Yates & Shapiro, Establishing a Sustainable Legal Information System in a Developing Country: A Practical Guide

Professor Dr. Kenneth A. Yates of University of Southern California Rossier School of Education and Charles E. Shapiro have published Establishing a Sustainable Legal Information System in a Developing Country: A Practical Guide, Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries, v. 42, article no. 8 (2010). Here is the abstract:

In this paper, a practical systems analysis approach is described for the planning, development and implementation of the information technology required to have a sustainable legal information system in a developing country. Considerations involved to create, compile and distribute the country’s governing laws in electronic form are described. Alternative database search and retrieval options are discussed, as well as issues relating to distribution of the database online, on local media, or on both. Based on a reasonable set of assumptions and general requirements for a developing country, a model legal information system is then presented. By using the approach suggested in this paper, a developing country can fully evaluate the cost-benefit tradeoffs, as well as all other tradeoffs, in determining the most appropriate information technology to use for the creation, compilation, and distribution of its laws in electronic form.

New UK eParticipation Effort: Top Direct.gov.uk ePetitions to Become Legislation

In 2011, the most popular citizen-created petitions on the Direct.gov.uk Website will be drafted as legislation in the UK Parliament, and petitions receiving a certain level of support will be guaranteed a debate in the House of Commons, according to stories in The Guardian and The Financial Times published 28 December 2010.

This ePetition measure seems to implement the Referendum Bill / Alternative Vote provision of section 6 of the 2010 Liberal Democrat – Conservative coalition agreement.

Browning, The Lawyer’s Guide to Social Networking

John G. Browning, Esq. of Thompson Coe has published The Lawyer’s Guide to Social Networking: Understanding Social Media’s Impact on the Law (Thomson Reuters West 2010). Here is a summary:

This product provides a comprehensive look at how social media is affecting the legal system. It examines the myriad ways in which information from sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter is being put to use in everything from criminal and family law matters to personal injury, employment, and commercial cases nationwide. The author illustrates how the pervasive social networking phenomenon is redefining traditional notions of jurisdiction, duty, service of process, and legal ethics while using actual trial- and appellate-level cases to analyze the discoverability and admissibility of social media evidence.

Applications Invited for State Justice Institute Grants

Applications are invited — with submission deadline of 1 February 2011 for the second quarter of fiscal year 2011 — for grants offered by the State Justice Institute (SJI). SJI offers grants to fund improvements in justice administration in U.S. state courts.

Grant categories of interest to the legal informatics and legal communication communities include Project Grants — particularly in the areas of immigration issues, state court reengineering, courts and the media, and elder issues — and Technical Assistance Grants, that fund the hiring of outside experts, and travel to observe the practices of other courts.

For more information, please see the SJI Grants Website.

Lanzara on How New Media Change the Way Judges Deal with Trial Transcripts

Professor Dr. Giovan Francesco Lanzara of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienza Politica has published Remediation of practices: How new media change the ways we see and do things in practical domains, First Monday, v. 15, no. 6-7 (June 2010), article 3034/2565. Here is the abstract:

Based on two ethnographic studies of technology–driven innovation in music education and judicial practice, in this paper I investigate the nature and meaning of mediation as a primary aspect of our way of experiencing and understanding reality. I explore what happens in an established domain of practice when the introduction of new technologies, such as the computer and video recording, requires practitioners to work with a new medium for carrying out their practices. In spite of the apparent distance of the two practical domains, music and the judicial, the two cases point to surprisingly similar phenomena affecting the nature of objects, the relationship between objects and their representations, and the perceptual and practical skills of the practitioners. The paper shows to what extent a practice is embedded in the medium and discusses the coping strategies that musicians and judges enact in order to make sense of and master the new media, and to reweave the ripped fabric of their practice.

