LexCraft: A Wiki Space to Share Best Practices for Legal Information Systems

LexCraft, run by Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, is a Wiki where developers can “record, refine, and promulgate best practices for electronic legal information publication. It’s a place to note both big things (like the OAI4Courts standard, now under development on LexCraft) and small things (like … everything you [need to] know about US Code section numbering).”

“LexCraft is about crafting things with legal text.” It’s “a place to look for [or share things like] a stopword list for legislation in English, a writeup on a search engine specifically adapted for legal text, or the profile of the research group that developed it, or a bibliography of papers on text retrieval as it specifically applies to legal text. So it’s part cookbook, part collection of profiles and bibliographies, part code library…”

Legal information systems developers are invited to participate in LexCraft. To join, please register here. Thanks!

Suggested Metadata Practices for Legislation

Tom Bruce, Director of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII), has posted Suggested Metadata Practices for Legislation [URL updated 2010-03-27 @ 21:17 PDT; HT Gannon], a summary of discussions held at last week’s Cornell Law.gov Workshop. The article is posted on LexCraft, an LII-hosted wiki where legal information system developers share best practices and other know how. Tom’s post may be of interest to all who work with legislative information systems.

Click here for more information on Law.gov.

Click here for more information about LexCraft.

HT @emasters.

New Book: Law and Technology: Looking into the Future: Selected Essays

The following new legal informatics conference proceedings have been published: Law and Technology: Looking into the Future. Selected Essays (Meritxell Fernández-Barrera, Norberto Nuno Gomes de Andrade, Primavera de Filippi, Mario Viola de Azevedo Cunha, Giovanni Sartor, Pompeu Casanovas eds., 2010), ISBN: 9788883980602, 370 Pages. This volume contains papers originally presented at The Future of … Conference on Law and Technology, held 28-29 October 2008 at the European University Institute’s ONE-LEX Project.

Here is the abstract:

Perspective analysis are particularly important in the ICT-law domain, since ICTs have known the most accelerated development in the last decades, and the deepest social effects (determined the passage from the industrial society to the social formation labelled by us information, knowledge or network society), matched by pervasive legal change (from data protection, to intellectual property, to internet law). As ICT development and the ICT driven social evolution are still accelerating their steps, it is necessary that the law does not remain confined to current problems and established outcomes: it needs to look into the future scenarios for capturing the sense of dynamics now underway and for preparing adequate legal response.

Here are the legal informatics papers included in the volume, with links to full-text or abstracts where available:

• Pompeu Casanovas, Relational Law and the Next Generation of Web Services;
• Anton Geist, The Open Revolution: Using Citation Analysis to Improve Legal Text Retrieval;
• Giuseppe Contissa, Modelling European and Italian Tax Legislation with LKIF Language;
• Tobias Mahler, Tool-Supported Legal Risk Management: A Road Map.

For more information, including the complete table of contents, please see the book description.

HT Professor Enrico Francesconi.

New Version of CEN Metalex Now Available

A new version of the CEN Metalex Workshop Agreement (dated 2009) is now available, per Professor Radboud Winkels of the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam.

Metalex is an interchange format for legal XML schemas and document-type definitions.

For more information, and for links to other Metalex documents, please see the Metalex Website.

Cornell Law.gov Workshop

Twitter tweets from the Cornell Law.gov Workshop are available at #lawgov. The purpose of this invitation-only workshop — being held 22-23 March 2010 at the Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell University Law School in Ithaca, New York, USA — is to begin the development of metadata standards for a proposed distributed registry and repository of all primary U.S. legal materials.

Click here for background on the Law.gov project. Thanks to LII Director Tom Bruce for graciously hosting this event.

Call for Papers: CLIMA XI: Special Session: Norms & Normative Multi-Agent Systems

A call for papers, with paper submission deadline of 11 May 2010, has been issued for CLIMA XI: The 11th International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems: Special Session: Norms and Normative Multi-Agent Systems, to be held 16-17 August 2010, in Lisbon, Portugal.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “logical foundations of normative systems
• computational models of normative systems
• computational models of normative multi-agent systems
• formal models of norm dynamics
• agent autonomy and norms
• agent deliberation and norms
• normative agent types
• programming normative multi-agent systems.”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Guido Governatori.

Call for Papers: RuleML 2010

A call for papers, with extended abstract submission deadline of 6 June 2010 and extended paper submission deadline of 11 June 2010, has been issued for RuleML 2010: The 4th International Web Rule Symposium: Research Based and Industry Focused, to be held 21-23 October 2010 in Washington, DC. The symposium will be held in conjunction with the 13th International Business Rules Forum.

