Weekly Report of Current Opinions (RECOP): First Raw Feed Available

The first raw feed of the Weekly Report of Current Opinions (RECOP), a collection of newly released U.S. court decisions, is now available at Public.Resource.Org, according to a tweet by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org.

Carl writes:

Will release processed version of cases in few weeks. Be careful if you use raw

Carl has also posted a new set of U.S. federal court decisions and docket information obtained from PACER, the U.S. federal judiciary’s fee-based database. Carl says a bit more about this data set in this tweet.

Click here for more information about RECOP.

Eiseman & Skalbeck on the Evaluation of Law School Websites

Jason Eiseman of the Yale Law School Library and Roger Skalbeck of Georgetown University Law Library have published Top 10 Law School Home Pages of 2010, in Ross E. Davies, Ed., Green Bag Almanac and Reader 2011. Washington, DC, Green Bag Press, pp. 339-366. Here is the abstract:

This ranking report attempts to identify the best law school home pages based exclusively on objective criteria. The goal is to assess elements that make websites easier to use for sighted as well as visually-impaired users. Most elements require no special design skills, sophisticated technology or significant expenses.

Ranking results in this report represent reasonably relevant elements. In this report, 200 ABA-accredited law school home pages are analyzed and ranked for twenty elements in three broad categories: Design Patters & Metadata; Accessibility and Validation; and Marketing and Communications. As was the case in 2009, there is still no objective way to account for good taste. For interpreting these results, we don’t try to decide if any whole is greater or less than the sum of its parts.

HT @lsolum.

JURIX 2010 Slides Available

Slides are now available for many papers given at JURIX 2010: The 23rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, held 16-17 December 2010 at the University of Liverpool Computer Science Department, in Liverpool, England, UK.

HT JURIX Blog.

Call for Papers: IDP 2011

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 18 February 2011 — has been issued for IDP 2011: The 7th International Conference on Internet, Law, and Politics, to be held 11-12 July 2011, at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Estudis de Dret i Ciència Política, in Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain.

Papers are invited on the following topics of interest to the legal informatics community:

Questions related to e-government and e-democracy such as open data, public sector information, online political participation, e-procurement or Internet governance

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT @MiquelP.

Call for Papers: Norms and Normative Multiagent Systems @ CLIMA

A call for papers — with an abstract submission deadline of 4 April 2011 and a full paper submission deadline of 8 April 2011 — has been issued for a Special Session on Norms and Normative Multiagent Systems, at CLIMA XII: The 12th International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems, to be held 17-18 July 2011, in Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain.

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 Professor Dr. Guido Boella.

Deadline Extended to 17 January: Call for Papers for ICAIL 2011

[NOTE: The call for papers submission deadline has been extended to 17 January 2011, according to @JackGConrad.]

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:

• “Mentoring program request deadline: November 8, 2010
• Mentoring program paper deadline: November 15, 2010
• Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 6, 2010
• Submission of abstracts (optional): January 3, 2011″
• Submission of papers extended deadline: January 17, 2011

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Formal and computational models of legal reasoning
• Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining
• Computational models of argumentation and decision making
• Legal knowledge representation including legal ontologies and common sense knowledge
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Modeling norms for multi-agent systems
• Modeling negotiation and contract formation
• Computational models of case-based legal reasoning
• Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
• Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
• Intelligent legal tutoring systems
• Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
• E-discovery and e-disclosure
• Automatic legal text classification and summarization
• Machine learning and data mining applied to legal databases”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Jack G. Conrad.

Preview of Open Access Legal Casebooks Available from eLangdell: CALI

A preview is now available of the open access digital legal casebooks being developed as part of the eLangdell Project sponsored by CALI: The Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction.

The preview — which consists of portions of Roger C. Park and Douglas D. McFarland’s Evidence for Civil Procedure Students — is available in several formats: ePub, mobi, PDF, and HTML, and is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

Click here for more information about the eLangell Project.

[NOTE: An earlier version of this post stated that the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University was a current sponsor of eLangdell. Our friends at CALI have told us that Berkman Center no longer sponsors eLangdell, so I've revised the post accordingly.]