Glassmeyer: CALI partners with law schools to build online tools for low-income litigants

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI has posted Law Schools Team Up with CALI to Harness Skills of Law Students, Develop Online Tools for Low-Income Litigants, at the CALI Blog.

The post contains a press release, which begins:

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI®) will announce at the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools in New Orleans on January 6, 2013 that they have reached agreements with faculty members from six law schools to develop course kits as part of the Access to Justice Clinical Course Project (A2J Clinic Project). Participating law schools include Columbia Law School, Concordia University School of Law, CUNY School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, UNC School of Law, and University of Miami School of Law.

Each participating faculty member will develop and document a course model that uses A2J Author® to teach law students how technology tools can be used to lower barriers to justice for low-income, self-represented litigants. CALI will use those course models to assist other law schools in establishing A2J Clinical Courses as a permanent part of their law school curriculum.

A2J Author is a software tool developed by CALI and the Center for Access to Justice & Technology at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law to deliver greater access to justice for self-represented litigants by enabling lawyers and law students to rapidly build user-friendly web-based document assembly tools called A2J Guided Interviews®. These A2J Guided Interviews allow users to complete court documents by presenting a series of easy-to-understand questions while graphics virtually lead users along the path to the courthouse, where these documents can be filed. [...]

HT @caliorg

Masters: CALI Legal Topics Expressed as a Hierarchical Drupal Taxonomy

Elmer Masters, JD, MLIS, of CALI has posted an image of the CALI legal topics subject list as a hierarchical Drupal taxonomy.

Click here for other resources on legal knowledge representation.

HT @emasters

Masters on CourtCloud: A New Repository for Court Opinions

Elmer Masters of CALI introduced a new technology called CourtCloud today in a presentation at LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference.

Here is a description of CourtCloud from the service’s Website:

• CourtCloud is a repository for court opinions.
• Only the court can upload documents to CourtCloud.
• Save word processor files in the desktop CourtCloud folder.
• Saved word processor files are copied to the CourtCloud server.
• CourtCloud processes the document creating PDF, HTML, and XML versions.
• The files are stored in the court’s CourtCloud folder.
• Original file + PDF, HTML, XML versions are available on the desktop and archived on the server.
• There is no direct public access to CourtCloud.
• Opinions saved to CourtCloud are added to the Free Law Reporter
• Free Law Reporter provides powerful searching and public API for access.

Click here for Twitter tweets about the presentation.

Iglezakis on CALI

Professor Dr. Ioannis Iglezakis of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Law School has posted Insight into the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), on his Informatics and Law blog.

In this post, Professor Iglezakis describes CALI‘s instructional and publishing programs and technology, and its role of fostering innovation in the areas of legal education and legal publishing.

(The deadline for submitting presentation proposals for the next CALI Conference: CALICon 2012, to be held 21-23 June 2012 in San Diego, California, USA, is 6 April 2012. Click here to submit a proposal.)

For more information, please see the complete post.

Masters: The Future of The Legal (Case)Book Is The Web

Elmer Masters, Esq., of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) has posted The Future of the (Case)Book Is the Web, at the CALI Spotlight Blog.

In this post, Elmer advocates the publication of free and open legal casebooks on the free Web, using the open EPUB format. He describes CALI’s eLangdell legal open educational resource service as an example of this approach.

For more information, please see the complete post.

New on VoxPopuLII: Mayer on The Free Law Reporter

John Mayer of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), has posted The Free Law Reporter – Open Access to the Law and Beyond, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Mayer describes The Free Law Reporter, CALI’s new free and open database of decisions from U.S. federal and state courts, built using data from Public.Resource.Org‘s RECOP database. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement.

Mr. Mayer underscores the ebook functionality of Free Law Reporter: the system allows users to automatically transform their Free Law Reporter search results into ebooks in the open EPUB format. These ebooks can be used as casebooks for law school courses, as well as in other applications.

The Free Law Reporter‘s ebook functionality complements CALI’s other legal open educational resource services, the eLangdell free and open digital casebook/textbook service, and the Legal Education Commons, where law professors share their instructional resources online.

Mr. Mayer’s post also discusses the principles underlying The Free Law Reporter. The first of these is the idea that law professors and law librarians should have the freedom to customize databases and course materials to meet the particular needs of their students and the particular objectives of their courses; as Mr. Mayer writes, “Academic law libraries should have free and open access to the law, access that allows them to define and construct the educational environment for law students.”

In addition, Mr. Mayer characterizes The Free Law Reporter as a generative resource, that can foster innovation, creativity, and collaborative effort among law professors, law librarians, and other members of the legal educational community.

Mr. Mayer’s post should be of interest to law professors, law librarians, legal information systems developers, continuing legal education providers, ebook technologists, and the open educational resources community.

Free Law Reporter: CALI’s New Free Law Resource, Built with RECOP Data

CALI, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, has launched The Free Law Reporter (FLR), a new, free, online source of full text U.S. federal and state court decisions, published from January 2011 to the present.

Click here for a list of the content.

FLR contains data from RECOP, The Weekly Report of Current Opinions, distributed by Carl Malamud‘s Public.Resource.Org. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement. FLR appears to be the second service to use RECOP data. The first appears to have been John Joergensen’s State and Federal Caselaw from the RECOP Project, at Rutgers-Camden Law.

The developers of FLR appear to be John Mayer and Elmer Masters of CALI.

FLR offers access to individual court decisions and to ebooks, in the open EPUB format, containing weekly compilations of court decisions from particular U.S. jurisdictions. Click here for 1FLRAlaska.epub, the first FLR ebook compilation from Alaska state courts. According to FLR’s technology page, FLR ebooks are available from the FLR Website and from CALI’s Legal Education Commons.

John Mayer also says: “you can do a search for cases [in FLR] and then download all of the results as an epub file.”

According to FLR’s technology page, FLR ebooks:

can be read on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs and laptops as well as iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. Amazon Kindle support is possible through third party conversion programs like Calibre while we research more direct paths to Kindle support.

FLR uses the Solr open source search engine. Click here for more details on the technology behind FLR.

Click here for Courtney Minick’s informative post about FLR at Justia’s Onward blog.

Click here for Bob Ambrogi’s informative post about FLR at his LawSites blog.

Apps for Justice Project Recognized

The “Apps for Justice” proposal — created by a team including Marc Lauritsen, Esq., of Capstone Practice Systems; Professor Ronald W. Staudt of the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law; and John P. Mayer, Executive Director of CALI: The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction — to “expand programs in which [law] students write software as part of their [legal] education,” was recognized at this weekend’s Future Ed 3 Conference with an award of a virtual dollar venture capital investment.

The proposal includes further development of law-school clinical programs that use the A2J Author software created by CALI and the Center for Access to Justice and Technology.

Click here for more information about A2J Author.

HT @sglassmeyer and @johnpmayer.

Preview of Open Access Legal Casebooks Available from eLangdell: CALI

A preview is now available of the open access digital legal casebooks being developed as part of the eLangdell Project sponsored by CALI: The Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction.

The preview — which consists of portions of Roger C. Park and Douglas D. McFarland’s Evidence for Civil Procedure Students — is available in several formats: ePub, mobi, PDF, and HTML, and is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

Click here for more information about the eLangell Project.

[NOTE: An earlier version of this post stated that the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University was a current sponsor of eLangdell. Our friends at CALI have told us that Berkman Center no longer sponsors eLangdell, so I've revised the post accordingly.]

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.