Court Video Developments

Three notable courtroom video projects have recently been launched.

First, proceedings of the UK Supreme Court are now being televised and Webcast live on SkyNews. Click here for Professor Simon Fodden’s post about this project at Slaw.ca.

Second, a pilot project to offer live video coverage of proceedings in selected U.S. federal district courts has been launched.

Third, proceedings of the Massachusetts Commonwealth District Court in Quincy are being Webcast live daily by OpenCourt, a project of WBUR in Boston. This project is funded by the Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge. OpenCourt posts updates on Twitter at @OpenCourtus.

If you know of other recent developments in offering video/Internet access to court proceedings, please feel free to tell us about them in the comments.

Lee on Redaction Failures in PACER

Timothy B. Lee of the Princeton University Department of Computer Science and Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) has posted Studying the Frequency of Redaction Failures in PACER, on the CITP’s blog, Freedom to Tinker.

In this post, Mr. Lee reports on research respecting documents from the U.S. federal courts’ PACER database. Using customized software, he found that, respecting some of these documents, redactions have been attempted, but have failed. The information not redacted included:

trade secrets such as sales figures and confidential product information. Other improperly redacted documents contain sensitive medical information, addresses, and dates of birth. Still others contain the names of witnesses, jurors, plaintiffs, and one minor.

Mr. Lee then offers recommendations to the U.S. federal judiciary respecting how to avoid this problem. He links to a letter, stating many of these recommendations, that he recently sent to a committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States.

Mr. Lee has also has posted the software code that he used to identify the unsuccessfully redacted documents.

Mr. Lee says that this research was funded by Public.Resource.Org.

For more information on CITP’s PACER-related research, please see Stephen Schultze’s recent VoxPopuLII post, PACER, RECAP, and the Movement to Free American Case Law.

New on VoxPopuLII: Mayer on The Free Law Reporter

John Mayer of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), has posted The Free Law Reporter – Open Access to the Law and Beyond, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Mayer describes The Free Law Reporter, CALI’s new free and open database of decisions from U.S. federal and state courts, built using data from Public.Resource.Org‘s RECOP database. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement.

Mr. Mayer underscores the ebook functionality of Free Law Reporter: the system allows users to automatically transform their Free Law Reporter search results into ebooks in the open EPUB format. These ebooks can be used as casebooks for law school courses, as well as in other applications.

The Free Law Reporter‘s ebook functionality complements CALI’s other legal open educational resource services, the eLangdell free and open digital casebook/textbook service, and the Legal Education Commons, where law professors share their instructional resources online.

Mr. Mayer’s post also discusses the principles underlying The Free Law Reporter. The first of these is the idea that law professors and law librarians should have the freedom to customize databases and course materials to meet the particular needs of their students and the particular objectives of their courses; as Mr. Mayer writes, “Academic law libraries should have free and open access to the law, access that allows them to define and construct the educational environment for law students.”

In addition, Mr. Mayer characterizes The Free Law Reporter as a generative resource, that can foster innovation, creativity, and collaborative effort among law professors, law librarians, and other members of the legal educational community.

Mr. Mayer’s post should be of interest to law professors, law librarians, legal information systems developers, continuing legal education providers, ebook technologists, and the open educational resources community.

May 27 Application Deadline: Residential Fellowship, CodeX: Stanford Center for Legal Informatics

Applications — with submission deadline of 27 May 2011 — are invited for a residential fellowship for the 2011-2012 academic year, at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

According to the fellowship announcement:

Codex research fellows will have the opportunity to spend one to two years at Stanford Law School collaborating with scholars in computer science and other relevant disciplines. Fellows will work on the center’s existing projects, and will have the opportunity to explore related research on their own and commence new projects. Fellows will work with cutting edge technologies emerging from Stanford’s engineering departments, and will be expected to bring a legally oriented perspective toward integrating these technologies into the law. Sample projects include automating the process of intellectual property licensing and developing automated legal compliance systems. [...] Applicants should have a J.D. or equivalent law degree. Because the primary focus of the center is employing technology within the law, applicants should also have experience in computer science or engineering related fields.

To see the full text of the announcement, or for application instructions, please go to the URL: http://jobs.stanford.edu/find_a_job.html; in the “Keyword Search” field type: 42440

and click “Search”.

HT Dr. Rinke Hoekstra.

New UK Free Case Law Service: Judgmental

Judgmental appears to be a new free case law service for the UK.

Judgmental‘s content appears to include case law from the UK, ECJ, ECHR, and Ireland. The years of coverage seem to vary for each court. The Judgmental Website doesn’t appear to include a detailed description of its content, so one must browse in order to determine the coverage for a particular court.

According to the site’s homepage, Judgmental is being developed by “Francis Irving, James Cranch and Nick Bull, with advice and support from Francis Davey, Judith Townend, Stefan Magdalinski and others.”

The service distinguishes itself from BAILII on the ground that while BAILII seems to let Internet search engines (including Google) index only its metadata and full-text from only selected cases, Judgmental lets Google index the full text of all of its case law; Judgmental therefore enables the use of Google and other Internet search engines for full-text retrieval of much UK case law.

Judgmental cases appear to be available only in HTML format, and only individually; no bulk access seems to be available. For each case, some citation (noter-up) information — i.e., citations and links to citing and cited cases — is provided. Also, Judgmental appears not to provide any on-site search tool, so users must either browse to find the case they seek, or search using Internet search engines.

I’ve asked the developers whether they plan to provide bulk access, but they haven’t responded.

News about Judgmental is being posted on Twitter at @judgmentals.

