play Media"], notes here);
• Panel III: Blog Preservation: Laura Campbell, Linda Frueh, Carolyn Hank (video here [click on "Click here to Play Media"]).

ABA Annual Meeting Technology Events

[Edited on 8-1-09 to include the program "Courts and the Media in the 21st Century," and on 7-31-2009 to make the hashtags more legible.]

The 2009 American Bar Association (ABA) Annual Meeting is being held July 30-August 4, 2009 in Chicago, Illinois. The meeting program is available here. The main Twitter hashtag for the meeting is #ABAChicago, but a few tweets can be found at #ABA09 and #ABA2009. The official ABA Twitter feed for the meeting is http://twitter.com/abachicago. News about the meeting is available from the official meeting Website, from the ABANow site, and from the ABA Journal meeting site.

The meeting features a number of legal technology events, including the following:

• Technology consulting sponsored by “ABA Source,” including a “mini-evaluation” of one’s law firm’s Website, and advice on the use of technology to improve workflow and profitability (Thursday, July 30, 1:00-4:00 p.m.);
• Electronic Discovery Around the World (Thursday, July 30, 2:00-3:30 p.m.);
• Social Networks, Blawgs and Podcasts: Business Development Tools for the Internet Age (Thursday, July 30, 3:45-5:15 p.m.);
• Listen to the Sound of Music—Recent Pitfalls in Online Music
  Distribution (Friday, July 31, 8:30-10:00 a.m.) [NOTE: DRM is likely to be discussed];
• Defending Internet Related Crimes (Friday, July 31, 8:30-10:00 a.m.);
• When is a Law the Law? Why Authenticity and Quality Matter [in Electronic Legal Information] (Friday, July 31, 9:30-11:30 a.m.);
• Courts and the Media in the 21st Century: Twitterers, Bloggers, the New Media, the Old Media, and What’s a Judge to Do? (Friday, July 31, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 noon);
• Ethical Issues and E-Discovery: How Inside and Outside Counsel Can Work Together (Friday, July 31, 2:00-3:30 p.m.);
• A No-Nonsense Approach to Generating Media Attention for the Solo and Small Firm Practitioner Without the Budget of a Mega- Corporate Law Firm (Friday, July 31, 3:45-5:15 p.m.);
• Effectively Using Technology to Maximize Client Efficiency in a
  Solo/Small Firm Setting (Saturday, August 1, 8:30-10:00 a.m.);
• Electronic Information: How to Find it, How to Protect it, and What
  to Do After the Worst Happens (Saturday, August 1, 9:00 a.m.-12:00 noon) [NOTE: Ediscovery is likely to be discussed];
• Seven Secrets Every Lawyer Must Know to Thrive, Even in a
  Recession (Saturday, August 1, 10:30 a.m.-12:00 noon) [NOTE: Although technology is not expressly mentioned in the description of this program, technology is likely to be discussed in this program's presentations on marketing, practice management, and planning)
• The Future of Evidence: Neuroscience and Its Use in the Courtroom (Saturday, August 1, 3:45-5:15 p.m.);
• Legal Strategies for Dealing with Anonymous Internet Posters (Saturday, August 1, 3:45-5:15 p.m.);
• Blogomania: User-Generated Content and the New Media Revolution (Sunday August 2, 10:30 a.m.-12:00 noon) [NOTE: Blogging by judges, lawyers or court or firm employees may well be discussed]; and
• Personal Versus Professional: Handling Employee Participation in
  On-Line Communities (Sunday August 2, 3:45-5:15 p.m.) [NOTE: Social media participation by employees of courts or law firms may well be discussed].

In addition, the legal-technology-related committees of the Section of Science & Technology Law and other ABA entities will be convening during the conference; see the meeting program for details.

For more details on technology-related events at ABA, see the meeting program, especially the tracks for “Solo & Small Firms,” “Technology & Business,” and “Litigation & ADR,” on pages 52-58; and pages 176-178 (listing programs of the Section of Science & Technology Law) & page 203 (listing events of the Legal Technology Resource Center).

First Seminar on eJustice: Toward a Transparent System of Justice

The First Seminar on eJustice: Toward a Transparent System of Justice, sponsored by the Documentation Sciences Foundation (CD), will be held September 24, 2009, jointly in two locations, linked by videoconferencing: the Centre for Advanced Tecnologies of Extremadura (CETA) in Trujillo, Spain, and the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial del la Federación in México D.F., Mexico. The seminar will be Webcast. The program is available here, and registration is available here. The panels will discuss the following topics:

• “Judges and litigants in the technology orbit”;
• “Development and management of the technologies: e-justice challenges”; and
• “Democratic habits and information useful socially: construction of citizenship?”

For more information, please see the seminar Website.

Automated Content Analysis and the Law: Workshop at National Science Foundation

In a new post, Dr. Adam Wyner describes an invited workshop on Automated Content Analysis and the Law, to be held August 3-4, 2009 at the headquarters of the National Science Foundation in North Arlington, Virginia. Dr. Wyner reports that the workshop organizer is Dr. Georg Vanberg of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The workshop will discuss the state of natural language processing and automated content analysis applications and techniques, and their relevance to legal scholarship, and particularly to empirical studies of case law. Dr. Wyner’s post lists the participants as well as the specific research questions to be discussed.

