Call for Papers: Online Dispute Resolution Workshop 2010 @ JURIX

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 10 November 2010 — has been issued for ODR Workshop 2010: The 6th International Workshop on Online Dispute Resolution, to be held 15 December 2010 in Liverpool, England, UK, in conjunction with JURIX 2010.

The theme of the workshop is: “Web 2.0, semantic web and the mobile web.”

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Argumentation and ODR
• Decision support for ODR
• Theories of dispute resolution and ODR
• Modeling and designing of ODR systems
• Tools and techniques for assisted negotiation, automated negotiation, online mediation, and online arbitration
• Empirical research on ODR use cases and projects
• ODR in e-commerce
• ODR in e-government
• ODR and e-justice
• ODR in peace-building processes
• ODR in online communities
• Mobile ODR
• Reputation issues in ODR
• Psychological and cognitive factors in ODR
• ODR protocols and standards
• Legal issues in ODR”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT @rinkehoekstra.

Call for Applications: Yale Information Society Project Fellowships, 2011-2012

Applications — with submission deadline of 1 January 2011 — are invited for fellowships during the 2011-2012 academic year, at the Yale Information Society Project, at the Yale Law School, in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

Applications are invited for two types of fellowship:

• The Yale ISP resident fellowship:
• “The Yale ISP resident fellowship is designed for recent graduates of law or Ph.D. programs who are interested in careers in teaching and public service in any of the following areas: law and media, media studies, intellectual property and innovation, Internet and communications law and policy, intellectual property law, access to knowledge, civil liberties online, first amendment law, digital education, youth social media policy, Internet governance and regulation, privacy, cybersecurity, biotechnology, standards and technology policy, and the intersections of law, technology, and culture generally.”
• The Yale ISP visiting fellowships:
• “A small number of special ISP visiting fellowships are also available for persons who provide their own sources of funding. Past visiting fellows have included recent graduates of law and Ph.D. programs, as well as academics, activists, and members of NGOs.”

For more information, please see the announcement.

Call for Applications: Berkman Center Fellowships 2011-2012

Applications are invited for fellowships during the 2011-2012 academic year at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Applications are invited for two types of fellowship:

• An “academic fellowship for rising early-to-mid career academics”:
• “The academic fellowship is intended for a rising scholar who will use the period of the fellowship to develop his/her teaching and research career and produce compelling, potentially paradigm-shifting contributions to our understanding of cyberspace. It is a stipended fellowship and residency in Cambridge, MA is required. The deadline for applications for the academic fellowship is 11:59 p.m. ET on November 15, 2010.”
• Fellowships through the Center’s “annual open call”:
• “Our annual open call for fellowship applications is an opportunity for academics and practitioners working on issues related to Internet and society to apply to be part of the Berkman fellows community. Stipends and administrative determinations are made on a case-by-case basis, and residency in Cambridge, MA is preferred, though in lieu of residency, routine visits to Cambridge are required. The deadline for applications through our open call is 11:59 p.m. ET on December 15, 2010.”

For more information, please see the announcement.

Call for Papers: dg.o 2011

A call for papers has been issued for dg.o 2011: The 12th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, to be held 12-15 June 2011, at the University of Maryland, in College Park, Maryland, USA. Here are the deadlines:

• 10 January 2011: Workshop, tutorial, and panel proposals due
• 6 February 2011: Papers, posters and demo descriptions due
• 30 March 2011: Camera-ready manuscripts due

Papers or proposals are invited on the following topics:

• “Digital Government Application Domains: such as courts, emergency response management, education, government statistics and data, grants administration, intelligence, international initiatives and cooperation, health and human services, law enforcement and criminal justice, legislative systems, natural resources management, open government (o-government), regulation and rulemaking, security, tax administration, transportation systems, and urban planning.
• IT-enabled Government Management and Operations: such as cross-boundary information sharing and integration, decision-making processes, digital government organization and management strategies, information assurance, information technology adoption and diffusion, IT and service architectures, long-term preservation and archiving of government information, program planning, service integration, as well as technology transition and transfer.
• Information Values and Policies: such as accessibility, digital democracy and governance, digital divide, openness, privacy, public participation in democratic processes, security, transparency, trust, and universal and equity of access to information and services.
• Information Technology and Tools to Support Government: such as cloud computing for digital government domains; collaboration tools; digital libraries and knowledge management; geographic information systems; human-computer interaction; intelligent agents; information integration; interoperable data, networks and architectures; large scale data and information acquisition and management; mobile government; multiple modalities and multimedia; national and international infrastructures for information and communication; service-oriented architectures; semantic web; and social networking, mashups, and software engineering for large-scale government projects.”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Gastil et al. on The Jury and Democracy

Professor Dr. John Gastil of the University of Washington Department of Communication; Dr. E. Pierre Deess of the New Jersey Institute of Technology; Professor Philip J. Weiser of the University of Colorado School of Law; and Cindy Simmons, Esq., M.A., of the University of Washington Department of Communication, have published The Jury and Democracy: How Jury Deliberation Promotes Civic Engagement and Political Participation (2010). Here is a summary:

Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and the U.S. Supreme Court have all alleged that jury service promotes civic and political engagement, yet none could prove it. Finally, The Jury and Democracy provides compelling systematic evidence to support this view.

