Poulshock on Legal Knowledge Systems and the Hammurabi Project

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

Michael Poulshock, Esq., of Stanford University’s CodeX Center for Computers and Law has posted his remarks given at the “Legal Automation” panel at NELIC 2011: The New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference, held 15 April 2011 at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall, in Berkeley, California, USA.

The post describes Mr. Poulshock’s views on legal knowledge systems. Mr. Poulshock then explains those views in the context of his Hammurabi Project, “an open source project whose goal is to convert portions of U.S. law into source code, and to make it freely available for anyone to use.”

Mr. Poulshock explains The Hammurabi Project as follows:

The idea is that you should be able to take a provision of the U.S. Code, for example, and then go and find the source code version of it. So you’d have legal source material on one hand, and then you’d have this parallel corpus of the law on the other, in the C# programming language.

Click here to read the entire post.

Click here to read Mr. Poulshock’s earlier post on “Rule-based Legal Information Systems” at VoxPopuLII.

McCarty on Natural Language Processing and Judicial Decisions

Professor Dr. L. Thorne McCarty of the Rutgers University Department of Computer Science has posted lecture videos and other materials in connection with his recent graduate course on Natural Language Processing. The course uses examples from a judicial decision: Carter v. Exxon Company USA, 177 F.3d 197 (3d Cir. 1999).

For more information, please see Professor McCarty’s discussion of these course materials in the IAAIL LinkedIn Group.

Palfrey on The Path of Legal Information

Vice Dean John G. Palfrey of the Harvard Law School recently gave a lecture entitled The Path of Legal Information, on 9 November 2010, at the Harvard Law School.

In his lecture, Dean Palfrey proposes the development of an open, interoperable system of digital legal information, and describes possible consequences of such a system for legal scholars, law students, citizens, and government.

The system proposed seems consistent with the objectives of the free access to law movement and the Law.gov legal open government data movement.

Click here for video of the lecture.

Click here for Dean Palfrey’s abstract of the lecture.

Wyner on Textual Information Extraction and Ontologies for Legal Case-Based Reasoning

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship has posted slides from his recent presentation entitled Textual Information Extraction and Ontologies for Legal Case-Based Reasoning, given 10 November 2010 at the ISKO UK panel Legal Know-How: Organization and Semantic Analysis, held at University College London. Here is the abstract:

This talk gives a brief overview of current developments and prospects in two related areas of the legal semantic web for legal cases – textual information extraction and ontologies. Textual information extraction is a process of automatically annotating and extracting textual information from the legal case base (precedents), thereby identifying elements such as participants, the roles the participants play, the factors which were considered in arriving at a decision, and so on. The information is valuable not only for search (to find applicable precedents), but also to populate an ontology for legal case-based reasoning. An ontology is a formal representation of key aspects of the knowledge of legal professionals with which we can reason (e.g. given an assertion that something is a legal case, we can infer other properties) and with respect to which we can write rules (e.g. reasoning using case factors to arrive at a legal decision). Since it is expensive to manually populate an ontology (meaning to read cases and input the data into the ontology), we use textual information extraction to automatically populate the ontology. We conclude with an appeal for open source, collaborative development of legal knowledge systems among partners in academia, industry, and government.

More information is available on Dr. Wyner’s blog, Language, Logic, Law, Software.

Click here for abstracts and some slides of the other panel presentations.

Mayer on The Future of the Legal Casebook & CALI’s eLangdell Project

John P. Mayer, Executive Director of CALI: The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction gave a presentation entitled The Future of the Legal Casebook & CALI’s eLangdell Project at the Chicago Law.gov Workshop, held 21 May 2010 in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

In his presentation, Mr. Mayer describes how CALI and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University are applying the open educational resources approach to law school instructional materials, through the eLangdell Project and the Legal Education Commons. The presentation also provides an overview of the current state of law school instructional resources technology — including the use of ebooks in law schools — and the future development of that technology.

Click here for more information about the Law.gov legal open government data project.

