Legal Informatics Proposals for TransparencyCamp 2013

Some legal informatics proposals have been submitted for TransparencyCamp 2013, to be held 4-5 May 2013, in Washington, DC, USA:

• Ben Balter: Open Sourcing Government
• Hudson Hollister: Creating a Legislative Agenda for Open Data
• Tom MacWright: The Story of the DC Code
• James McKinney: Open Government Data Standards
• David Moore: OpenGovernment.org : For state and city government engagement
• Stephen Schultze: PACER, RECAP, OpenPACER.org

The Twitter hashtag for TransparencyCamp 2013 appears to be #tcamp13

Peña Gangadharan: Toward a Deliberative Standard: Rethinking Participation in Rulemaking

Dr. Seeta Peña Gangadharan of the New America Foundation has published Toward a Deliberative Standard: Rethinking Participation in Policymaking, Communication, Culture, and Critique, 6, 1-19 (2013).

Here is the abstract:

In contrast to communitarian and pluralist approaches to participation, the following article develops a deliberative model of participation in rulemaking at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This deliberative model is distinguished by its concern for the emergence of publics and for the speaking and listening capacities of policymakers and publics alike. The model focuses both on spaces for collective discussion as well as translation between sites of discussion. Embracing a complex view of civil society, and stressing the principle of inclusion, a deliberative model corresponds to a form of legitimacy that extends beyond the boundaries of conventional administrative procedure.

Gastil on the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review 2012

Professor Dr. John Gastil of Penn State University has posted The Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, at the Democracy Fund Blog.

The post summarizes the results of the 2012 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, “which convene[d] a group of average citizens together to evaluate ballot measures and share their recommendations with the voting public.”

Key findings:

• A majority of Oregon voters were aware of the CIR.
• Roughly two-thirds of those who read the CIR Statements found them helpful when deciding how to vote.
• Those who read a CIR Statement learned more about the ballot measures than those who read other portions of the official Voter’s Guide. [...]

The complete evaluation report described in the post is: Katherine R. Knobloch, John Gastil, Robert Richards, and Traci Feller. (2012). Evaluation Report on the 2012 Citizens’ Initiative Reviews for the Oregon CIR Commission. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University.

For more details, please see Professor Gastil’s complete post.

Click here for more information on the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, at Participedia.

Disclosure: Professor Gastil is my Ph.D. advisor, and I contributed to the evaluation report on the 2012 Oregon CIR and the voter survey discussed in the post, and to the Participedia article on the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review linked above.

HT @jgastil

Coglianese: Enhancing Public Access to Online Rulemaking Information

Professor Dr. Cary Coglianese of University of Pennsylvania Law School has published Enhancing Public Access to Online Rulemaking Information, Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law, Vol. 2, pp. 1-66 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

One of the most significant powers exercised by federal agencies is their power to make rules. Given the importance of agency rulemaking, the process by which agencies develop rules has long been subject to procedural requirements aiming to advance democratic values of openness and public participation. With the advent of the digital age, government agencies have engaged in increasing efforts to make rulemaking information available online as well as to elicit public participation via electronic means of communication. How successful are these efforts? How might they be improved? In this article, I investigate agencies’ efforts to make rulemaking information available online. Drawing on a review of current agency uses of the Internet, a systematic survey of regulatory agencies’ websites, and interviews with managers at a variety of federal regulatory agencies, I identify both existing “best practices” as well as opportunities for continued improvement. The findings of this research suggest that there exist both considerable differences in how well different agencies are making rulemaking information available online as well as significant opportunities for the diffusion of best-practice innovations that some agencies have adopted. This research also provides a basis for seven recommendations that I offer for enhancing both the accessibility and quality of rulemaking through online technology. A commitment to well-accepted democratic principles applicable to regulatory agencies should lead federal web designers to strive to create websites that are as accessible to ordinary citizens, including individuals with limited English proficiency, vision impairments, and low-bandwidth connections, as they are to the sophisticated repeat players in Washington policymaking circles.

The article focuses on erulemaking systems other than Regulations.gov and RegulationRoom.

Three Efforts to Crowdsource Amendments to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, in Honor of Aaron Swartz: Lofgren-Wyden, EFF, and ForktheLaw

At least three separate efforts to crowdsource amendments to the U.S. federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) appear to have recently been launched:

• Representative Zoe Lofgren and Senator Ron Wyden have been using Reddit as a platform to crowdsource revisions to the statute; they call their amendments Aaron’s Law;
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been crowdsourcing revisions to the statute on its Website (e.g., here and here);
• Nadim Kobeissi is crowdsourcing revisions to the statute at a new site called Fork the Law.