HT @smithsam.

OpenGovernment.org: Transparency Service for U.S. State Legislative Information

OpenGovernment.org is a new transparency service for U.S. state legislative information. OpenGovernment.org is a joint effort of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.

For (currently) five U.S. states (California, Louisiana, Maryland, Texas, and Wisconsin), OpenGovernment.org lets users:

• identify pending legislation;
• read versions of that legislation;
• share copies of legislation via social media;
• track and receive notice via RSS of changes to the legislation;
• read news stories, blog posts, and other social media communication about legislation;
• learn about legislators connected with legislation;
• get information about legislators’ votes on legislation; and
• obtain campaign finance information by industry.

OpenGovernment.org is written in Ruby on Rails, and uses data from Sunlight’s Open States Project (which offers a free, open RESTful API for legislative data and bulk downloads of that data), processed with the open source GovKit software.

OpenGovernment.org invites participation by developers. Click here for OpenGovernment‘s page for Developers, which explains the system’s architecture and offers links to code and other technical resources.

Since the Open States Project now has data for 25 U.S. states, OpenGovernment.org plans to offer data for more states in the future.

OpenGovernment.org is a notable example of the use of legal open government data — of the kind that the Law.gov project wishes to make more widely available — for purposes of increasing government transparency and public participation in government.

OpenGovernment.org was inspired by OpenCongress, which offers similar services in connection with information from the U.S. Congress.

For more information about OpenGovernment.org, visit their Website.

McMillan on Trust and Court E-Filing Systems

James E. McMillan of the National Center for State Courts has published two new posts about judicial e-filing systems:

• Trust and E-Filing, Court Technology Bulletin, 7 May 2011;
• E-Filing / E-Reader Notes, Court Technology Bulletin, 14 May 2011.

Mr. McMillan’s post, E-Filing / E-Reader Notes, cites a recent article on e-briefs in Texas state appellate courts, by Don Cruse, Esq.

EU Council Invites EU Members to Use European Case Law Identifier and Standard Metadata for Court and Tribunal Decisions

The Council of the European Union (EU), on 29 April 2011, issued conclusions inviting EU member states to begin using “the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) and a minimum set of uniform metadata for case law.”

In particular, the Council invites member states to apply ECLI to “all decisions rendered by all of their courts and tribunals,” and to apply the metadata set to “all decisions of courts and tribunals which are published on public websites.”

Detailed descriptions of the ECLI and the metadata set appear in the Annex to the document.

The document states that this measure is consistent with the Council’s earlier decision not to create a single database of all EU member states’ case law, but rather to develop a distributed system, enabled by interoperable metadata, for access to that case law.

For more information, please see the document.

HT Ronald van den Hoogen.

New on VoxPopuLII: Poast, Katz, and Bommarito on the Electronic World Treaty Index

The Electronic World Treaty Index is a new post by Paul Poast of the University of Michigan Department of Political Science, Daniel Martin Katz of the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems and Computational Legal Studies, and Michael J. Bommarito II of Systematic Global Macro and Computational Legal Studies, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, the authors describe the content and functionality of The World Treaty Index (WTI), a new, updated, digital version of Peter Rohn’s pioneering reference source.

The new digital World Treaty Index includes metadata for nearly 75,000 treaties that entered into force in the twentieth century. Users may search by numerous access points, including citation; title keyword; party name (including countries and organizations); “Correlates of War” country code; subject; whether the treaty is unilateral, bilateral, or multilateral; and signature date.

Visualizations and data export are among the notable functionality in the new digital WTI. Display results include a visualization “of the distribution of the requested treaties over the requested time period,” a function that highlights the data visualization expertise of the founders of Computational Legal Studies. In addition, users may export search results for bilateral treaties, and may download metadata for multilateral treaties in bulk, in both instances in .csv format, for use in standard statistical packages. These features render WTI both a legal reference source and a valuable data set for research in political science and law.

In the coming months, the authors plan to extend WTI’s coverage through 2011, add metadata about “treaty terminations and renegotiations,” enhance the multilateral treaties interface, and add links to full text of treaties.

This post should be of interest to researchers in international law and political science, legal information professionals, developers of legal information systems, and those who study legal metadata.

Accessing PACER Cases Free of Charge

A procedure for accessing full text judicial decisions free of charge on PACER — the U.S. federal courts’ database of court decisions and litigation materials — has been posted by Mark Rosch. The procedure has been recently discussed by Nick Moline of Justia.

Oddly, this procedure does not seem to be mentioned in the FAQ on the PACER Website.

This functionality appears to have been introduced in 2005, according to a 2005 announcement from the PACER Service Center. (HT @sglassmeyer.) However, this information does not appear to be readily accessible on the PACER Website. In fact, to date, the PACER FAQ does not appear to make any mention of the availability of PACER cases free of charge.

Posting this procedure in the PACER FAQ — where, one would think, most PACER users are likely to look for information about the costs of using PACER — would seem to be in the public interest, because such posting is very likely to reduce PACER users’ costs of retrieving judicial decisions from PACER, and to encourage more citizens to use PACER as a source of judicial decisions.

On a related note, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts announced yesterday that twelve U.S. federal courts will participate in a pilot project to enhance public access to the judicial decisions on PACER that are available free of charge. The decisions are to be made available through the Government Printing Office (GPO)’s FDsys system. This pilot project is a joint effort between the Judicial Conference of the United States and GPO.

For more on PACER, please see Stephen Schultze’s VoxPopuLII post, PACER, RECAP, and the Movement to Free American Case Law.

HT @evwayne.