June 12: Starger Presents Legal Visualization Software @ Penn State

Professor Colin Starger of University of Baltimore School of Law will give an informal presentation of his software for visualizing legal arguments and holdings in court decisions, on Wednesday, June 12, 2013, from 10:00 a.m.-12 noon in Willard 171, at Penn State University, University Park, PA. All are welcome, and admission is free.

Click here for a map.

The presentation may be of particular interest to faculty and graduate students in law, information science, communication studies, and rhetoric.

Professor Starger directs the Supreme Court Mapping Project, which “seeks to use information design and software technology to enhance teaching, learning, and scholarship focused on Supreme Court precedent.”

Professor Starger’s articles reporting results obtained using the software include:

• A Visual Guide to Maryland v. King, American Criminal Law Review Blog (March 20, 2013);
• A Visual Guide to NFIB v. Sebelius: Competing Commerce Clause Opinion Lines 1789-2012, 2012 Cardozo L. Rev. de novo 316;
• Expanding Stare Decisis: The Role of Precedent in the Unfolding Dialectic of Brady v. Maryland, 46 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 77 (2012);
• Exile on Main Street: Competing Traditions and Due Process Dissent, 95 Marquette Law Review 1253 (2012).

Colin Starger is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore. He received his B.A. summa cum laude from UCLA and his J.D. from Columbia Law School. Before teaching at the University of Baltimore, he served as a law clerk to Magistrate Judge Michael Dolinger of the Southern District of New York, at Cardozo Law School’s Innocence Project as a staff attorney, and at NYU Law School as acting assistant professor of lawyering. Professor Starger developed the software discussed in the presentation with software engineer Darren Kumasawa.

For questions about the presentation, please contact Robert Richards, Ph.D. candidate in CAS.

Carey: Diagrams of data regarding modeling contradictions in judicial precedent

Matthew Carey, Esq., of Thomson Reuters has posted diagrams of the data reported in his Artificial Intelligence and Law article: “Holdings about holdings: Modeling contradictions in judicial precedent”.

Click here for the article.

Click here for a preprint of the article.

HT Matt Carey

Supreme Court Mapping Project @ University of Baltimore

Professor Colin Starger of the University of Baltimore School of Law tells us of The Supreme Court Mapping Project.

Here are excerpts of the description:

The SCOTUS Mapping Project has two distinct components:

Enhanced development of the Mapper software. This software enables users to create sophisticated interactive maps of Supreme Court doctrine by plotting relationships between majority, concurring and dissenting opinions. With the software, users can both visualize how different “lines” of Supreme Court opinions have evolved, and employ animation to make interactive presentations for audiences.

Building an extensive library of Supreme Court doctrinal maps. By highlighting the relationships between essential and influential Court opinions, these maps promote efficient learning and understanding of key doctrinal debates and can assist students, scholars, and practitioners alike. The library already includes maps of key regions of doctrine surrounding the Due Process Clause, the Commerce Clause, and the Fourth Amendment.

For more details, please see the project’s Website.

For examples of the output of the project, please see the papers linked in the post, Starger: Mapping Arguments in the U.S. Health Care Case.

Carey on Modeling Contradictions in Judicial Precedent

[Note on 9 June 2013: Matt has posted diagrams of the data reported in the article.]

Matthew Carey, Esq., of Thomson Reuters has published Holdings about holdings: Modeling contradictions in judicial precedent, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Click here for a preprint of the article.

Here is the abstract:

This paper attempts to formalize the differences between two methods of analysis used by judicial opinions in common law jurisdictions to contradict holdings posited by earlier opinions: “disagreeing” with the holdings of the earlier opinions and “attributing” holdings to the prior opinions. The paper will demonstrate that it is necessary to model both methods of analysis differently to generate an accurate picture of the state of legal authority in hypothetical examples, as well as in an example based on Barry Friedman’s analysis of the “stealth overruling” of Miranda v. Arizona through subsequent judicial interpretations. Because the question of whether “disagreement” and “attribution” need to be modeled separately relates to contradictions rather than to subtler interactions between holdings such as “distinguishing,” it can be answered using the simple technique of modeling holdings as propositional variables and evaluating the holdings using truth tables.

