Click here to access an EPUB ebook version of the book free of charge. (If you need an EPUB reader, try the Firefox EPUB Reader extension.)

According to the introduction, the book chapters are based on papers presented at “a pair of conferences — one in October 2010 at Harvard Law School and one in April 2011 at Columbia Law School — that brought together several dozen academics and practitioners who are deeply interested in the technology of law and how law schools and other institutions should educate students and lawyers about it.”

Here is the table of contents:

• Brian Donnelly, What Does “Digital Lawyer” Mean?
• Marc Lauritsen, Lawyering in an Age of Intelligent Machines
• David M. Blaszkowsky and Matthew Reed, Meta-What? Lawyers, Legal Training, and the Rise of Meta-Data for Digital Securities and Other Financial Contracts
• Harry Lewis, Under the Hood of the Internet
• Jeanne Eicks, Educating Superior Legal Professionals: Successful Modern Curricula Join Law and Technology
• Brock Rutter, Survey of Existing Courses in Lawyer Use of Technology
• Fred Galves, Teaching Litigation Technology
• Ronald W. Staudt, Cyberclinics: Law Schools, Technology, and Justice
• Paul Maharg, Simulation: A Pedagogy Emerging from the Shadows
• Stephanie Kimbro, What Should Be in a Digital Curriculum: A Practitioner’s Must Have List
• Barbara L. Bernier and F. Dennis Green, Law School Reset — Pedagogy, Andragogy, and Second Life
• Michael G. Bennett, A Critical Embracing of the Digital Lawyer
• Gregg Gordon, The Digital Lawyer’s Evolving Education in Scholarly Research

HT @stephkimbro.

Here is an excerpt from the instructions:

Our idea is that a large number of contributors should each write a short piece about some particular paper that appeared in ICAIL [the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law]. The paper should be one that has contributed to the contributor’s understanding of some aspect of AI and Law, and which still has some message for today.

Contributions should be at most two pages and should cover:

• The research context of the paper: the state of the art at the time;
• The contribution of the paper (e.g. the technique, method, or question it introduced; its main theoretical or empirical results; or other contribution);
• How this contribution influenced the author personally;
• How this contribution has been developed in AI and Law;
• Why the paper is important today (e.g. lines of research that remain open, or questions that need no longer be asked).

Proposals should include a list of “three papers that you would be interested in writing about.”

The call includes a list of the most frequently cited papers from the conference. “(A complete table of contents for all ICAILs is at http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/icail/index.html.)”

For more information, please see the call.

HT Anne Gardner.

The post was written in preparation for Ms. Kirchberger’s presentation at the conference, Juridiska tjänster via webben – drivkrafter och överväganden, held 15 November 2011 in Stockholm.

Click here for the presentation slides.

Here is an excerpt of the post:

[...] When we talk about law as a service or law as an app, we could start by discussing what law is. While legal theorists have done this for quite some time now, there is still no generally accepted answer. If we – more practically – assume that law is there for a purpose – the purpose of making society run smoothly and avoiding unbalance – one could assume that society should be aware of the law on a daily basis in order to allow it to run smoothly.

The ideal law app, therefore, tells a person in advance – proactively – if a legal problem is near and how to avoid it. This could be compared to a GPS navigator warning a car driver of a nearby traffic jam and suggesting alternative routes. Think about how many legal disputes could be prevented just by getting the right information/advice at the right time. [...]

For more information, please see the complete post.

The post is to some extent a response to Jason Wilson‘s post entitled I am Now an App.

For more information on Ms. Kirchberger’s research, please see her post at VoxPopuLII entitled, If the mountain will not come to the prophet, the prophet will go to the mountain.

The announcement describes Legislation.gov.uk as follows:

Legislation.gov.uk is a world first – the first linked data statute book. This means that people can re-use legislation data in other applications or link it to other databases. This has led to The National Archives developing a new, transferable business model for updating government databases.

For more information about Legislation.gov.uk, please see John Sheridan’s post, “Legislation.gov.uk,” at VoxPopuLII.

