Mill on Scout, Free Access to Law, and Open Legal Data

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation has posted the text of his presentation on tracking government information and open legal data, given 26 April 2013 at the AzALL Congressional Information Symposium, in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

Here is the introduction to the presentation:

I recently got a chance to go speak to a group of Arizona law librarians about legal informatics [...]

They found me because of Scout, and asked me to talk about tracking government information. I decided to start with Scout as an example, to zoom out to similar projects [GovTrack and CourtListener] , and then to describe the conditions necessary to make projects like ours possible. Because the audience was law librarians, a sympathetic crowd inside an unsympathetic area of government, I emphasized the necessity of absolutely free access to data as a fundamental requirement and right. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @konklone

Legal informatics presentations at e-Government Konferenz 2013

Several legal informatics presentations are listed in the program for e-Government Konferenz 2013, to be held 11-12 June 2013, in Linz, Austria:

• Mag Michael Fuchs & Mag Markus Poplari: Aktuelles zum Zentralen Personenstandsregister
• Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Michael Glatz: Justiz 3.0
• Dipl.-Ing. Christian Habernig: ePartizipation in Wien
• ADir. Thomas Halwachs & Mag Gerhard Köhle: Durchgängiges e-Government zwischen Verwaltung, Wirtschaft und Bürger/innen am Beispiel des Zentralen Waffenregister (ZWR)
• Gerhard Hartmann: „Wien stellt ‚e‘ zu“ – Die elektronische Zustellung von behördlichen Dokumenten
• Dipl.-Ing. Herbert Hüttenbrenner: Plattformübergreifende Registereinbindung
• Dipl.-Ing. Robert Ortner & Martin Mitter: eFWP elektronischer Flächenwidmungsplan, Abwicklung von Umwidmungsverfahren
• Dr Arne Tauber: Elektronische Signatur – Quo Vadis: ein Rückblick und ein Ausblick
• Prof. Dr. Arthur Winter: Österreichische Registerlandschaft

LawWithoutWalls Conposium 2013: Tweets and Resources

The LawWithoutWalls Conposium 2013 was held 13-14 April 2013 at the University of Miami School of Law in Miami, Florida, USA.

Here is a description of LawWithoutWalls:

LawWithoutWalls is a part-virtual, educational collaboratory created by Michele DeStefano and Michael Bossone at the University of Miami School of Law. It brings together a transdisciplinary group of people and institutions from around the world to engage on the burning issues facing the legal profession, collaboratively solve legal problems, and develop the skillsets needed to thrive in the new, global legal marketplace.

The 2013 Conposium presentations — during which “teams present their Projects of Worth (and prototypes) to a panel of judges” — included a number on new legal information or communication systems.

Click here for the event schedule.

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #lwow2013

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the event, in .csv format.

Tweets from LexThink.1 2013

Twitter tweets from LexThink.1 2013 lightning talks about innovation in legal technology and law practice, held 3 April 2013 in Chicago, Illinois, are now archived in .csv format.

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #lexthink

Click here for the event’s program.

Click here for the event’s Website.

Good Law Initiative: UK Government Effort to Make Legislation More Effective and Accessible

The UK Office of the Parliamentary Counsel is launching “the ‘Good Law’ initiative, with the aim of improving the user’s experience of legislation,” at an event to be held 16 April 2013, at the Institute for Government, London, England.

The Twitter hashtag for the initiative is #goodlaw

Here are excerpts of the announcement:

Legislation is difficult. The volume of statute law and regulations, together with their piecemeal structure, level of detail, and frequent amendments, mean that citizens find law complex, hard to understand, and difficult to comply with. That can generate barriers to economic activity, as well as burdens for individuals, businesses, and communities. It obstructs good government, and it undermines the rule of law.

Efforts have been made to address aspects of the problem. Parliamentary Counsel has adopted a simple, plain English style. The National Archives have improved access to up-to-date legislation through legislation.gov.uk. The Law Commission has a programme of special Bills for law reform, consolidation and repeals. But the problem remains.

