New on VoxPopuLII: Pearse on an Ontology for Legal Scholarship

Michelle Pearse of the Harvard Law School Library has posted Is it Time for Law Libraries to Collaborate on Description for Their Own Institutions’ Legal Scholarship?, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Ms. Pearse argues that law librarians should cooperate to create an ontology of legal concepts, to be used by law reviews to describe the articles they publish. Ms. Pearse endorses a model of ontology development described by Dr. Núria Casellas and Dr. Adam Wyner. Accordingly, Ms. Pearse proposes that the ontology would be developed collaboratively by legal subject specialists, including law professors, other legal scholars, and law librarians.

According to Ms. Pearse, the proposed ontology would be made available in open, interoperable formats. This would allow the ontology to link to other ontologies — thereby contributing to the development of the legal Semantic Web — and would facilitate use of the ontology by a range of software and users, and in connection with a variety of systems and data. By providing high quality metadata in open, interoperable formats, the ontology would further the objectives of the open access law journal and open legal educational resources movements.

Ms. Pearse argues that application of such an ontology to law review articles would provide an additional way for law librarians to participate in the law review publishing process. She sees this as a natural next step for law librarians, given their expertise in legal metadata, and the fact that librarians already participate in other stages of the law journal information lifecycle, including providing support for article preemption, research, and cite checking, and the archiving of law review articles in institutional or scholarly repositories.

In her post, Ms. Pearse also addresses many of the questions likely to be raised concerning such an ontology, including questions respecting project organization, ongoing revision and maintenance, staffing, workflow, and software tools.

This post should be of interest to the legal publishing community, especially editors and publishers of law journals; law librarians; legal scholars; and legal technologists involved with Semantic Web development.

Please Participate in Survey About Legislation.gov.uk

Please consider participating in a user survey respecting Legislation.gov.uk, the official, free online source for UK statutes. The survey is available on the main Legislation.gov.uk site — from the “Survey” tab on right screen — or directly here. The deadline for participating in the survey is 30 September 2011.

According to Legislation.gov.uk‘s creator, John Sheridan of The National Archives (UK), anyone — including those who are not citizens or residents of the UK — may participate in the survey.

Lauritsen, Kimbro, and Granat on Virtual Law Practice: Basic Concepts

Marc Lauritsen, Esq., of Capstone Practice Systems; Stephanie L. Kimbro, Esq., of Kimbro Legal Services and VLOTech; and Richard S. Granat, Esq., of The Granat Group, have posted slides from their presentation: Virtual Law Practice: Basic Concepts, given 27 September 2011.

Click here for video of the presentation. (HT @stephkimbro).

The presentation was sponsored by the American Bar Association’s eLawyering Task Force, of which Mr. Lauritsen and Mr. Granat are co-chairs.

The presentation explains the basic concepts of virtual law practice and elawyering; describes the benefits of virtual law practice; furnishes examples of virtual law firms and their technology; discusses ethical issues arising from virtual law practice; and explores practical aspects of running a virtual law practice.

Many of the ideas introduced in the presentation are explained in more detail in Ms. Kimbro’s recent book, Virtual Law Practice: How to Deliver Legal Services Online.

[Updated 9 October 2011 to correct URL for video.]

Deutscher EDV Gerichtstag 2011: Sheridan Paper, Materials, and Tweets

Some materials from Deutscher EDV Gerichtstag 2011, held 21-23 September 2011 in Saarbrücken, Germany, are now available.

The program included a paper by John Sheridan of The National Archives (UK) and Legislation.gov.uk, entitled Freie Daten für freie Bürger.

• Click here for the conference program;
• Summaries of some conference programs are available at the LAWgical blog;
• Abstracts of some conference panels are available on the conference Website (some slides and papers should be posted here shortly [HT @edvgt]);
• Tweets from the conference [hashtag #edvgt2011 ] are archived here in .csv format.

For more information, please see the conference Website.