[UPDATE: Daniel Schuman kindly just told me of a fourth effort: Professor Orin Kerr has been crowdsourcing revisions to the statute at Volokh Conspiracy. In addition, Meredith L. Patterson just told me that Fork the Law is run by a group, of which she and Nadim Kobeissi are members; the Fork the Law personnel are listed here.]

At least the first three of these efforts are being undertaken expressly in honor of Aaron Swartz, who, before his death, was prosecuted for alleged violations of the CFAA, among other statutes.

What’s notable to me about these efforts is their variety:

• variety of leaders (official legislators, public interest lawyers, a programmer, a law professor)
• variety of ideological perspectives (from moderate Democratic to libertarian)
• variety of intended audiences (including a broad general Internet audience, civil libertarians, programmers, the legal community)
• variety of platforms (a general social news site, a collaborative legal blog, the Website of a public interest law firm, a purpose-built site)
• and a variety of tools with which public attitudes and comments are posted, aggregated, processed, and then re-published for further public input.

The potential value of distributed and parallel crowdsourced drafting efforts is also apparent. Holding these different drafting efforts, targeted at different audiences with different types of knowledge and experience, in public on the open Web allows each of these drafting communities to learn from the others and adjust its draft accordingly, while maintaining its distinctive perspective. In particular, each drafting community can benefit from both legal and policy expertise expressed in other communities. So certain of the potential information advantages of working on the open Web — notably increased quantity, quality, and diversity of input — seem very likely to be realized through these CFAA crowdsourcing efforts.

HT Alex Howard, Eric Mill, and Stephen Schultze

Sunlight Foundation Releases Docket Wrench: Tool for Analyzing Comments to Proposed Regulations

Sunlight Foundation today released Docket Wrench, an online system that analyzes and summarizes public comments to proposed U.S. federal regulations, according to Nicko Margolies’s post, Docket Wrench: Exposing Trends in Regulatory Comments.

Here is an excerpt of the announcement:

Today the Sunlight Foundation unveils Docket Wrench, an online research tool to dig into regulatory comments and uncover patterns among millions of documents. Docket Wrench offers a window into the rulemaking process where special interests and individuals can wield their influence without the level of scrutiny traditional lobbying activities receive.

Before an agency finalizes a proposed rule that Congress and the president have mandated that they enforce, there is a period of public commenting where the agency solicits feedback from those affected by the rule. The commenters can vary from company or industry representatives to citizens concerned about laws that impact their environment, schools, finances and much more. These comments and related documents are grouped into “dockets” where you can follow the actions related to each rule. Every rulemaking docket has its own page on Docket Wrench where you can get a graphical overview of the docket, drill down into the rules and notices it contains and read the comments on those rules. We’ve pulled all this information together into one spot so you can more easily research trends and extract interesting stories from the data. [...]

For more details, please see the complete announcement.

According to Tom Lee of Sunlight Foundation, Docket Wrench was developed by Andrew Pendleton and Amy Cesal.

HT @tjl

Knobloch, Gastil, et al.: Applying an Evaluative Model of Democratic Deliberation to the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review

Professor Dr. Katherine R. Knobloch, Professor Dr. John Gastil, Justin Reedy, and Professor Dr. Katherine Cramer-Walsh, have published Did They Deliberate? Applying an Evaluative Model of Democratic Deliberation to the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review, forthcoming in Journal of Applied Communication Research.

Here is the abstract:

As deliberative forums proliferate, scholars and practitioners need to establish a shared evaluative framework grounded in a theoretical definition of deliberation, applicable across contexts, and capable of yielding results comprehensible to public officials and key stakeholders. We present such a framework and illustrate its utility by evaluating the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR), a public event that serves as both a critical case study and an important practical innovation in its own right. Our analysis shows that the CIR met a reasonable standard for democratic deliberation, and we pinpoint CIR features that both aided and detracted from its overall quality. We also show how we summarized these results to communicate our evaluation efficiently to the Oregon State Legislature. We conclude by making recommendations for future applications of our theoretical model and evaluative framework and offer practical suggestions for future deliberative forums.

New crowdsourced legislative proposal project on Reddit: Lofgren: Domain Name Seizures

Member of the U.S. House of Representatives Zoe Lofgren is crowdsourcing the content of a U.S. federal legislative proposal, on the social media site Reddit.

Click here for the Reddit thread.

Representative Lofgren writes:

The goal of the legislation would be to build due process requirements into domain name seizures for copyright infringement. [...] The goal is to develop targeted legislation that requires the government to provide notice and an opportunity for website operators to defend themselves prior to seizing or redirecting their domain names. The focus would be on government domain name seizures based on accusations that a website facilitates copyright infringement and not, for example, accusations of obscenity or libel. Feedback and input should also take into account any legitimate concerns that notice or delay might reasonably lead to destruction of evidence, threats to the physical safety of an individual, or other unintended negative consequences.

HT @juliepsamuels

Legal Communication Papers @ NCA 2012

Many papers on legal communication were presented at NCA 2012: The 98th Annual Convention of the National Communication Association, held November 15-18, 2012 in Orlando, Florida, USA. Here is a list of those I could identify. For abstracts and full text, please contact the authors. (If you know of other papers on legal communication presented at NCA 2012, please feel free to identify them in the comments to this post. Click here for the complete NCA 2012 program.)

• Daniel Bergan and Richard T. Cole, Michigan State University: Call Your Legislator: The Impact of Citizen Contacts on Legislative Voting
• Mike Bergmaier, Penn State University: From Miscegenation to Contemporary Marriage Equality: Marriage as a Function of Ideological State Apparatuses
• Lacey Brown, University of West Florida, Chair: Panel: Trayvon Martin and COMMunity: Exploring the Interpretive Frames of the “Stand Your Ground” Law in Shaping 21st Century American Communities
• Kathryn A. Cady and Kerith M. Woodyard, Northern Illinois University: All the Working Woman’s Friends: Protective Labor Legislation and the Early ERA Controversy
• Peter Odell Campbell, Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: The Abject of Community: The Majoritarian ‘Fourth Persona’ in U.S. Equality Rhetoric
• Kelly Carr, University of Baltimore: Inventing Continuity While Enacting Change: The Supreme Court Opinion Writing Process
• Michael S. Chouinard, Florida State University: Judge or Activist? Vaughn Walker and the Overturning of Proposition 8
• Hayley Jeanne Cole, Univ of Missouri, Columbia: Same Sex Marriage Ads: Don’t Mention It: A Content Analysis of the No on Prop 8 Ads
• Josh Compton and Paul Klaas, Dartmouth College: Oh, the Places Legal Rhetoric can Go: Prosecuting and Defending Characters of Dr. Seuss’s Bartholomew and the Oobleck
• Christopher R. Darr, Indiana Univ, Kokomo, and Harry C. Strine IV, Bloomsburg University: Partisanship, Ideology and Advice and Consent: A Content Analysis of Incivility in Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings
• Daniel Emery, University of Oklahoma: Property Crimes: Castle Laws, the 2008 Mortgage Crisis, and Privatization of Public Space
• Jerri Faris, Purdue University: Celebrating COMMunity with Ex-prisoners: Engaged Communication Scholarship in a Reentry Court
• Ryan P. Fuller, Univ of California, Santa Barbara: Agenda Denial Strategies in Regulating Vertical Integration: The Case of California SB 1765
• Joshua Gonzalez, University of Iowa: Undignified: Poverty and Personhood in the 1996 Welfare Reform Debates
• Nichola Gutgold, Penn State Univ, Lehigh Valley: The Enactment Rhetoric of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• Leslie J. Harris, Univ of Wisconsin, Milwaukee: Spousal Correction or Spousal Cruelty? The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Domestic Violence
• Amy Hasinoff, McGill University: Social Media and Sexuality: The Missing Discourse of Consent in New Sexting Legislation
• Erik Jimenez, California State University, Los Angeles: Are You a Mexican? Investigating the Devastating Implications of Alabama’s Hammon-Beason (HB) 56
• Katherine R. Knobloch, University of Washington, and John W. Gastil, Penn State University: Civic (Re)Socialization: The Educative Effects of Deliberative Participation
• Jeff Kurr, Baylor University: President Obama’s Rhetorical Pivot in Avoiding the Detainment of Deliberation over Closing the Detention Facilities at Guantanamo Bay
• Derek Lackaff, Elon University: Open Governance Experiments in the Icelandic Context
• Owen H. Lynch, Southern Methodist University: Lowering the Bar or the Important Role of Humor in The Legal Community
• Carol L. Mammel, University of the Fraser Valley: The Osoyoos Indian Band, Canadian Wildlife Service, and the Species at Risk Act: Lack of consultation, and perpetuation of underdevelopment on reserves
• Bryan J. McCann, Wayne State Univ: Between Thugs and Innocents: Racialized Violence and the Perogative of ‘Self Defense’ in the Trayvon Martin Case
• Robert Mills, Northwestern University: The Harmonious Vocalics of Judicial Unanimity: Authorship and Legitimacy in Cooper v. Aaron
• Jay Reynolds Patterson, Georgia State University: Contemporary Legal Discourse and the Graeco-Roman Tradition: The 2009 OJ Simpson Kidnapping Trial
• Carlo A. Pedrioli, Barry University: Constructing Modern-day U.S. Legal Education through Rhetoric: Langdell, Ames, and the Scholar Model of the Law Professor Persona
• Preconference: Reading the Rhetoric of Civil Rights Sit-Ins
• Alessandra Renzi, Ryerson University: Get Out of My Park: Occupying Discourse on Public Use
• Robert Richards, Penn State University: Legal Narrative in the Citizens’ Panel: Identifying Theories to Explain Storytelling in a Small Group Deliberation about Ballot Initiatives
• Brandi Dale Rogers, University of Wisconsin, Madison: Science, Law, and the Argumentative Antecedents of Fetal Personhood: A Rhetorical Analysis of Early Prenatal Torts
• Clarke Rountree, University of Alabama, Huntsville: Reversing Course: Supreme Court Overruling in an Early Admiralty Case
• Clariza Ruiz De Castilla, University of Texas, Austin: Citizenship in the Sunshine State: Florida News Coverage on Arizona’s SB 1070
• Kristina Ruiz-Mesa, Univ of Colorado, Boulder: COMMunities of Practice and Discourses of a DREAM: How Congress and Fox News Represent ‘Others’ within the DREAM Act
• Susan H. Sarapin, Troy University: Forget about It! The Ironic Effects of Instructions to Disregard Perry, Ben, Gil, and Ducky
• Susan H. Sarapin, Troy University: Toward a Causal Explanation of ‘The CSI Effect’: Self-efficacy as Mediator between Fictional Crime-TV Exposure and Verdict Certainty
• Joseph Sery, University of San Francisco: ‘Fruit from the Poisonous Tree’: The Rhetorical Strategy behind Mapp v. Ohio
• Rohini Singh, Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: Turning the Tables: Refutation by Reversal in Clarence Darrow’s Plea for Leopold and Loeb
• Jeff Swift, North Carolina State University: The Invisible Hand of the Speech Marketplace: The Supreme Court’s Currency Manipulation
• Elycia M. Taylor, Catherine Knight Steele, and Emilie Lucchesi, University of Illinois, Chicago: Protective or Oppressive? Analyzing Death Penalty Framing
• Dave Tell, University of Kansas, and Eric C. Miller, Penn State University: Rhetoric and Judicial Activism: The Case of Hillary Goodridge v. Department of Public Health
• Mary Lynn L. Veden, Univ of Arkansas, Fayetteville: The Alchemy and Antirrhetic of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish
• Rachel Avon A. Whidden, Lake Forest College: Proving Science in Court: Vaccine Injury Payouts and the Legitimization of the MMR-Autism Connection