At this event, the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel launches the ‘good law’ initiative with the aim of improving the user’s experience of legislation. Join us to discuss what ‘good law’ means in practice. What do users expect from legislation? How can we make it more accessible? When is complexity in legislation desirable? And when is unavoidable?

I believe that at the launch event, John Sheridan of The National Archives will give a presentation about the role of legislation.gov.uk in the Good Law initiative.

For more information about the launch event or to register for the event, please see the event announcement.

Click here for more information about the principles underlying the Good Law project.

HT @johnlsheridan

ReInventLaw Channel: Videos of Talks at ReInventLaw Events

The ReInventLaw Channel is now available, providing access to videos of presentations given at ReInventLaw conferences.

The presentations cover topics including innovation in legal technology and legal services delivery.

The channel currently includes videos of presentations given at ReInventLaw Silicon Valley 2013 and LawTechCamp London 2012.

The channel is produced by the ReInventLaw Lab at Michigan State University College of Law.

HT @computational

Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier on Big Data and Law

Professor Dr. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the Oxford Internet Institute and Kenneth Neil Cukier of The Economist gave a presentation entitled Big Data — and Its Dark Side, 6 March 2013, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

The presentation concerned their new book entitled Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Houghton Mifflin, 2013).

The presentation includes some examples concerning legal data, including an analysis of topics discussed in proceedings of the British House of Commons, a study of the association between the ideology and citation practices of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, and predictive policing.

Surden on Computable Contracts

Professor Harry Surden of the University of Colorado Law School has published Computable Contracts, UC Davis Law Review, Vol. 46, pp. 629-700 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

It is possible to formulate contractual obligations so that computers can “understand” and make prima-facie compliance assessments with specified terms and conditions. Such a contractual obligation, formulated specifically for computer processability, is what this Article terms a “computable contract.” Computable contracts are not merely theoretical, but instead are increasingly being used in economically significant domains. Certain widely used financial contracts exemplify this model. The emergence of computable contracts has largely been unrecognized in the legal literature. However, computable contracting is not extensible across all, or even most, contracting scenarios. Rather, it is limited to a small subset of contracting scenarios involving standardization, and relative legal and factual certainty.

Drawing upon computer science research, this Article provides a theoretical account of computable contracting. It first explains how firms can communicate contracting information to computers by representing contracts as data instead of (or in addition to) the traditional written language form. Formalizing contractual obligations in this way is what is termed “data-oriented” contracting. The representation of contractual obligations as data, in turn, allows for novel contracting properties. For example, parties can effectively “translate” certain contractual criteria into a comparable set of computer-processable rules. To make contracts “computable”, parties provide computer systems with external data that is relevant to performance. This model is supported by contemporary examples of computable contracts in domains ranging from finance to intellectual property. This Article also provides principles for distinguishing contracting scenarios that are amenable to computability from those that are not.

Click here for video (in QuickTime format, .mov) of Professor Surden’s presentation of this article at Stanford Law School, October 2011.

Click here for the abstract of Professor Surden’s presentation of this article at Stanford Law School, October 2011.

Morley on Sheridan, Open Legislative Data, and Legislation.gov.uk

Video of Oliver Morley’s presentation last month at the Sprint 13 conference, concerning open data at The National Archives, including Legislation.gov.uk, is available.

This clip starts at the discussion of Legislation.gov.uk, the UK open legislation platform. The discussion covers John Sheridan‘s innovative work developing Legislation.gov.uk according to principles of open Linked Data, the new project to update the UK statute book by means of expert participation, a new platform that will allow UK Government personnel to edit legislation, and new tools that produce visualizations of the quantities of UK and EU statutes and regulations.

Click here for John Sheridan’s VoxPopuLII post about the technology of Legislation.gov.uk.

Click here for slides of John Sheridan’s recent presentation on Legislation as Data.

HT @johnlsheridan

Videos of Legal Information-related Presentations at Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference

Click here for videos of legal information-related presentations at the Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference, an event of the Advisory Committee on Transparency, held 28 January 2013 at the U.S. Congress’s Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC.