David Moore and Carl Tashian of the Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF) discuss the technology, principles, development, and users of OpenGovernment.org — their new free, open, citizen engagement and transparency service for U.S. state legislation — in my new post at Slaw.ca, entitled “Sites of Real Engagement”: OpenGovernment.org Opens Up State Legislation.
OpenGovernment.org is a joint project of PPF and the Sunlight Foundation.
OpenCongress — the free, open source, U.S. federal legislative current awareness and eparticipation service, sponsored by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation — has launched two new tools for enabling citizen engagement and political communication:
For more information, please see the announcement on the OpenCongress Blog.
HT @ppolitics.
[Image courtesy of OpenCongress. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.]
Senior Associate Dean Richard A. Danner of the Duke University School of Law, and Vice Dean John G. Palfrey of the Harvard Law School, presented papers at a program on Open Access to Legal Information, at CAFLL 2011: The Chinese and American Forum on Legal Information and Law Libraries, on 22 July 2011, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
For full text of the papers, please contact the authors.
Eran Kahana, Esq., of CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and DataCard Corporation has posted The Case for Robot Personal Liability: Part II – Iterative Liability, at The CodeX Blog.
The post discusses legal liability “of cyber and cybernetic entities building more sophisticated AI iterations of themselves,” and “the concept of ‘iterative liability,’” meaning the “liability standards that propagate into and within each new entity version.”
Professor Dr. Cláudio de Lucena Neto of Universidade Estadual da Paraíba Departamento de Direito Privado presented a paper entitled The [Effects] of Lawsuit Automation in a Labour Court and in a Common Justice Court in the State of Paraíba, Brazil: A Comparative Case Study, at LexInformatica 2011 / CLIT 2011: The 4th Regional Conference on Law and Electronic Communications / The 5th Regional Conference on Cybercrime, Law and Information Technology, held 29-30 June 2011, in Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa. Here is the abstract:
Technological development has introduced deep changes in the legal field. In Brazil, the introduction of new technologies in legal activities that made it possible for a lawsuit to be fully conducted by electronic means in the various courts and judicial instances, is a remarkable process, that keeps being constantly improved.
Information systems and lawsuit processing software applications were regulated in Brazil with the introduction of Federal Law number 11.419/2006, which enables the organisms of the Judiciary Power to fully or partially automate its lawsuits, making the practice of procedural acts, as the sending of an electronic petition and other procedural communications, possible through Internet. Moreover, the referred legal text faces criticism from authors in Brazil, under the argument that it already went into effect with flaws, and that it is not able, in the present, to reflect the recent changes and updates in the field of new technologies.
Although not yet implemented in all judicial organisms, instances and districts, lawsuit processing software applications are already adopted in various spheres of justice administration. An experience that occurs in Labor Courts, one of the pioneer instances to implement automation lawsuit tools in all its districts and in the creation of a fully electronic pilot project district should be highlighted in the Brazilian national scenario, in comparison to a Common Justice District, which is based on traditional, paper processing practices.
The use of information systems and lawsuit processing software applications, besides being an important tool in the numerous attempts to enhance the speed of the legal system’s response to the citizen, also reflects in the internal organization of the judiciary system, and in the practices of lawyers and the citizens themselves, as it happens with the information search and petition system which can be operated through the World Wide Web. On the other hand, it brings along flaws and difficulties, as privacy issues and technical support problems which have not been easily solved, troubles that represent obstacles which need to be faced and surpassed, on the way to the offer of an adequate judicial service.
For the full text of the paper, please contact the author. Thanks to Dr. de Lucena Neto for granting permission to post the abstract.
A related paper, Cláudio de Lucena Neto and Coronel Salvino de Figueiredo, The Potential of e-Justice in Brazil, was presented at The 3rd International Seminar on Information Law, 25-26 June 2010, in Corfu, Greece.
Ed Walters, Esq., of FastCase, has posted Tear Down This (Pay)Wall: The End of Private Copyright in Public Statutes, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.
In this post, Mr. Walters describes the extent to which U.S. state governments and for-profit legal publishers assert copyright in U.S. state statutes, and the problems this poses for due process of law, as well as for competition and innovation in the legal publishing industry. Mr. Walters explains the U.S. legal authorities prohibiting copyright in state statutes. Mr. Walters then proposes an innovative strategy
with which state governments can preclude assertions of copyright in state laws.
In the course of his argument, Mr. Walters notes the recent approval of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act, which has the potential to make important contributions toward freeing state statutes from copyright restrictions.
This post will be of interest to advocates of open government data, as well as to government technologists, legal publishers, developers of legal information systems, and all who seek greater competition and innovation in the U.S. legal publishing market.