Pagallo on Law, Information and Complexity: A Topological Approach

Professor Dr. Ugo Pagallo of Università degli Studi di Torino Facoltà di Giurisprudenza delivered a paper entitled Law, Information and Complexity: A Topological Approach, on 25 May 2010, at the Stockholm University Faculty of Law. Here is the abstract:

The subject deals, first of all, with Hayek’s classical distinction between cosmos and taxis, i.e., evolution vs. constructivism, spontaneous orders vs. human (political) planning. Recent empirical evidence confirms that the informational complexity of the law is not reducible to taxis alone and, furthermore, orders spontaneously emerge from the complexity of the environment through specific laws of evolution. Whereas, most of the time, today’s research on, say, AI & Law, legal theory, etc., focuses on the taxis-side of the law, my aim is to illustrate the informational nature of complex social systems via a theory of spontaneous orders and an evolutionary theory of complex social networks. By distinguishing three levels of analysis, namely information as reality, for reality, and on reality, a topological approach shows how information is produced and distributed in current legal systems, how it is possible to harness these properties and obtain useful applications in the legal domain, while shedding further light on some aspects of current legal research, e.g., AI work on legal ontologies.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the author.

HT @iinek.

Palmirani on Legal Resources Modelling in the Semantic Web for Implementing eGov

Professor Monica Palmirani of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche «Antonio Cicu» and Centro Interdipartimentale de Ricerca in Storia del Diritto e Informatica Giuridica (CIRSFID) presented a lecture entitled Legal Resources Modelling in the Semantic Web for Implementing eGov on 11 November 2009 at CodeX: The Stanford University Center for Computers and Law, in Palo Alto, California, USA.

Click here for audio of the presentation.

Click here for the presentation slides.

In this presentation, Professor Palmirani provides an accessible overview of XML as applied to legal documents. Professor Palmirani explains how legal XML can facilitate the representation of legal concepts and legal rules in the metadata associated with legal documents. Professor Palmirani also shows how legal XML can:

• improve legal document management by enabling the encoding — in the metadata associated with a legal document — of all legislative actions and alterations to a document throughout its lifecycle;
• enhance public access to legal information by allowing the presentation of legal documents in multiple formats and media;
• facilitate eParticipation by enabling the identification of citizens’ contributions to legal documents in the metadata associated with those documents; and
• ease the updating of certain governmental information systems — particularly in areas of public administration in which the law frequently changes, such as taxation, securities, and environment — by facilitating dynamic updating of rules-based applications as new laws are enacted or existing laws are amended.

For those new to these topics, Professor Palmirani’s presentation offers an excellent introduction to legal XML, the legal Semantic Web, and the role of rule markup languages in connection with legal documents.

Computational Legal Studies’ Law.gov Workshop Slides

Michael J. Bommarito II and Daniel Martin Katz, both of the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems and the Computational Legal Studies blog, have posted the slides from their presentations at workshops related to the Law.gov legal open government data project.

In the presentation, the authors explain that the current body of U.S. legal information constitutes a very large data set, which contains information valuable to researchers in a number of disciplines, including law, other social sciences, and computer science. The authors argue that, to be of maximum value to scholarly researchers, such data sets should be complete, authenticated, and made available in formats suitable for data processing, attributes that are objectives of the Law.gov project. The authors demonstrate — with examples from their own research on the U.S. Code, the U.S. federal judiciary, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions — the ways in which researchers can use sophisticated computing techniques to analyze large, high quality legal data sets, and produce new knowledge.

The demonstration includes the authors’ remarkable dynamic visualization, The Development of Structure in the Citation Network of the United States Supreme Court.

Click here for information about Law.gov.

Postponed: Teleconference: Schiappa on Defining Marriage in California: An Analysis of Public & Technical Argument

UPDATE: This event has been postponed. The new date has not yet been announced. Check here for news.

Professor Edward Schiappa of the University of Minnesota Department of Communication Studies will give a teleconference entitled Defining Marriage in California: An Analysis of Public & Technical Argument (scroll down for details), date TBA April 2010, as part of the National Communication Association (NCA)’s CARD Calls Series: Communication About Research and Professional Development.

Professor Schiappa’s presentation will report findings from a study of the legal and political rhetoric respecting same-sex marriage in California, and particularly concerning California’s Proposition 8 (i.e., California Constitution article 1, section 7.5 (scroll down)). This presentation follows up on the panel on this topic at the NCA 2009 Annual Convention (scroll down).

To register, or for more information, please see the NCA teleconference Website.

Hans on Japan’s New Lay Judge System: Deliberative Democracy in Action?

[NOTE, added 1 March 2010: Click here for Mark Nathan's post summarizing the lecture.]

Professor Valerie P. Hans of the Cornell University Law School, will give a lecture entitled Japan’s New Lay Judge System: Deliberative Democracy in Action?, on 24 February 2010 at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University of Buffalo Law School.