APSA 2011: Legal Information / Communication Papers

Here are the legal information or legal communication papers (as best I can identify them), presented at APSA 2011: The American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, held 1-4 September 2011, at The University of Washington Department of Political Science, in Seattle, Washington, USA (If you know of other APSA 2011 legal information / communication papers, please feel free to identify them in the comments):

• Brent D. Boyea, Jeff Yates, and Damon M. Cann, Judicial Response or Litigant Strategy: Examining the Success of the U.S. Solicitor General;
• Ericka Christensen, James Newman, and Jason McConnell, A Statistical Treatment of Legal Epistemic Communities and the Department of Justice: The Impact upon Judicial Selection and Judicial Decision-Making;
• Audrey Comstock, Law as a Communicative Signal: Legal Signaling, Economic Sanctions, and Human Rights;
• Tyler Curley, Normalizing the Exception: Governmentality, Legal Discourse and Post-9/11 U.S. Security;
• Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton, Lessons from the Decoding of National Constitutions: The Comparative Constitutions Project;
• Peter K. Enns and Patrick C. Wohlfarth, Public Opinion and the Median Justice (or The Swing Justice);
• Sean Farhang, Delegation and Democracy: Courts, Administrators, and Legislative Specificity;
• Charles Finocchiaro and David Darmofal, Spatial Proximity and Roll-Call Voting Behavior in the U.S. Senate;
• Matt Grossmann , The Long Great Society: Macro Politics, Governing Networks, and American Policy History;
• Susan Haire and Rorie Spill Solberg, The Development of Legal Doctrine: Citation Patterns in the Us Courts of Appeals;
• Laura J. Hatcher, The Epistemology of Due Process Meets Science: Why the Coast is Hard to See in Court Cases;
• Michael T. Heaney, Panel: Legislative Networks and Lawmaking,
• Stuart Jordan and Lawrence Rothenberg, Learning from Empirical Studies of Agency Rulemaking (Abstract from Midwest Political Science Association 2011 Annual National Conference)
• Jonathan P. Kastellec and Deborah Beim, Strategic Dissents on the U.S. Courts of Appeals: Theory and Evidence;
• Benjamin E. Lauderdale and Tom S. Clark, The Genealogy of Law: Identifying Substantive Connections Among Supreme Court Cases Using Network Community Detection Methods;
• Meghan E. Leonard, Legitimacy and Decision-Making on State High Courts (an apparently similar paper entitled Institutional Legitimacy and Decision-Making on State High Courts: Examining Judicial Review was presented by the author at State Politics and Policy Conference 2011);
• Akitaka Matsuo and Shunta Matsumoto, Partisan and Personal Incentives in Parliamentary Speeches: A Computer Content Analysis;
• Nancy Maveety, Lori Beth Way, and Charles C. Turner, Roberts’ Rules of Writing: An Evaluation of Separate Opinion Behavior on the Roberts Court;
• Banks Miller, An Empirical Analysis of Recusal Motions in State Supreme Courts;
• Peter Frank Nardulli, Buddy Peyton, and Joseph W. Bajjalieh, Measuring Cross-National and Inter-Temporal Differences in Law-Based Orders: 1946-2010;
• Rolfe Peterson and Lena Surzhko-Harned, To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Comparative Analysis of Twitter Adoption in the United States Congress and the European Parliament;
• Salmon A. Shomade, Judicial Decision-Making: The Influence of Case Salience on Trial Court Sentencing;
• Amy Steigerwalt, Pamela C. Corley, and Artemus Ward, The Need for an Answer: Unanimity and Agenda Setting;
• Robert Thomson, Daniel Naurin, and Marta Smolen, Legislative Decision-Making in the European Union Before and After Enlargement: Explaining Network Ties in an International Legislature;
• Joseph Daniel Ura, Program: The Text and the Context: Agenda Setting, Opinion Writing, and Public Opinion;
• Jack Vowles, The Manipulation of Norms and Emotions? Partisan Cues and Campaign Claims in the UK Electoral System Referendum.