Call for Papers: Special issue of AI & Law on Computational Methods for Enforcing Privacy and Fairness

Dr. Thomas F. Gordon of Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communications Systems (FOKUS) tells us that a call for papers has been issued for a special issue of the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law on the topic, “Computational Methods for Enforcing Privacy and Fairness in the Knowledge Society”.

The submission deadline is 15 April 2013.

Here is an excerpt from the call:

We invite contributions on methodologies, techniques, algorithms, and tools in support of the analysis or of the enforcement of privacy, non-discrimination, and other personal rights in ICT systems for the knowledge society. Special focus is on multi-disciplinary approaches on the following, non-exhaustive, list of topics, and that relate to Artificial Intelligence and Law:

• Methods for enforcing data privacy and anonymity
• Methods for data portability, and for the right to oblivion
• Methods for data protection and law enforcement
• Privacy by-design in intelligent systems
• Privacy-preserving data mining
• Privacy policies in social networks
• Context-aware location privacy
• Methods for unbiased data collection and processing
• Methods for enforcing fairness in profiling and targeting
• Methods for discrimination discovery from data
• Statistical measures of discrimination
• Methods for discrimination prevention in data mining
• Computational argumentation in discrimination analysis
• Design of (quasi-)experimental methods
• Computational models of segregation in social networks
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Tools and systems, with case studies [...]

For more details, please see the complete call.

HT Tom Gordon

Starger: Mapping Arguments in the U.S. Health Care Case

Professor Colin Starger of University of Baltimore School of Law has posted A Visual Guide to NFIB v. Sebelius: Competing Commerce Clause Opinion Lines 1789-2012.

The guide is an argument map of the major arguments in the case.

The software used to create the argument map was developed by Professor Starger and Darren Kumasawa. Professor Starger tells me that a beta version of the software will be available in the coming months. For more information about the software, please contact Professor Starger.

This and other legal argument maps appear in the following papers:

• Colin Starger, Expanding Stare Decisis, forthcoming in Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review
• Colin Starger, Exile on Main Street: Competing Traditions and Due Process Dissent, Marquette Law Review, 95, 1253-1328 (2012)

HT David Gold.

New on VoxPopuLII: Hall on Electronic Voting and Direct Democracy

Dr. Joseph Lorenzo Hall of the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy has posted Electronic Voting and Direct Democracy, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In his post, Dr. Hall describes the shortcomings of current electronic voting and Internet voting (e-voting) technology, and how those shortcomings are magnified when that technology is applied to citizen lawmaking processes, such as ballot initiatives. Dr. Hall then offers recommendations for improving e-voting systems generally, and in the context of direct democracy.

Dr. Hall’s post — which is particularly timely given calls to experiment with Internet voting during the fall 2010 U.S. elections — should be of interest to the egovernment community, as well as to those interested in citizen participation in lawmaking.

Bench-Capon & Prakken on Using Argument Schemes for Hypothetical Reasoning in Law

Professor Dr. Trevor Bench-Capon of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, and Professor Dr. Henry Prakken of the University of Groningen Faculty of Law have published Using Argument Schemes for Hypothetical Reasoning in Law, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

This paper studies the use of hypothetical and value-based reasoning in US Supreme-Court cases concerning the United States Fourth Amendment. Drawing upon formal AI & Law models of legal argument a semi-formal reconstruction is given of parts of the Carney case, which has been studied previously in AI & law research on case-based reasoning. As part of the reconstruction, a semi-formal proposal is made for extending the formal AI & Law models with forms of metalevel reasoning in several argument schemes. The result is compared with Rissland’s (1989) analysis in terms of dimensions and Ashley’s (2008) analysis in terms of his process model of legal argument with hypotheticals.