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.

Goodenough and Lauritsen, eds.: Educating the Digital Lawyer

Professor Oliver Goodenough of Vermont Law School and Harvard’s Berkman Center Law Lab, and Marc Lauritsen, Esq., of Capstone Practice Systems have edited a new book entitled Educating the Digital Lawyer (New Providence, NJ: Matthew Bender, 2012).

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.

Davidow et al. on OpenCourt and Transparency in the Court

John Davidow of WBUR, and colleagues, gave a presentation entitled OpenCourt: Transparency in the Court, on 29 November 2011, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Click here for video and audio of the presentation.

Here is the abstract of the presentation:

With the support of a Knight News Challenge grant OpenCourt streams and archives live daily coverage of court sessions. The project seeks to make courts more accessible to the public through technology while respecting legitimate concerns about privacy. John Davidow (Executive Producer), Joe Spurr (Director), and Val Wang (Producer) join the Berkman Center community to talk about this fascinating project.

Rabb and Bhatti on a New Web Resource About Islamic Law: Islawmix

Professor Dr. Intisar A. Rabb of Boston College Law School, and Umbreen Bhatti, Esq., of Disability Rights Legal Center gave a presentation entitled Islawmix: Content and Context for Islamic Law in the News, on 3 October 2011, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

islawmix is a project of The Berkman Center.

Here is the abstract of the presentation:

Recent years have seen an uptick in coverage of Islamic law (sharīʿa) in American news media, policy, and academic circles. What are the rules that dictate how Muslims in America conduct themselves? How do or should our legal institutions respond? When reporting on issues involving Muslims, how can journalists or academics distinguish individual preference or culture from Islamic law? What available, authoritative resources can best inform interested readers, from the casual to the scholarly? islawmix aims to fill the information gap in this important area. In this talk, Intisar A. Rabb — Berkman Fellow and faculty of Boston College Law School — and Umbreen Bhatti — co-founder of islawmix and a lawyer with experience in civil rights and constitutional law — walk through “why islawmix” and explore how islawmix aims to accomplish the rather ambitious task of providing accessible resources for parsing such complex information and developing resources for the aggregation and contextualization of significant trends in Islamic law.

islawmix is on Twitter: @islawmix.

Digital Law Library Wiki: Berkman Center Law Lab Launches Prototype

The Law Lab of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University has announced the launch of a prototype of its Digital Law Library wiki.

The prototype currently covers primarily the law of Senegal.

The purpose of the prototype is to provide access to primary and secondary “Senegalese and other West African [legal resources] online in a searchable and easily accessible format.”

The prototype was developed by the Law Lab in collaboration with Le Centre de Recherche, d’Etude et de Documentation sur les Institutions et les Législations Africaines (CREDILA).

For more information, please see the Law Lab’s Digital Law Library site and the announcement.

Dulin & Weinberger on Innovative Library Technologies

Kim Dulin of the Harvard Law School Library, and David Weinberger of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, recently gave a presentation about new technologies developed at the Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory, a project of The Harvard Law School Library.

The presentation was given 9 November 2010 at The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

The presentation highlighted the following open source applications:

• ShelfLife, a resource discovery / metadata presentation tool;
• StackView, “an intelligent graphical representation of books” and “a frame for viewing digital representations of books”;
• LibraryCloud, “a data service that aggregates and delivers library metadata. At the moment, it feeds data and metadata from the Harvard Library system into ShelfLife.”

Click here for Ethan Zuckerman’s liveblog of the presentation.

Call for Applications: Berkman Center Fellowships 2011-2012

Applications are invited for fellowships during the 2011-2012 academic year at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Applications are invited for two types of fellowship:

• An “academic fellowship for rising early-to-mid career academics”:
• “The academic fellowship is intended for a rising scholar who will use the period of the fellowship to develop his/her teaching and research career and produce compelling, potentially paradigm-shifting contributions to our understanding of cyberspace. It is a stipended fellowship and residency in Cambridge, MA is required. The deadline for applications for the academic fellowship is 11:59 p.m. ET on November 15, 2010.”
• Fellowships through the Center’s “annual open call”:
• “Our annual open call for fellowship applications is an opportunity for academics and practitioners working on issues related to Internet and society to apply to be part of the Berkman fellows community. Stipends and administrative determinations are made on a case-by-case basis, and residency in Cambridge, MA is preferred, though in lieu of residency, routine visits to Cambridge are required. The deadline for applications through our open call is 11:59 p.m. ET on December 15, 2010.”

For more information, please see the announcement.

September 21, 2010: Presentation: “Hacking the Casebook”

A presentation about new resources for creating digital legal casebooks, entitled Hacking the Casebook, will be given by the H20 Development Team on 21 September 2010 at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. The presentation will be Webcast.

Here is the abstract:

Traditional law school casebooks are expensive, bulky and stagnant. With the support of the HLS Library, Berkman has been updating our suite of classroom tools, H2O, to create an online alternative to casebooks that are free, online and remixable. H2O includes our new tool Collage for editing down and annotating cases, Playlists for aggregating materials, the Question Tool for in-classroom back channel, and the Rotisserie for out-of-class discussion. In this lunch we’ll demo some of the tools (all still in alpha) and show how Jonathan Zittrain‘s Torts class is using them this term.

Goodenough on The Digital LLC

An audio podcast is now available of a discussion by Professor Oliver Goodenough of Vermont Law School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, about the Berkman Center’s Digital LLC Project, held 28 July 2010 on Radio Berkman. Here is a description of the project:

Digital LLC is an open-source software that provides entrepreneurs with the tools to take advantage of Vermont’s recent ground-breaking legislation allowing “virtual LLCs” and “virtual corporations” to achieve full legal status and to exist entirely in digital form. Digital LLC guides entrepreneurs in building the two main components that govern the management of an LLC: the Operating Agreement and the Articles of Organization. Once these key documents are agreed upon by the designated LLC members, the software allows users to make all management decisions digitally for the entire existence of the LLC.

Digital LLC has the potential to lower barriers to entry, streamline execution, and import better institutions to side-step local limitations, making a whole new cooperative relationship possible.

Click here for more information about The Digital LLC Project.

Demo Available of Digital LLC Project, from Law Lab at Berkman Center

A demo is available of Digital LLC, “open-source software that provides entrepreneurs with the tools to take advantage of Vermont’s recent [...] legislation allowing ‘virtual LLCs’ and ‘virtual corporations’ to achieve full legal status and to exist entirely in digital form.”

Digital LLC is a project of the Law Lab at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

According to the announcement, “Digital LLC guides entrepreneurs in building the two main components that govern the management of an LLC: the Operating Agreement and the Articles of Organization. Once these key documents are agreed upon by the designated LLC members, the software allows users to make all management decisions digitally for the entire existence of the LLC.”