Chung, Mowbray, and Greenleaf on Searching Legal Information in Multiple Asian Languages

Philip Chung of the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, Professor Andrew Mowbray of University of Technology Sydney Faculty of Law, and Professor Dr. Graham Greenleaf of the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, have published Searching Legal Information in Multiple Asian Languages, forthcoming in Legal Information Management.

Here is the abstract:

In this article the Co-Directors of the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) explain the need for an open source search engine which can search simultaneously over legal materials in European languages and also in Asian languages, particularly those that require a ‘double byte’ representation, and the difficulties this task presents. A solution is proposed, the ‘u16a’ modifications to AustLII’s open source search engine (Sino) which is used by many legal information institutes. Two implementations of the Sino u16A approach, on the Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII), for English and Chinese, and on the Asian Legal Information Institute (AsianLII), for multiple Asian languages, are described. The implementations have been successful, though many challenges (discussed briefly) remain before this approach will provide a full multi-lingual search facility.

Call on Congress: New Service Provides U.S. Federal Legislative Data by Phone

Call on Congress, a new, free service that provides access to U.S. federal legislative data by telephone, has been launched by the Sunlight Foundation, according to the post by Nicko Margolies entitled Announcing Call on Congress: Bringing Capitol Hill to Any Phone, on the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

According to the post, Call on Congress provides the following information:

• Members of Congress can be identified “by ZIP code”.
• For each Member of Congress, the service provides “a short biography, [names of] top campaign donors, recent votes,” “contact information for [his or her] local election office,” and “the ability to transfer your call directly to [his or her] office”
• Legislation can be identified “by bill number”
• For each bill, the service provides a summary “and news about any recent or upcoming actions.”

Information is provided in English, Spanish, or Esperanto.

According to Jeremy Carbaugh‘s post, The Tech Behind Call on Congress, the law-related data provided by Call on Congress comes from the following sources:

• Member lookup by ZIP code and contact information is powered by our Congress API.
• Bill information comes from the Real Time Congress API.
• Campaign contributions and member biographies are provided by the Influence Explorer API.
• Our friends at TurboVote are responsible for the API that allows us to provide information about local election offices.

In addition, the Call on Congress software is “open source and available on GitHub.”

For more information, please see Announcing Call on Congress: Bringing Capitol Hill to Any Phone and The Tech Behind Call on Congress.

Hannaford-Agor et al.: Jurors and Jury Use of New Media: A Baseline Exploration

Paula Hannaford-Agor, JD, MPP, Dr. David Rottman, and Dr. Nicole Waters, all of the National Center for State Courts, presented a paper entitled Jurors and Jury Use of New Media: A Baseline Exploration, at ICLS 2012: International Conference on Law and Society, held 5-8 June 2012 in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

Here is the abstract:

The incidence of juror use of advanced communications technologies to conduct independent research on trial-related issues and to communicate with others about the trial while it is underway is a source of increasing concern about the fairness of jury verdicts. In the past two years, at least 90 court opinions have been published addressing allegations of juror misconduct, of which 28 of the verdicts were ultimately overturned. In this paper, the Center for Jury Studies at the National Center for State Courts describes the results of a pilot test of survey instruments and study protocols conducted in 2011 to document the frequency of juror and jury use of new media and its impact on trial deliberations and verdicts. The pilot study sample consisted of completed study packages from 9 civil trials and 6 criminal trials. Six trial judges form 5 states (California, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, and Texas) participated in the pilot study. Case types included in the pilot study included manslaughter, robbery/theft, drug offenses, sexual assault, and firearm offenses (criminal trials), and automobile tort and dram shop claims (civil trials). Overall, the NCSC obtained very high response rates and good compliance with the study protocols. The surveys of judges and lawyers focused on case and trial characteristics, and opinions about the severity of problems related to juror use of new media. The pilot test also recorded baseline information from more than 500 prospective jurors in those jurisdictions about jurors’ access to contemporary communication technologies, their awareness of restrictions on use of those technologies, and interest in using those technologies during trial and deliberations. Among the key findings from the pilot study were the following:

• Judges and attorneys view juror Internet use as a moderately severe problem.
• Jurors and prospective jurors view themselves as technologically knowledgeable and the overwhelming majority had daily, if not immediate, access to the Internet through a variety of communication devices. This level of access and usage is comparable to national surveys of adult Internet use.
• Most jurors correctly understood judicial admonitions concerning Internet use by jurors, but sizeable minorities either misunderstood or were unsure about those admonitions.
• Sizeable proportions of jurors said that they would have wanted to use the Internet to conduct case-related research or communicate with family and friends. No difference in juror interest levels expressed between civil and criminal trials.
• A small number of jurors and alternates reported that they engaged in “old-fashioned” misconduct (discussions with other jurors, with family/friends), but none of the misconduct involved Internet use. Four jurors in 4 separate trials reported that they relied moderately heavily on information obtained through misconduct.

The paper concludes with suggestions to modify the study methods to address inherent limitations in the methodological approach adopted for the pilot test.

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

Quaresma on Legal Information Extraction ← Machine Learning Algorithms + Linguistic Information

Professor Dr. Paulo Quaresma of Universidade de Évora Departamento de Informática has published Legal Information Extraction ← Machine Learning Algorithms + Linguistic Information, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 37-38.

