McGrath on Legislative Workbench Legislative Information System

Sean McGrath of Proplyon has posted Legislative Workbench (LWB) Technical White Paper, Version 1.0 (2011).

The paper describes the architecture of the system that powers KLISS, the Kansas Legislative Information Services System.

Click here for Sean’s earlier posts about KLISS.

Richardson on E-Possession

Sally B. Richardson, Esq. presented a paper entitled E-Possession, at ALPS 2011: The Association for Law, Property, and Society Annual Meeting, held 4-5 March 2011 at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC, USA. Here is the abstract:

To acquire title to real property via adverse possession, the taking party must physically use the property in a continuous, uninterrupted, peaceable, public, and unequivocal manner for a statutorily required time period. Historically, one of the reasons for requiring a party to meet all of these requirements—particularly the requirement of actual, physical use of the property—was to put the record owner on notice of the existence of the adverse claimant. Today, courts and scholars cite that same rationale when reciting the traditional, and still enforceable, elements. Much has changed, however, since the doctrine of adverse possession was first promulgated. Given changes in how individuals own land and changes in technology, this Article questions whether all elements of adverse possession remain necessary. Specifically, the Article contemplates whether technology has developed such that requiring actual use of property in order to acquire the property through adverse possession leads to the wasteful use of property, not only from the perspective of the adverse claimant, but also from the point of view of the record owner. After discussing whether the traditional elements of adverse possession encourage waste, this Article develops the concept of electronically possessing real property (“e-possession”) as a means of acquiring title. In developing the idea of e-possession, the Article considers the positives and negatives of applying the concept and how e-possession would operate.

Thanks to Ms. Richardson for sending the abstract.

New Free Database of U.S. Court Decisions, Using RECOP Data, by John Joergensen

John Joergensen of the Rutgers Camden Law Library has created a new, free, full-text database of what appear to be all judicial decisions issued by U.S. state and federal courts from January 2011 to present: State and Federal Caselaw from the RECOP Project.

The database contains data from RECOP, The Weekly Report of Current Opinions, distributed by Carl Malamud‘s Public.Resource.Org. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement.

The user interface of the Rutgers-Camden RECOP database — which appears to use the Swish-e open source search engine — enables Boolean search queries and filtering by state or federal judicial circuit.

The Rutgers-Camden database appears to be the first system on the free Web to make use of RECOP data.

The Rutgers-Camden database is part of the Rutgers-Camden Digital Law Library, which Joergensen has developed.

Click here for more information about RECOP, from Carl’s post at O’Reilly Radar.

HT @jjoerg42.

Call for Papers: Workshop on Agent Model-Based Reasoning in Law

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 14 April 2011 — has been issued for The 2011 Workshop on Agent Model-Based Reasoning in Law, to be held 6 June 2011, at The University of Pittsburgh, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. The workshop is being held in conjunction with ICAIL 2011: The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Papers for the workshop are invited on the following topics:

• Agent roles in law-based institutions and plan recognition based on regulative and constitutive rules
• Conceptual issues in the formal specification of norm-governed multi-agent systems
• Monitoring of multi-agent interactions in law enforcement
• Agent model-based reasoning about evidence from witness and expert testimony
• Mental concepts in ontologies of law
• Models of agent interaction in policy simulation

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Le Métayer et al. on Liability Issues in Software Engineering: Case Study of eSignatures

Daniel Le Métayer of INRIA Grenoble – Rhône-Alpes, and colleagues, have published Liability Issues in Software Engineering: The Use of Formal Methods to Reduce Legal Uncertainties, Communications of the ACM, 54(4), 99-106 (April 2010). Here is the abstract:

This paper reports on the results of a multidisciplinary project involving lawyers and computer scientists with the aim to put forward a set of methods and tools to (1) define software liability in a precise and unambiguous way and (2) establish such liability in case of incident. The overall approach taken in the project is presented through an electronic signature case study. The case study illustrates a situation where, in order to reduce legal uncertainties, the parties wish to include in the contract specific clauses to define as precisely as possible the share of liabilities between them for the main types of failures of the system.

Call for Papers: DESI IV: Workshop on Discovery of Electronically Stored Information

A call for papers — with submission deadlines of 1 April 2011 for research papers, and 22 April 2011 for position papers — has been issued for DESI IV: Workshop on Setting Standards for Searching Electronically Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings, to be held 6 June 2011, at The University of Pittsburgh, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. The workshop is being held in conjunction with ICAIL 2011: The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Papers for DESI IV are invited on the following topics:

• “How do key stakeholders in the e-discovery process conceptualize ‘search quality?’ To what extent are those conceptualizations consistent?”
• “What is within and what is beyond the scope of ‘search quality’ in the context of e-discovery?”
• “To what extent is search quality dependent on:
• Effective automation
• Effective processes for using those automated techniques
• The interaction between the two?”
• “To what extent are these issues new in the context of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and to what extent have they always been good practice even in earlier times?”
• “What processes are in use today for stakeholders to communicate about search quality in the context of e-discovery?”
• “What kinds of ‘standards’ are needed to help improve mutual understanding of what was actually done, and to actually help improve ‘search quality?’”
• “What can we learn from existing standards and standards setting processes?”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Bommarito, Katz, and Isaacs: An Empirical Survey of the Population of United States Tax Court Written Decisions

Michael J. Bommarito II and Daniel Martin Katz, both of the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems and Computational Legal Studies, and Jillian Isaacs-See of BDO USA, LLP, have published An Empirical Survey of the Population of United States Tax Court Written Decisions, Virginia Tax Review, 30, 523-557 (2011). Here is the abstract:

What can empirical data tell us about the jurisprudence of United States Tax Court? Which sections of the Internal Revenue Code are most frequently cited and has recent tax legislation sparked change in the Tax Court’s decisions? This article presents an analysis of the citation practices of the United States Tax Court between 1990 and 2008. While previous citation studies focus on case-to-case citations, we modify this approach to focus on statutory citations, which better capture the nature of tax jurisprudence. By applying techniques from computer science, we collect and analyze more than 11,000 decisions and 244,000 statutory citations authored by the United States Tax Court between 1990 and 2008. Our approach includes both a static and longitudinal analysis of the most cited Internal Revenue Code sections. In addition, we carry out a network analysis of these case-to-statute citations to uncover patterns in citation practices, concept relationships, and legislative acts. This article answers the call for greater empiricism in tax scholarship and paves the way for future research on Tax Court jurisprudence.

Leong and Mullins: An Empirical Examination of Gender and Student Note Publication 1999-2009

Professor Nancy Leong of William and Mary Law School and Jennifer Mullins of American University Washington College of Law have posted An Empirical Examination of Gender and Student Note Publication 1999-2009, forthcoming in American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law. Here is the abstract:

This Article presents original empirical research documenting a significant gender disparity in student note publication. Examination of the notes published during a ten-year time span in the general-interest law reviews at fifty-two schools — a total of nearly six thousand notes —r eveals that women authored approximately forty percent of student notes, while men published almost sixty percent. At thirteen schools, women authored fewer than thirty-five percent of published student notes. The Article proposes a range of explanations for the disparity, recognizing that the explanation may differ from one school to the next and from one year to the next at the same school. Moreover, the Article argues that the disparity matters: it has negative consequences for women’s careers years after graduation from law school. Consequently, the Article concludes by offering some preliminary ideas about what law students, law reviews, and faculty members might do to remedy the gender disparity, and by encouraging stakeholders in the note publication process to continue the conversation within their institutions.

Hage on a Model of Legal Acts as a Basis for Computational Systems

Professor Dr. Jaap Hage of Maastricht University, Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid has posted A Model of Legal Acts: Part 1: The World of Law and A Model of Legal Acts: Part 2: The Operation of Legal Acts on SSRN. Here are the abstracts:

Part 1:

This paper aims at providing an account of legal acts that forms a suitable starting point for the creation of computational systems that deal with legal acts. The paper is divided into two parts. Because legal acts will be analyzed as intentional changes in the world of law, the ‘furniture’ of this world, that consists broadly speaking of entities, facts and rules, plays a central role in the analysis. This first part of the paper deals with this furniture and its philosophical underpinnings, and at the same time introduces most of the logical apparatus that will be used to deal with it. The focus in the first part is on static and dynamic legal rules and their interplay in constituting the world of law.

Part 2:

[...] This second part of the paper deals in some detail with the operation of legal acts. Topics dealt with include: power and competence, capacity, form requirements; partial validity, avoidance and representation.

HT Legal Theory Blog.

Updated: Legal Informatics Conference Calendar

The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.

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, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.