Farina et al.: Knowledge in the People: Rethinking ‘Value’ in Public Rulemaking Participation

Professor Dr. Cynthia R. Farina and colleagues at the Cornell University eRulemaking Initiative (CeRI) have posted Knowledge in the People: Rethinking ‘Value’ in Public Rulemaking Participation.

Here is the abstract:

A companion piece to Rulemaking vs. Democracy: Judging and Nudging Public Participation that Counts, this Essay continues to examine the nature and value of broader public participation in rulemaking. Here, we argue that rulemaking is a “community of practice,” with distinctive forms of argumentation and methods of reasoning that both reflect and embody craft knowledge. Rulemaking newcomers are outside this community of practice: Even when they are reasonably informed about the legal and policy aspects of the agency’s proposal, their participation differs in kind and form from that of sophisticated commenters. From observing the actual behavior of rulemaking newcomers in the Regulation Room project, we suggest that new public participation is often, if not predominantly, experiential in nature and narrative in form. We argue that it is unrealistic to expect that rulemaking newcomers can be significantly inculcated into the norms and methods of the existing rulemaking community of practice. Yet, the potential policymaking value of the on-the-ground, situated knowledge they can bring to the discussion justifies efforts to expand our understanding of the kinds of comments that should “count” in the process. We take some first steps in that direction in this Essay.

Thanks to Professor Farina for notifying us of the paper.