Liu & Shih on Hybrid-Patent Classification Based on Patent-Network Analysis

Professor Dr. Duen-Ren Liu and Meng-Jung Shih, both of National Chiao Tung University Institute of Information Management, have published Hybrid-patent classification based on patent-network analysis, forthcoming in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). Here is the abstract:

Effective patent management is essential for organizations to maintain their competitive advantage. The classification of patents is a critical part of patent management and industrial analysis. This study proposes a hybrid-patent-classification approach that combines a novel patent-network-based classification method with three conventional classification methods to analyze query patents and predict their classes. The novel patent network contains various types of nodes that represent different features extracted from patent documents. The nodes are connected based on the relationship metrics derived from the patent metadata. The proposed classification method predicts a query patent’s class by analyzing all reachable nodes in the patent network and calculating their relevance to the query patent. It then classifies the query patent with a modified k-nearest neighbor classifier. To further improve the approach, we combine it with content-based, citation-based, and metadata-based classification methods to develop a hybrid-classification approach. We evaluate the performance of the hybrid approach on a test dataset of patent documents obtained from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and compare its performance with that of the three conventional methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed patent-network-based approach yields more accurate class predictions than the patent network-based approach.

Jones on A User Registration System for Regulations.gov

Gregory D. Jones has published a comment entitled Electronic Rulemaking in the New Age of Openness: Proposing a Voluntary Two-Tier Registration System for Regulations.gov, Administrative Law Review, v. 62, no. 4 (2010), pp. 1261-1286. Here is a summary:

This Comment argues that a voluntary two-tiered registration system that acknowledges the role of interest groups in rulemaking is best suited to meet the [Obama] Administration’s goals for open government. Part I briefly reviews the history of e-rulemaking in the United States, including the recent policies by the Obama Administration. It also considers how the role played by interest groups in rulemaking offers both advantages and disadvantages to agencies, and briefly considers several technical challenges posed by the current e-rulemaking model. Part II describes the European model [represented by the European Commission's Your Voice in Europe eParticipation service, and its Register of Interest Representatives] in more detail and explores the degree to which that model should be modified and imported to the United States. Part III considers the practical implications of importing the European model, focusing on the pros and cons of the proposed system. This Part weighs the perceived benefits of the system against its apparent costs, concluding that the import is worthwhile. In closing, this Comment recommends that the eRulemaking Program conduct an in-depth study and public consultation to further evaluate the costs of a voluntary two-tiered registration system.

McKelvey et al. on The Communication of Trademark Rights & Licensing Policy on University Official Athletic Websites

Professor Steve McKelvey, Professor Sheranne Fairley, and Mark D. Groza, all of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Isenberg School of Management, have published Caught in the Web? The Communication of Trademark Rights and Licensing Policy on University Official Athletic Websites, Journal of Legal Aspects of Sport, v. 20, no. 1, p. 1-34 (2010). Here is a summary:

This study sought to investigate the overall approach by which collegiate athletic departments communicate trademark rights and licensing policy to stakeholders via their official athletic website. This entailed not only a content analysis of what information was provided, but as importantly an examination of where this information was located on official athletic websites and the path to accessing it. The article first discusses the growing emphasis on trademark protection and enforcement within the collegiate athletics industry, followed by a review of prior literature that has called for more strategic approaches to trademark protection at the institutional level. The materials in these sections strongly suggest a need for more effective communication of trademark rights and licensing policy within the collegiate marketing and licensing industry. A discussion of the importance of websites as communication tools, the study method and the results are followed by a discussion of the findings and the implications for sport managers.

Palfrey on The Path of Legal Information

Vice Dean John G. Palfrey of the Harvard Law School recently gave a lecture entitled The Path of Legal Information, on 9 November 2010, at the Harvard Law School.

In his lecture, Dean Palfrey proposes the development of an open, interoperable system of digital legal information, and describes possible consequences of such a system for legal scholars, law students, citizens, and government.

The system proposed seems consistent with the objectives of the free access to law movement and the Law.gov legal open government data movement.

Click here for video of the lecture.

Click here for Dean Palfrey’s abstract of the lecture.

Changes to Legal Informatics Conference Calendar

The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated. Event data in iCalendar (.ics) format have been added for many events. (Event data for more events will be added in the coming weeks.) (I decided to add event data to the calendar after seeing Jon Udell’s recent Berkman Center presentation urging inclusion of .ics event data in Web-based calendars.)

The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, or that are known to welcome papers on legal information systems.

Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.

If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, please feel free to share that information in the comments to this post.