Summary of Feb. 18 ABA Conference on Public Understanding of the Courts in the Age of New Media

A summary of the ABA Conference on Public Understanding of the Courts in the Age of New Media, held 18 February 2011 at The University of Arizona School of Law’s Rehnquist Center, has been posted by Tim Eigo, Esq., of Arizona Attorney magazine.

The summary includes a selection of Twitter tweets about the conference, marked by hashtags #barmedia and #newmediaconf.

HT @christinemartin.

Calls for Papers: Workshops @ ICAIL 2011

Calls for papers, with diverse submission deadlines, have been issued for the workshops at ICAIL 2011: The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law; the workshops are scheduled to be held 6 and 10 June 2011, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

DESI IV: Workshop on Setting Standards for Searching Electronically Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings, 6 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 1 April 2011: Research papers;
• 22 April 2011: Position papers.

Workshop on Agent Model-Based Reasoning in Law, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 14 March 2011.

Computational Law: A Bridge Towards the Business Rules, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 20 April 2011.

AI & Evidential Inference, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• TBA

AHLTL 2011: Applying Human Language Technology to the Law, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• 31 March 2011.

Coherence 2011: Artificial Intelligence, Coherence, and Judicial Reasoning, 10 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 15 April 2011: Abstracts;
• 3 June 2011: Full papers.

HT JURIX.

Martin on Abandoning Law Reports for Official Digital Case Law

Dean Peter W. Martin of Cornell University Law School has posted Abandoning Law Reports for Official Digital Case Law (2011), on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

In 2009, Arkansas ended publication of the Arkansas Reports. Since 1837 this series of volumes, joined in the late twentieth century by the Arkansas Appellate Reports covering the state’s intermediate court of appeals, had served as the official record of Arkansas’s case law. For all decisions handed down after February 12, 2009, not books but a database of electronic documents “created, authenticated, secured, and maintained by the Reporter of Decisions” constitute the “official report” of all Arkansas appellate decisions.

The article examines what distinguishes this Arkansas reform from the widespread cessation of public law report publication that occurred during the twentieth century and this new official database from the opinion archives now hosted at the judicial websites of most U.S. appellate courts. It proceeds to explore the distinctive alignment of factors that both led and enabled the Arkansas judiciary to take a step that courts in other jurisdictions, state and federal, have so far resisted. Speculation about which other states have the capability and incentive to follow Arkansas’s lead follows. That, in turn, requires a comparison of the full set of measures the Arkansas Supreme Court and its reporter of decisions have implemented with similar, less comprehensive, initiatives that have taken place elsewhere. Finally, the article considers important issues that have confronted those responsible for building Arkansas’s new system of case law dissemination and the degree to which principal components of this one state’s reform can provide a useful template for other jurisdictions.

NELIC 2011: New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference

[Update 20 April 2011: Click here for videos of the entire NELIC conference. HT @LSNTAP.]

NELIC 2011: The New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference, will be held 15 April 2011, at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall, in Berkeley, California, USA.

According to the announcement, invited speakers will address the following topics:

• “Quantitative Legal Prediction“: such as applying “machine learning” and “natural language processing” to develop “statistical model[s]” of “judicial decision-making”;
• “Legal Financing and Securitization“
• “The Future of Legal Automation“
• “Legal Interfaces and User Experiences“: including implications for access “to the legal system.”

As of today, the speakers include Joshua Walker of Lex Machina; and Daniel Martin Katz of the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems.

For registration or more information, please see the conference announcement.

Ph.D. Position: Multi Agent Systems at Leibniz Center for Law

An announcement respecting a Ph.D. position in multiagent systems has been posted by the Leibniz Center for Law:

A PhD position on agent concepts in public administration at the Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

The PhD student will work on the design methodology for multi-agent simulations, and address the interesting theoretical questions we have about agent role descriptions as design components in multi-agent simulation. The PhD student will also give input to a methodology for acquisition of legal knowledge from the text of the law.

Agent roles in general are identied with a set of abilities, and a set of susceptibilities to actions of others, and with goals, plans, and beliefs typical of that role. Law-based agent roles are a natural approach to knowledge acquisition from the sources of law. Law-based agent roles can be characterized by a set of powers and liabilities, duties and rights found in legal rules in thetext of the law. [...]

Job requirements

The candidate is supposed to write a PhD-thesis on the subject outlined below. He or she will be contracted as a PhD-student (AiO) conform the regulations of the University of Amsterdam.

The candidate for this position should have a master’s degree or equivalent. The candidate should be interested in the legal domain & in multi-agent systems. We are looking for someone with programming skills and a background in multi-agent systems, knowledge representation, and/or semantic web technology. [...]

For application instructions or for more information, please see the complete announcement.

Legal Data Sets

Several law-related data sets are linked at the Legal Information Systems Website.

Click here for some additional law-related data sets.

HT Law Librarian Blog.

[Note: This post was updated on 31 August 2011 to reflect new URLs.]

Call for Papers: AICOL 2011

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 16 May 2011 — has been issued for AICOL 2011: The Third Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Law, to be held 16 August 2011 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

The workshop is to be held in conjunction with IVR 2011: XXV. World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.

