A call for proposals — with submission deadline of 1 September 2010 — has been issued for Civil Justice Action Grants, with the designation JLS/2010/JCIV/AG, by the EU Directorate General for Justice, Freedom, and Security.
Applications are invited respecting the areas of e-Justice or the training of legal practitioners.
For more information, please see the call for proposals.
A call for papers has been issued for ICAIL 2011: The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, to be held 6-10 June 2011 at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
The conference is organized by IAAIL: The International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law.
A mentoring program is being offered for authors wishing to submit papers to the conference.
Here are the submission deadlines:
Papers are invited on the following topics:
For more information, please see the call for papers.
HT Jack G. Conrad.
Professor Dr. Richard D. Hartley and Professor Dr. Holly Ventura Miller, both of The University of Texas at San Antonio Department of Criminal Justice, and Professor Dr. Cassia Spohn of The Arizona State University Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, have published Do You Get What You Pay For? Type of Counsel and Its Effect on Criminal Court Outcomes, forthcoming in Journal of Criminal Justice. Here is the abstract:
Although the Sixth Amendment of the constitution guarantees assistance of counsel to indigent criminal defendants, questions exist about the quality of this representation. Critics assert that ‘you get what you pay for’ and that public defenders are less effective than privately retained counsel regarding criminal justice outcomes. Some research, however, reveals that public defenders are as effective as privately retained counsel because of their working relationships with prosecutors and judges, the so-called courtroom workgroup. The current study tested the assertion that ‘you get what you pay for’ by examining the effect of type of counsel (public defenders versus private attorneys) on four different case processing outcomes for a large mid-western jurisdiction. Results generally show that type of counsel has no significant direct effect. Tests for interaction, however, suggest that for some defendants, type of counsel interacts with other key variables to influence certain outcomes.
Click here for a summary of research findings and an outline of the article.
Click here for ABA Journal‘s summary of the article.
HT @ABAJournal.
Professor Samir Chopra of the Brooklyn College Department of Philosophy has published Rights for Autonomous Artificial Agents?, CACM: Communications of the ACM, August 2010, at 38-40 (Vol. 53, No. 8). Here is a summary:
Societal norms and the legal system constrain our interactions with other human beings (our fellow citizens or people of other nations), other legal persons (corporations and public bodies), or animal entities. There are, in parallel, rich philosophical discussions of the normative aspects of these interactions in social, political, and moral philosophy, and in epistemology and metaphysics. The law, taking its cues from these traditions, strives to provide structure to these interactions. It answers questions such as: What rights do our fellow citizens have? How do we judge them liable for their actions? When do we attribute knowledge to them? What sorts of responsibilities can (or should) be assigned to them? It is becoming increasingly clear these questions must be addressed with respect to artificial agents. So, what place within our legal system should these entities occupy so that we may do justice to the present system of socio-economic-legal arrangements, while continuing to safeguard our interests? [footnotes omitted]
Professor Chopra’s article discusses contracting, legal agency, rights, and legal personhood respecting autonomous artificial agents.
A set of forms and checklists — called The Conflicts of Interest Toolkit — for aiding lawyers in avoiding conflicts of interest prohibited by legal ethics rules, has been published by The Canadian Bar Association Task Force on Conflicts of Interest.
Click here for Dan Pinnington’s Slaw post explaining the context of the toolkit.
The toolkit materials are provided in PDF and MS Word formats. Because legal ethics compliance systems are increasingly automated, it would be interesting to see a bar association provide a resource like the toolkit as a database available via an open platform, such as MySQL, or as a set of documents encoded in a language more readily processed by software, such as XML, with concepts and entities encoded in RDF. Such versions of the toolkit could be readily incorporated into a range of existing compliance systems and other information systems and integrated with other data, while an RDF version of the toolkit could also be processed by Semantic Web technology.
Jeffrey Budziak and Daniel Lempert, both of The Ohio State University Department of Political Science, have posted a working paper entitled Legal Argumentation and Case Quality at the U.S. Supreme Court, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The importance of legal argumentation at the Supreme Court has been subject to substantial debate in the judicial politics literature. Scholars have demonstrated that individual components of legal argumentation appear to independently influence Supreme Court decision-making. However, few examinations have attempted to disentangle, both theoretically and empirically, the dependent nature of legal argumentation. We attempt to do so by reexamining the oral argument component of legal argumentation. Relying on the oral argument grades assigned by Justice Harry Blackmun, we investigate the effect of oral argument grades at an unexpected stage of the Court’s process: the decision to grant certiorari (cert). Our results show that the grades assigned by Justice Blackmun strongly correlate with the decisions of individual justices to vote to grant cert. We believe the results demonstrate both the importance of the underdeveloped notion of “case quality” and the need for greater theoretical and conceptual clarity between the different components of legal argumentation.
HT @aabibliographer.
Timothy Hanson of Hanson Renouf has published Jurats as Adjudicators in the Channel Islands and the Importance of Lay Participation, 39 Common Law World Review 250-282 (2010) (Issue No. 3). Here is the abstract:
Many legal systems place great importance upon lay persons adjudicating in courts and tribunals but how those persons are chosen, the precise role that they perform and the qualities that they are supposed to bring to the legal process are issues that often excite lively debate. This paper is about the Channel Islands, which enjoy as part of their legal systems adjudicators known as Jurés-Justiciers or ‘Jurats’ who normally have no legal qualifications or training before being able to take up such posts. Historically, the Jurats have played an essential part in the Channel Islands being able to maintain their curious constitutional position in the British Isles by their knowledge and application of the customary laws prevailing in each island and their jealous protection of such customs from outside interference. Nevertheless, in the twenty-first century, when legal principle from one jurisdiction can more readily influence the development of law in another related system and public expectations are no less demanding than elsewhere in the British Isles, it is important to reassess the role of the Jurats. In so doing, it will be readily appreciated that the Jurat system, albeit in need of some reform, is no mere curiosity of the past but something of which Channel Islanders can be justifiably proud.
Professor Haim Sandberg, LL.D., of The College of Management School of Law, has published Real Estate e-Conveyancing: Vision and Risks, 19 Information & Communications Technology Law 101-114 (2010) (Issue No. 2). Here is the abstract:
More then 150 years had passed since English solicitors expressed their vision of a land registration system in which land transactions are quickly and smoothly registered at the same manner in which securities are transferred in the stock exchange. This vision led to the development of the Torrens system and to its expansion in various sides of the globe. Yet the reality of land conveyancing was far from accomplishing this old vision. The process of registration in many jurisdictions suffered from bureaucratic delays and was, and in many jurisdictions still is, based on analogical paper-based documentation system. Though many systems had gone through a computerization process, it dealt with the presentation of manually entered information rather than direct and automatic registration of digital applications. It was only the last decades of the twentieth century that brought to reality the idea of real estate e-conveyancing according to which a land transaction should be automatically processed and registered from the stage of the application to the stage of final registration. A few countries made a great deal of effort to develop such a system but yet there is a way ahead until its conclusive implementation. Israel land registry is going to launch an e-registration project as well. The article analyzes the vision of e-conveyancing and compares it to the current progress of the e-conveyancing projects around the world. It shows that the safe identification of parties, documents and signatures is the major problem of all the newly developed e-conveyancing systems and that this problem is the main obstacle that prevents a full scale implementation of e-conveyancing.