Papers for the symposium are invited on the following topics:

• “Rules, Semantic Technology, and Cross-Industry Standards
• Rule Transformation and Extraction
• Rules and Uncertainty
• Rules and Norms
• Rules and Inferencing
• Rule-based Event Processing and Reaction Rules
• Rule-Based Distributed/Multi-Agent Systems
• … Rules and ontologies
• Execution models, rule engines, and environments
• Graphical processing, modeling and rendering of rules.”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Guido Governatori.

[This post was last updated 5 June 2010.]

April 9-11, Citability Codeathon, Chevy Chase, Maryland

A codeathon to create applications in connection with Citability, a project to create a new standard for permanent URIs for government information resources, including legal resources, will be held 9-11 April 2010, at Microsoft Corporation, 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Suite 700, Chevy Chase, Maryland, USA.

Among the applications to be written at the codeathon are resolvers for converting legal resource URNs conforming to the URN:LEX standard, to URIs conforming to the Citability standard.

Click here for the full text of the URN:LEX standard.

Click here for the full text of the Citability standard, entitled Citable Documents Specification.

For more information, please see the codeathon announcement.

OAI-PMH for Court Decisions Application Available from Cornell’s LII

An OAI-PMH proof-of-concept application for court decisions — called OAI4Courts — has been issued by the Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell University Law School. The application, written by Thomas R. Bruce, co-founder and director of the LII, demonstrates how metadata — conforming to the OAI-PMH standard — describing court decisions can be made available for wide distribution on the Internet.

Such distribution could enable the creation of free and open registries of metadata for court records, similar to the many OAI-PMH-compliant free and open registries for metadata describing journal articles, books, and dissertations, such as OAIster.

The application will be discussed at the Cornell Law.gov Workshop, an invitation-only meeting to be held in connection with the Law.gov legal open government data project, on 22-23 March 2010 at the LII.

The application is made available on the LII’s LexCraft Wiki, where developers of digital law collections share technical information and advice.

For more information, please see the OAI4Courts application page.

Changes to Access to U.S. Federal Court Records on PACER

Changes intended to enhance public access to U.S. federal court records through the PACER system were announced 16 March 2010 by the Judicial Conference of the United States.

PACER is the fee-based legal information service of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AOUSC) Public Access and Records Management Division.

According to the announcement, the Judicial Conference has approved the following measures:

• U.S. federal judges will be permitted “to make digital audio recordings of court hearings available online to the public through PACER, for $2.40 per audio file”;
• PACER users will not be charged for PACER usage “unless they accrue charges of more than $10 of PACER usage in a quarterly billing cycle”;
• A pilot program has been approved, under which a maximum of 12 U.S. federal courts may “publish … district and bankruptcy court opinions” free of charge “via the [U.S.] Government Printing Office’s Federal Digital System (FDsys).”

The GPO FDsys pilot program seems consistent with the goals of the Law.gov legal open government data project.

The announcement appears to contain one partially inaccurate statement: “All court opinions are available through PACER free of charge, and that will not change.” This statement appears to be inaccurate in two respects, as I verified by PACER searches performed this week. First, many U.S. federal district court opinions placed in PACER prior to the installation of “District Court CM/ECF version 2.4″ — which appears to have occurred in most courts in 2005 or 2006 — are available to the public only for a fee (click here for the PACER document stating this policy; and see as an example the district court opinion in Parker v. District of Columbia, Civil Action No. 03-0213 (EGS) (D.D.C. Mar. 31, 2004), document number 35 on the docket numbered 1:03-cv-00213-EGS available via the D.D.C. PACER site).

Second, public users are charged a fee to access U.S. federal circuit court opinions through U.S. federal district court dockets accessible via U.S. federal circuit court PACER sites, and through federal district court PACER sites. See, e.g., the Eighth Circuit opinion in Milavetz, Gallop & Milavetz, P.A. v. United States, No. 07-2405 (8th Cir. Sept. 4, 2008), available through the Eighth Circuit PACER site and the D. Minn. PACER site as document 56 on the docket numbered 0:05-cv-02626-JMR-FLN .

Employees of the AOUSC are currently reviewing the accuracy of the statement, “All court opinions are available through PACER free of charge, and that will not change.” I hope they will soon issue a correction to that statement. I am grateful to several AOUSC and PACER Service Center employees, and to Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy for their assistance this week respecting this issue.