Drawing from in-depth interviews, thousands of juror surveys, and court and voting records from across the United States, the authors show that serving on a jury can trigger changes in how citizens view themselves, their peers, and their government–and can even significantly increase electoral turnout among infrequent voters. Jury service also sparks long-term shifts in media use, political action, and community involvement.

In an era when involved Americans are searching for ways to inspire their fellow citizens, The Jury and Democracy offers a plausible and realistic path for turning passive spectators into active political participants.

The book includes reports of research produced by The Jury and Democracy Project, based at the University of Washington.

URN:LEX: New Version 02 Available

A new version 02 of the URN:LEX standard for legal identifiers has been posted. The new version is dated 1 October 2010, and expires 4 April 2011.

The new version has been published by Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council (ITTIG/CNR); Italy, National Centre for ICT in Public Administration (CNIPA); Brazil, Federal Senate, IT Department (PRODASEN); and Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute (LII).

The contacts for the draft are Professor Enrico Francesconi & Pierluigi Spinosa, both of ITTIG/CNR, and Caterina Lupo of CNIPA.

According to the new version:

The purpose of the “lex” namespace is to assign an unequivocal identifier, in standard format, to documents that are sources of law. The identifier is conceived so that its construction depends only on the characteristics of the document itself and is, therefore, independent from the document’s on-line availability, its physical location, and access mode.

The authors have also developed a URN schema handler which can be used in conjunction with URN:LEX.

New from Robb Shecter: Permalinks to U.S. Trademark Records

Robb Shecter, creator of OregonLaws.org and WebLaws.org, has announced a new, innovative service: Permalinks to U.S. Trademark Records.

Robb explains that currently, links to trademark and servicemark online registration records of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) expire after a short time, and the PTO offers no permanent URL service. So Robb created a new service that enables users to “create links that don’t expire to trademarks at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.”

Robb says his service was inspired by tinyThom.as, a site providing a similar permalink service for U.S. federal legislation records stored on the Library of Congress’s THOMAS system.

Robb told me last week that he has the following plans for his trademarks permalink service:

• Make it easier to share a reg. page via a browser plugin and/or a web form where someone can copy & paste the original url to get a permanent one.
• Possibly adding the ability to create permalinks to searches, not just permanent records.

Please feel free to use Robb’s new service and let him know your ideas, either by contacting him directly or by commenting on this post.

Call for Papers: Workshop on Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules @ JURIX 2010

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 5 November 2010 — has been issued for the 2010 Workshop on Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules, to be held 15 December 2010 at the University of Liverpool, in Liverpool, England, UK, in conjunction with JURIX 2010: The 23rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

Here is the workshop description:

The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum in which researchers can present their research on modelling legal cases and legal rules.

Papers are solicited that model a particular legal case or a small set of legal rules. Authors are free to choose the case or set of legal rules and analyse them according to the authors’ preferred model of representation; any theoretical discussion should be grounded in or exemplified by the case or rules at hand. Papers should make clear what are the particular distinctive features of their approach and why these features are useful in modelling the chosen case or rules. The workshop is an opportunity for authors to demonstrate the benefits of their approach and for group discussions to identify useful overlapping features as well as aspects to be further explored and developed.

For more information, please see the call for papers on Dr. Adam Wyner’s blog, Language Logic Law Software.

Disclosure: I am a member of the workshop’s Programme Committee.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

New on VoxPopuLII: Lima on the LexML Brazil Project

Dr. João Alberto de Oliveira Lima of the Federal Senate of Brazil has posted The LexML Brazil Project, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In his post, Dr. Lima describes the LexML Brazil free access to law project, and the technology underlying its LexML Brazil Portal and Brazilian Federal Constitution Portal.

Dr. Lima’s post explains the project’s reference model — which is based on CIDOC CRM — and persistent identifier system, which implements the URN:LEX legal uniform resource name standard.

Dr. Lima’s post concludes by sketching the project’s future plans, which include the creation of a suite of open source legal document management tools, and full implementation of the LexML Brazil XML Schema, which is based on the Akoma Ntoso legal XML standards.

Dr. Lima’s post should be of interest to the legal publishing community, as well as to those concerned with eGovernment, legal technology innovation, free access to law, or public access to legal information.

JURIX 2010: Accepted Papers

Accepted papers have been announced for JURIX 2010: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 16-17 December 2010, at the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, in Liverpool, England, UK.

Invited speakers for the conference have also been announced.