Here is the abstract:

In order to automatically extract information from legal texts we propose the use of a mixed approach, using linguistic information and machine learning techniques. In the proposed architecture, lexical, syntactical, and semantical information is used as input for specialized machine learning algorithms, such as support vector machines. This approach was applied to collections of legal documents and the preliminary results were quite promising.

Venturi on the Design and Development of TEMIS: A Syntactically and Semantically Annotated Corpus of Italian Legislative Texts

Giulia Venturi of l’Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR di Pisa (ILC-CNR) has published Design and Development of TEMIS: a Syntactically and Semantically Annotated Corpus of Italian Legislative Texts, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 1-12.

Here is the abstract:

Methodological issues concerning the design and the development of TEMIS, a syntactically and semantically annotated corpus of Italian legislative texts, are presented and discussed in the paper. TEMIS is a heterogeneous collection of texts exemplifying different sub–varieties of Italian legal language, i.e. European, national and local texts. The whole corpus has been dependency annotated and a subset has been enriched with frame–based information by customizing the formalism of the FrameNet project. In both cases, a number of domain–specific extensions of the annotation criteria developed for the general language has been foreseen. The interest in building such a corpus stems from the increasing need for annotated collections of domain–specific texts recognized by both the Artificial Intelligence and Law (AI & Law) community and the Natural Language Processing (NLP) one. In two research communities the benefits of having a resource where both domain–specific content and its underlying linguistic structure are made explicit and aligned are widely acknowledged. To the author knowledge, this is the first annotated corpus of legal texts overtly devoted to be used for legal text processing applications based on NLP tools.

Bruce on Legislative Identifier Granularity

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School (LII) has posted Identifiers, Part 2: Identifier Granularity, on LII’s new legislative metadata blog, Making Metasausage.

In this post, Tom explores legislative identifier granularity, or the level of specificity at which such an identifier functions. The post discusses related issues such as the incorporation of semantics in identifiers; the use of “pure” (semantics-free) legislative identifiers; and how government agency authority and procedural rules influence the use, “persistence, and uniqueness” of identifiers. The latter discussion leads Tom to conclude that

a “gold standard” system of identifiers, specified and assigned by a relatively independent body, is needed at the core. That gold standard can then be extended via known, stable relationships with existing identifier systems, and designed for extensible use by others outside the immediate legislative community.

The post continues with a discussion of the relationship of legislative identifier granularity to various functions of identifiers, including “tracing the evolution of a bill or other legislative document,” “recording the status of that document,” version control, “fragmentation” of legislative documents, and “recombination” of such fragments, as through “codification,” which Tom calls an example of “fragmentary re-use.”

For more information, please see the complete post.

Hernandez Redesigns Federal Court Website Using Drupal

Mario Hernandez of Designs Drive, announced today that he had completed redesigning the Website of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, using the Drupal open source content management system.

According to the description of the new design on the court’s Website, the new design

is the result of input obtained through surveys and focus groups aimed at eliciting feedback from the wide variety of users of our website.

For more information, please see the court’s Website or contact Mr. Hernandez.

Click here for more information on Drupal and courts.

Several Presentations Posted from International Meeting: Achieving Greater Transparency in Legislatures thru Open Document Standards

Several presentations from the International Meeting: Achieving Greater Transparency in Legislatures thru Open Document Standards, have been posted at the meeting Website.

Respecting other presentations, click here for Daniel Schuman’s presentation, entitled Access to Parliamentary Information and Open Data Standards.

HT @ncasellas.

Greenleaf et al. on Building the Legal Information Institute of India

Professor Dr. Graham Greenleaf of the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, and colleagues, have published Challenges for Free Access to Law in a Multi-Jurisdictional Developing Country: Building the Legal Information Institute of India, SCRIPTed, 8(3), 292-316 (2011). Here is the abstract:

This article analyses the complexities involved in providing free public online access to the “public legal information” of the Indian legal system. It starts with some of the causes of the complexity of Indian legal information then describes the considerable progress that has previously been made in the provision of free access to some types of legal information, but why the result is still below international standards. The article then explains a project to remedy some of these deficiencies, the Legal Information Institute of India (LII of India), being carried out by eight Indian law schools and an international partner. It has developed in its first year of public operation, the LII of India, a system with over 750,000 searchable documents and 151 databases. The considerable remaining challenges for creation of a world-standard and sustainable system are then outlined, and steps proposed to address them. The extent to which this collaborative project might be a model for development of free access to legal information in other countries is considered.

Spellman and Schauer on Legal Reasoning

Professor Dr. Barbara A. Spellman of the University of Virginia Department of Psychology and Professor Frederick Schauer of the University of Virginia School of Law have posted Legal Reasoning, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The nature of legal reasoning, and its relationship with reasoning, has long been a topic of importance for lawyers and legal scholars. But it is also a topic with psychological implications, especially cognitive ones, and indeed most of the existing views about legal reasoning depend on psychological assumptions about the way in which ordinary people, lawyers, and judges reason and make decisions. This article, a chapter in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Thinking and Reasoning (K. Holyoak & R. Morrison eds.), explores the intersection between cognitive and social psychology, on the one hand, and legal reasoning and thinking and decision making, on the other. It attempts to show how existing psychological research is germane to the important questions about the nature legal reasoning – particularly with respect to precedent, analogy, authority, and rule-following – but even more it attempts to suggest a range of topics and questions that additions to the now-small body of psychological research might usefully address.