Click here for Paul Appleby’s recent post about new automatic updating technology being added to Legislation.gov.uk.

Click here for other resources on Linked Data and law.

Click here to register for the free Webinar.

Here is the abstract of the presentation:

While more nations across the globe move toward democratic elections, countries with long histories of electoral democracy now strive to make their systems more deliberative. We welcome you to learn about four of the boldest and most influential innovations in deliberative democracy, each of which finds ways of bringing citizens’ voices more directly into public policy debates by connecting small face-to-face deliberation with larger mass political events. Discover democracy’s widening reach, strengthening citizens’ participation in the public democratic system.

The presentation is hosted by the Centre for Public Involvement.

The presentation is being offered as part of the University of Alberta’s International Week, on the theme of Living Democracy: Citizen Power in a Digital Age.

In this paper, we present a framework that can process a user query for retrieval of information from documents of different properties across multiple domains, with specific application to patent laws and regulations. The framework has three basic components. The first component is ontology mapping and generation. What happens is that the keywords entered by users are mapped into a subset of relevant keywords. This step is performed by looking up those words in an ontology database. The second component is the joint and cross search in various document domains; in our case, they are patents and scientific publications. The last component is to modify the search results by applying user feedback statistics. The results of feedback will be saved as metadata for future uses.

A case example is given to demonstrate how results from multiple domain searches can be combined using ontology and cross referencing. We use an example of well-known biotechnology patents on erythropoietin (EPO) and give detailed analysis on each document domain with this keyword. Relationships between each domain are demonstrated.

A user feedback mechanism is also discussed in this paper. The ability to take user feedback into the framework is important. There is no doubt that domain knowledge from expert or experienced users could be a very good compliment to the proposed system. Both direct and indirect user feedbacks are discussed.

Here is an extract from the post:

There is an opportunity to build a system that enables ordinary citizens to use increasingly available information technologies to comment on, critique laws, report problems in practice and suggest amendments. This is the opportunity that African Legal Information Institute is working on. Kerry [Anderson] recently wrote about an exciting new pilot funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation. The objective is to use software to enable people to comment on free legal information. Think of it as a system for making bug reports and feature requests for statutes and case law. The people reponsible for making and administering the law will still have the power and responsibility to do so, but they will have better information.

For more information, please see the complete post.

In this post, Mr. Kahana discusses the potential obstacles that unauthorized practice of law (UPL) statutes raise to the development of computational law artificial intelligence (CLAI) technologies. He then recommends an approach to revising UPL statutes so that they do not inhibit the development of CLAI technologies.

HT @stephkimbro.

Mr. Schuman’s post describes http://docs.house.gov/ — also called “Bills This Week” and “Bills to Be Considered on the House Floor” — which provides free public access to XML versions of “all House bills, amendments, resolutions for floor consideration, and conference reports … as well as information on floor proceedings and more.”

The post evaluates the House site in light of the House leadership’s stated transparency goals, and describes additional content and services planned for the site.

Click here for the XML metadata used by the House.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Topics — which “should bridge technology and law in some way” — include “technology that could help in the practice of law” and “knowledge management for solo lawyers.”

The conference Website describes lawTechCamp 2012 in the following way:

lawTechCamp is a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals including bloggers, twitters, legal-technology lawyers, social networkers, and anyone curious about new media and the law.  

lawTechCamp is not just for lawyers.  If you are interested in the intersection of law and technology, such as legal issues facing startups, access to justice issues, or someone just interested in technology or law, then please join us – and bring a friend or colleague.

This event is casual, with active participation between the audience and the workshop presenters and event-attendees. Attendance is free, but registration is required.

The conference is co-sponsored by The Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

According to the conference co-organizer Monica Goyal:

We are looking for speakers and attendees [...]. It is meant to be an unconference, and we hope to do it for free again this year. And we are looking for other sponsors. [...] I would love to see this grow to other states. The sharing of ideas and community building, I believe are antecedents to technology creation.

Click here for registration information.

For more information, please see the call for session proposals.

HT Monica Goyal.