Dung and Sartor on The Modular Logic of Private International Law

Professor Dr. Phan Minh Dung of the Asian Institute of Technology Department of Computer Science, and Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor of Università di Bologna CIRSFID, have published The Modular Logic of Private International Law, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

We provide a logical analysis of private international law, a rather esoteric, but increasingly important, domain of the law. Private international law addresses overlaps and conflicts between legal systems by distributing cases between the authorities of such systems (jurisdiction) and establishing what rules these authorities have to apply to each case (choice of law). A formal model of the resulting interactions between legal systems is proposed based on modular argumentation. It is argued that this model may also be useful for governing the interactions between heterogeneous agents, belonging to different and differently regulated virtual societies, without recourse to a central regulatory agency. The model also provides for multiple interpretations concerning rules of private international law as well as substantive rules of the different legal systems.

Chopra and White on A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents

Professor Samir Chopra of the Brooklyn College Department of Philosophy, and Laurence F. White, Esq., have published A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents (University of Michigan Press, 2011). Here is the publisher’s summary:

As corporations and government agencies replace human employees with online customer service and automated phone systems, we become accustomed to doing business with nonhuman agents. If artificial intelligence (AI) technology advances as today’s leading researchers predict, these agents may soon function with such limited human input that they appear to act independently. When they achieve that level of autonomy, what legal status should they have?

Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White present a carefully reasoned discussion of how existing philosophy and legal theory can accommodate increasingly sophisticated AI technology. Arguing for the legal personhood of an artificial agent, the authors discuss what it means to say it has “knowledge” and the ability to make a decision. They consider key questions such as who must take responsibility for an agent’s actions, whom the agent serves, and whether it could face a conflict of interest.

Call for Papers: MPM 2011: Workshop on Modelling Policy-making

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 24 October 2011 — has been issued for MPM 2011: Workshop on Modelling Policy-making, to be held 12 or 13 December 2011, in Vienna, Austria, in conjunction with JURIX 2011.

For MPM 2011, the program committee co-chairs are Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, and Dr. Neil Benn of the University of Leeds Institute of Communications Studies. Dr. Wyner and Dr. Benn are both members of the team for Project IMPACT: Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis.

For MPM 2011, papers are invited on the following topics:

• information extraction from natural language text
• policy ontologies
• formal logical representations of policies
• transformations from policy language to executable policy rules
• argumentation about policy proposals
• web-based tools that support participatory policy-making
• tools for increasing public understanding of arguments behind policy decisions
• visualising policies and arguments about policies
• computational models of policies and arguments about policies
• integration tools
• multi-agent policy simulations

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Extended Call for Papers: JURISIN 2011

A call for papers — with an extended submission deadline of 28 September 2011 — has been issued for JURISIN 2011: The Fifth International Workshop on Juris-informatics, to be held 1-2 December 2011, in Takamatsu, Kagawa, Japan.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Legal reasoning
• Argumentation/Argumentation agent
• Legal term ontology
• Formal legal knowledge-base/Intelligent management of legal knowledge-base
• Translation of legal documents
• Computer-aided law education
• Use of Informatics and AI in law
• Legal issues on ubiquitous computing/multi-agent system/the Internet
• Social implications of use of informatics and AI in law

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Katz on Legal Informatics, Corporate Law Firm Ownership and 21st Century Legal Education

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University College of Law has posted Legal Informatics, Corporate Law Firm Ownership and 21st Century Legal Education, at Truth on the Market, as part of that blog’s symposium, Unlocking the Law: Deregulating the Legal Profession.

In his post, Prof. Katz summarizes changes in the legal marketplace that are driven by technological innovation and new law firm business models. In light of these changes, Prof. Katz recommends changes to the U.S. law school curriculum intended to better equip law students for the new market for private legal services. Consistent with those recommendations, Prof. Katz describes three new courses he is teaching at Michigan State University College of Law that incorporate quantitative research methods, software programming, and technology management for lawyers.