April 26: CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference: Tweets and Resources

The CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference is being held 26 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

The conference focuses ‘on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly. The conference will bring together leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, investors and technologists that are experimenting and actively working to re-architect the future of the law. If you’re of a similar mind, we’d love to have you there.’

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #futurelaw

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the conference, in .csv format.

The conference Chair was Tim Hwang.

The legal informatics-oriented panels at the conference include:

• Legal Disruption: Why Now? Why Here? What Next?
• Computational Law and Contracts
• Designing Legal Data
• Open Source Legal Practice

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University and the ReInventLaw Lab will give the closing keynote address.

The conference is sponsored by CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

Please see the comments to this post for additional resources related to the conference.

Ossowski (ed.): Agreement Technologies

Springer has published an article collection entitled Agreement Technologies (2013), edited by Professor Dr. Sascha Ossowski of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.

The book is volume 8 in the the Law, Governance and Technology Series.

Here are excerpts from the preface:

This book describes the state of the art in the emerging field of Agreement Technologies (AT). AT refer to computer systems in which autonomous software agents negotiate with one another, typically on behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements. [...]

The book was produced in the framework of [the EU-funded] COST Action IC0801 on Agreement Technologies.

This book [...] is subdivided into seven parts.

• Part I is dedicated to foundational issues of Agreement Technologies, examining the notion of agreement and agreement processes from different perspectives. [...]
• Part II outlines the relevance of novel approaches to Semantics and ontological alignments in distributed settings.
• Part III gives an overview of approaches for modelling norms and normative systems, the simulation of their dynamics, and their
  impact on the other key areas of Agreement Technologies.
• Part IV discusses how to design computational organisations, how to reason about them, and how organisational models can be evolved.
• Part V gives an overview of current approaches to argumentation and negotiation, and how they can be used to inform human reasoning, as well as to assist machine reasoning.
• Part VI describes different models and mechanisms of trust and reputation, and discusses their relevance for the other key areas of Agreement Technologies. [...]
• Part VII provides examples of how the techniques outlined in the previous parts of the book can be used to build distributed software applications that solve real-world problems.

Please notice that the parts are supported by a set of video-lectures that can be freely downloaded from the web.

Registration open: CodeX FutureLaw 2013: Conference on Technology & Legal Profession, 26 April

Tim Hwang tells us that registration is now open for CodeX FutureLaw 2013, “a conference focusing on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly,” to be held 26 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

Tim is Chair of the conference.

The legal informatics topics to be addressed during the conference sessions include:

• Legal Disruption: Why Now? Why Here? What Next?
• Computational Law and Contracts
• Designing Legal Data
• Open Source Legal Practice

Speakers include:

• Itai Gurari of Judicata
• Tony Lai of LawGives
• Daniel Lewis of Ravel Law
• Tim Stanley of Justia
• Ed Walters of Fastcase

For more details, please see the conference Website.

HT Tim Hwang

Legal Informatics Projects Featured at Open Data Day DC 2013

The program for Open Data Day DC 2013, also called Open Data Day 2013 Hackathon – DC Metro — to be held 23 February 2013 in Washington, DC, USA — includes at least four legal informatics projects:

• Contract/Procurement Visualization Sprint (Visualizing.org) [...]
• Open DC Zoning Data (@andrewsalzberg) [...]
• Parse dates and legal citations from RECAP documents [...]
• Discover Bill Pedigree

The Twitter hashtags for the event appear to be #opendataday #dc

Updates about the Open Data Day DC 2013 activities are available on the event’s hackpad.

If you know of other legal informatics projects to be discussed at Open Data Day DC 2013, please mention them in the comments.

Information about other legal hacking events appears here and here.

HT @JoshData

Surden on Computable Contracts

Professor Harry Surden of the University of Colorado Law School has published Computable Contracts, UC Davis Law Review, Vol. 46, pp. 629-700 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

It is possible to formulate contractual obligations so that computers can “understand” and make prima-facie compliance assessments with specified terms and conditions. Such a contractual obligation, formulated specifically for computer processability, is what this Article terms a “computable contract.” Computable contracts are not merely theoretical, but instead are increasingly being used in economically significant domains. Certain widely used financial contracts exemplify this model. The emergence of computable contracts has largely been unrecognized in the legal literature. However, computable contracting is not extensible across all, or even most, contracting scenarios. Rather, it is limited to a small subset of contracting scenarios involving standardization, and relative legal and factual certainty.

Drawing upon computer science research, this Article provides a theoretical account of computable contracting. It first explains how firms can communicate contracting information to computers by representing contracts as data instead of (or in addition to) the traditional written language form. Formalizing contractual obligations in this way is what is termed “data-oriented” contracting. The representation of contractual obligations as data, in turn, allows for novel contracting properties. For example, parties can effectively “translate” certain contractual criteria into a comparable set of computer-processable rules. To make contracts “computable”, parties provide computer systems with external data that is relevant to performance. This model is supported by contemporary examples of computable contracts in domains ranging from finance to intellectual property. This Article also provides principles for distinguishing contracting scenarios that are amenable to computability from those that are not.

Click here for video (in QuickTime format, .mov) of Professor Surden’s presentation of this article at Stanford Law School, October 2011.

Click here for the abstract of Professor Surden’s presentation of this article at Stanford Law School, October 2011.

Call for Papers: AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 28 February 2013 and full paper submission deadline of 15 May 2013 — has been issued for AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, to be held at a date to be determined, between 21 and 27 July 2013, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

The workshop is being collocated with XXVI. World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.