Papers for AICOL 2011 are invited on the following topics:

• Law and Science
• Law and Cognitive Science
• Law and Complexity Theory
• Complex Systems
• Legal Theory
• Legal Culture
• Computer Ethics
• Artificial Societies
• Argumentative Frameworks
• Legal Ontologies
• Legal Concepts
• Legal Thesauri
• Taxonomies
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Legal Knowledge Acquisition
• Legal Knowledge Representation
• Knowledge Management
• Cognitive schemas
• Law and Robotics
• Law and Mathematics
• Legal Graphic Representation
• Game Theory
• Formalization of Legal Systems and Norms
• Rules and Standards
• Agreement technologies
• Electronic Institutions
• Legal Information Retrieval
• Online Dispute Resolution
• Trends in e-Discovery, e-Courts, e-Administration
• Users’ studies

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani.

McMillan on URN:LEX

James E. McMillan of the National Center for State Courts has posted How to Verify a Court Document?, Court Technology Bulletin, 18 February 2011.

In this post, Mr. McMillan describes the URN:LEX legal identifier standard, developed by Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi and Pierluigi Spinosa, both of ITTIG/CNR, and Caterina Lupo of CNIPA.

Mr. McMillan also presents a sample pretrial memorandum designated by a URN:LEX URN.

This post is the third installment of Mr. McMillan’s series entitled, The Future Is Not Paper:

• Click here for Part 1, on Microsoft’s Pivot technology;
• Click here for Part 2, on dynamically updated court document systems.

New on VoxPopuLII: Holmes on Accessible Law

Nick Holmes of infolaw has posted Accessible Law, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Holmes discusses the state of the free access to law movement, and the challenges of making free law usable by ordinary citizens. Mr. Holmes describes FreeLegalWeb, his new free access to law service, that combines free primary law with expert legal commentary presented via blogs, to make the law more accessible to the people.

Mr. Holmes also discusses the recent debate between Bob Berring, Tom Bruce, and others over the quality of access to law provided by commercial computer assisted legal research services and free law services, as well as Jason Wilson’s concept of online legal publishing as curation.

This post will be of interest to those who develop or manage legal information systems; to the legal publishing community; to the free access to law community; and all who are interest in improving public access to legal information.

Sartor et al. on Approaches to Legal Ontologies: Theories, Domains, Methodologies

Approaches to Legal Ontologies: Theories, Domains, Methodologies (Springer 2011), a collection of scholarly articles on legal ontologies, has been published.

The volume is edited by Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor of Università di Bologna CIRSFID, Professor Dr. Pompeu Casanovas of the Institute of Law & Technology (IDT) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Maria Angela Biasiotti of ITTIG/CNR, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of the European University Institute Department of Law.

This is the first volume in Springer’s new Law, Governance, and Technology Series, edited by Professors Casanovas and Sartor.

Some of the articles in this volume are based on papers originally presented at the Workshop on Approaches to Legal Ontologies, held 9-10 December 2008, at European University Institute Department of Law, in Fiesole, Florence, Italy.

Here are the contents:

1. Introduction: Theory and Methodology in Legal Ontology Engineering: Experiences and Future Directions / Pompeu Casanovas, Giovanni Sartor, Maria Angela Biasiotti, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera
2. The Legal Theory Perspective: Doctrinal Conceptual Systems vs. Computational Ontologies / Meritxell Fernández-Barrera and Giovanni Sartor
3. Empirically Grounded Developments of Legal Ontologies: A Socio-Legal Perspective / Pompeu Casanovas, Núria Casellas, and Joan-Josep Vallbé
4. A Cognitive Science Perspective on Legal Ontologies / Joost Breuker and Rinke Hoekstra
5. Social Ontology and Documentality / Maurizio Ferraris
6. The Case-Based Reasoning Approach: Ontologies for Analogical Legal Argument / Kevin D. Ashley
7. A Complex-System Approach: Legal Knowledge, Ontology, Information and Networks / Pierre Mazzega, Danièle Bourcier, Paul Bourgine, Nadia Nadah, and Romain Boulet
8. The Multi-Layered Legal Information Perspective / Guido Boella and PierCarlo Rossi
9. Legal Ontologies: The Linguistic Perspective / Maria Angela Biasiotti and Daniela Tiscornia
10. A Legal Document Ontology: The Missing Layer in Legal Document Modelling / Monica Palmirani, Luca Cervone, and Fabio Vitali
11. From Thesaurus Towards Ontologies in Large Legal Databases / Ángel Sancho Ferrer, Carlos Fernández Hernández, and José Manuel Mateo Rivero
12. The Computational Ontology Perspective: Design Patterns for Web Ontologies / Aldo Gangemi, Valentina Presutti, and Eva Blomqvist
13. A Learning Approach for Knowledge Acquisition in the Legal Domain / Enrico Francesconi
14. Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science: The Legal Perspective / Roberta Ferrario, Nicola Guarino, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera
15. Legal Multimedia Ontologies and Semantic Annotation
    for Search and Retrieval / Jorge González-Conejero