AALL 2009

The 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL 2009), is taking place July 25-28, 2009, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, in Washington, DC. The conference theme is “Innovate 2009.” The conference program is available here. The Twitter feed for the conference is http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23aall2009. Information about the conference is available on the AALL Annual Meeting page, and from the unofficial conference Wiki. The official online conference scheduler is available here, and a cool unofficial conference scheduler for mobile devices, ScheduAALL, created by Tom Boone, is available here.

According to AALL President James E. Duggan and 2009 Annual Meeting Program Committee Chair Paul George, “Our theme is INNOVATE, and we cannot think of a better time to celebrate our creativity and innovations than this moment in history in our nation’s capital. We have seen many changes since we met last year: a new
president and federal administration, as well as significant economic changes. As librarians, we know the importance of information in addressing the multiple challenges individuals, organizations and countries face on a day-to-day basis. We will continue to find ways to improve access to information while adapting to changes in our users’ needs—in technology and in the world. We know that our ingenuity and innovations have always equipped us to succeed. This Conference affords us the opportunity to share our innovations, learn from each other and celebrate our successes, while preparing us for the work that lies ahead.”

We send our best wishes to our colleagues attending the conference.

Wardeh, Bench-Capon, & Coenen on PADUA: A Protocol for Argumentation Dialogue Using Association Rules

Maya Wardeh, Trevor Bench-Capon, and Frans Coenen, all of the Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, have published PADUA: A Protocol for Argumentation Dialogue Using Association Rules, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

“We describe PADUA, a protocol designed to support two agents debating a classification by offering arguments based on association rules mined from individual datasets. We motivate the style of argumentation supported by PADUA, and describe the protocol. We discuss the strategies and tactics that can be employed by agents participating in a PADUA dialogue. PADUA is applied to a typical problem in the classification of routine claims for a hypothetical welfare benefit. We particularly address the problems that arise from the extensive number of misclassified examples typically found in such domains, where the high error rate is a widely recognised problem. We give examples of the use of PADUA in this domain, and explore in particular the effect of intermediate predicates. We have also done a large scale evaluation designed to test the effectiveness of using PADUA to detect misclassified examples, and to provide a comparison with other classification systems.”

NIEM 2.1 to Be Released in Late Summer 2009

Version 2.1, a new version, of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) is to be released in late summer 2009, according to an article in the July 2009 issue of NIEM Newsletter. NIEM is a standard for facilitating the exchange of XML documents by U.S. federal, state, and local government agencies. The XML document type definitions (DTDs) covered by NIEM include several law-related DTDs (which are gathered into entities, each of which is called an “Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD)”) listed at the National Center for State Courts and the U.S. Department of Justice.

According to the newsletter, NIEM 2.1 will feature a better “structure for an offense in the Justice domain,” and will include three new domains: Maritime; Family Services; and Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear (CBRN).

The Maritime domain will include the Maritime Information Exchange Model (MIEM) version 1.0 (described in this presentation by Dr. Rick Hayes-Roth and Dr. David Reading) which is relevant to legal informatics to the extent that it includes markup for Advance Notices of Arrival, required by 33 CFR sec. 401.79; for ship manifests, which have legal functions in certain contexts; and for other law-related documents.

The Family Services domain, being developed jointly by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration on Children and Families, the National Center for State Courts, and the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, will also include standards for certain as-yet-unspecified law-related documents.

The newsletter asserts that NIEM 2.1 is backwards compatible, that “[a]ll previous” intergovernmental information exchange models, “including GJXDM, NIEM 1.0 [scroll down], and NIEM 2.0 continue to remain available to support existing exchanges,” and that agencies “may migrate to [NIEM 2.1] in their own timelines.”

Training respecting NIEM 2.1 will be available at the 2009 NIEM National Training Event, to be held September 30-October 2, 2009, in Baltimore, Maryland, or from tutorials and other resources on the NIEM Website.

For more information, see the NIEM Newsletter article, or the NIEM Website.

HT Court Technology Bulletin.

Deadline Extended: Call for Papers: AICOL 09

The deadline has been extended to July 15, 2009 respecting the call for papers for AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems: Multilingual Ontologies, Multiagent Systems, Distributed Networks (AICOL 09), to be held September 15-16, 2009 in Beijing, in conjunction with the 24th World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (XXIV IVR Congress). Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Multilingual Ontologies;
• Models of Legal Concepts;
• Legal Thesauri, Taxonomies and Ontologies;
• Alternative Dispute Resolution, Online Dispute Resolution;
• Legal Knowledge Acquisition, Knowledge Management;
• AI and Legal Theory;
• Formalization of Legal Norms, Concepts and Cases;
• Logical models;
• Argumentative Frameworks;
• Game Theory in Law;
• Legal Information Retrieval.

For more information, see the call for papers.

Legal Informatics Papers from CAiSE ’09

Two legal informatics papers presented at the 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Systems (CAiSE ’09), held June 8-12, 2009 in Amsterdam, have been published in volume 453 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org):

• Motoshi Saeki, Haruhiko Kaiya, & Satoshi Hattori, Applying a Model Checker to Check Regulatory Compliance of Use Case Models; and
• Brigitte Burgemeestre et al., Early Requirements Engineering for e-Customs Decision Support: Assessing Overlap in Mental Models.