Papers for AICOL 2013 are invited on the following topics:

• Law and Science
• Knowledge Management
• Law and Cognitive Science
• Cognitive schemas
• Law and Complexity Theory
• Law and Robotics
• Complex Systems
• Law and Mathematics
• Legal Theory
• Legal Graphic Representation
• Legal Culture
• Game Theory
• Computer Ethics
• Formalization of Legal Systems and Norms
• Artificial Societies
• Rules and Standards
• Argumentative Frameworks
• Agreement technologies
• Legal Ontologies
• Electronic Institutions
• Governance
• Legal Concepts
• Legal Information Retrieval
• Legal Thesauri
• Online Dispute Resolution
• Taxonomies
• Trends in e-Discovery, e-Courts, e-Administration
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Legal Knowledge Acquisition
• Users’ studies
• Legal Knowledge Representation

For more details, please see the call.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

Legal Informatics Papers @ e-Stockholm ’12 Legal Conference

Five legal informatics papers were presented at the e-Stockholm ’12 Legal Conference held 21-23 November 2012.

Click here for the page listing the papers, with links to abstracts.

Here are the authors and titles of the legal informatics papers listed on the program; titles link to the abstracts:

• Colette R. Brunschwig: Law is Not or Must Not Be Just Verbal and Visual in the 21st Century: Toward Multisensory Law
• Giovanni Sartor: A Logical Model for the Conflict of Laws
• Helena Haapio: Visualising Contracts for Better Business
• Innocent Mgeta: Tanzanian perspective
• Tobias Mahler: A Graphical User-interface for Legal Texts?

For full text of papers please contact the authors.

HT blawblaw

Call for Papers: ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law

A call for papers — with paper submission deadline of 18 January 2013 — has been issued for ICAIL 2013: 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, to be held 10-14 June 2013 in Rome, Italy.

The Twitter account for the conference is @ICAIL2013 . The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #ICAIL2013. The conference organizers invite those interested to follow the Twitter account and hashtag and to comment and contribute with the latest news.

The conference features two tracks: one for “regular papers” and one for “innovative applications papers.”

Here is the complete list of deadlines:

• Mentoring program request deadline: November 9, 2012
• Mentoring program paper deadline: November 16, 2012
• Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 7, 2012
• Submission of abstracts (optional): January 11, 2013
• Submission of papers deadline: January 18, 2013
• Notification of acceptance: March 20, 2013
• Final revised and formatted papers due: April 19, 2013
• Conference: June 10 – June 14, 2013

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Formal and computational models of legal reasoning
• Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining
• Computational models of argumentation and decision making
• Legal knowledge representation including legal ontologies and common sense knowledge
• Automatic legal text classification and summarization
• Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
• Machine learning and data mining applied to legal databases
• Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
• E-discovery and e-disclosure
• E-government and e-justice
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Modeling norms for multi-agent systems
• Modeling negotiation and contract formation
• Computational models of case-based legal reasoning
• Online dispute resolution
• Intelligent legal tutoring systems
• Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Anne Gardner

[NOTE: Updated 23 November 2012 to add the Twitter account and hashtag. HT Enrico Francesconi]

Legislative Bill and Government Contract Metadata Added to New York State Open Government Site

Metadata for legislative bills and state government contracts have been added to NYOpenGovernment.com, an open government data and transparency service maintained by the New York State Attorney General, according to David Lombardo’s article entitled Project Sunlight website now offers open government link, dailygazette.com Capital Region Scene blog, 31 May 2012.

For each legislative bill, metadata in NYOpenGovernment.com include the name of the bill’s sponsors and co-sponsors, the section of the state code in which the bill is to be located if enacted, the year the bill was introduced, a summary of the bill, and a link to the full text in the New York legislature’s bill databases. On NYOpenGovernment.com bill metadata does not appear to be made available in XML. NYOpenGovernment.com does not appear to allow bulk download of bill metadata.

For each government contract, metadata in NYOpenGovernment.com include the name of the contracting agency, the vendor’s name and address, a description of the contract, agency code, contract number, the amount of the contract, and amendments to the contract. Contract metadata on NYOpenGovernment.com are made available in XML, CSV, and Excel formats. However, Derek Willis notes that on NYOpenGovernment.com identifiers for government contract records in XML, CSV, and Excel formats are irregular, making automated harvesting of these records very difficult. NYOpenGovernment.com does not appear to allow bulk download of contract metadata.

The user interface of the service enables cross-database searches — although results are not integrated — so that users can manually establish connections between information about bills or contracts, on the one hand, and information about state elected officials, campaign donations, lobbying, charities, state corporations, and “member items” — which appear to be earmarks — on the other.

The value of NYOpenGovernment.com to developers, technologists, and scholars seems quite limited, to the extent that the service does not appear to offer an application programming interface (API), the search system does not integrate results from different databases, the service does not allow bulk download of metadata, legislative metadata are not provided in XML, and the service adds unsystematic identifiers to XML versions of contract metadata records, making scraping very difficult.

HT State Integrity Investigation.

April 15: Legal Hackathon, at Brooklyn Law School Incubator and Policy (BLIP) Clinic

A legal hackathon will be held 15 April 2012 at the Brooklyn Law School Incubator and Policy (BLIP) Clinic, in Brooklyn, New York, USA.

The agenda includes sessions and workshops on:

• “Crowdsourced Policymaking and Fostering Civic Engagement through Technology”;
• “Hacking Contracts”;
• hacking privacy policies;
• developing “a platform to publish corporate resolutions” for benefit corporations, as part of an online platform for such corporations, called O-Corporation.

For more information, please see the Website.

HT Tim Hwang.