Mill on Scout, Free Access to Law, and Open Legal Data

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation has posted the text of his presentation on tracking government information and open legal data, given 26 April 2013 at the AzALL Congressional Information Symposium, in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

Here is the introduction to the presentation:

I recently got a chance to go speak to a group of Arizona law librarians about legal informatics [...]

They found me because of Scout, and asked me to talk about tracking government information. I decided to start with Scout as an example, to zoom out to similar projects [GovTrack and CourtListener] , and then to describe the conditions necessary to make projects like ours possible. Because the audience was law librarians, a sympathetic crowd inside an unsympathetic area of government, I emphasized the necessity of absolutely free access to data as a fundamental requirement and right. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @konklone

Legal informatics presentations at e-Government Konferenz 2013

Several legal informatics presentations are listed in the program for e-Government Konferenz 2013, to be held 11-12 June 2013, in Linz, Austria:

• Mag Michael Fuchs & Mag Markus Poplari: Aktuelles zum Zentralen Personenstandsregister
• Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Michael Glatz: Justiz 3.0
• Dipl.-Ing. Christian Habernig: ePartizipation in Wien
• ADir. Thomas Halwachs & Mag Gerhard Köhle: Durchgängiges e-Government zwischen Verwaltung, Wirtschaft und Bürger/innen am Beispiel des Zentralen Waffenregister (ZWR)
• Gerhard Hartmann: „Wien stellt ‚e‘ zu“ – Die elektronische Zustellung von behördlichen Dokumenten
• Dipl.-Ing. Herbert Hüttenbrenner: Plattformübergreifende Registereinbindung
• Dipl.-Ing. Robert Ortner & Martin Mitter: eFWP elektronischer Flächenwidmungsplan, Abwicklung von Umwidmungsverfahren
• Dr Arne Tauber: Elektronische Signatur – Quo Vadis: ein Rückblick und ein Ausblick
• Prof. Dr. Arthur Winter: Österreichische Registerlandschaft

Hagan: Open Law Lab

Dr. Margaret Hagan of Stanford Law School has launched Open Law Lab, “an initiative to design law – to make it more accessible, more usable, and more engaging.”

Dr. Hagan says that the Lab currently is a nonprofit collaborative project among law students.

The Lab’s work currently addresses:

• Visualization of legal information
• Improvements in dispute resolution
• Legal educational technology with an emphasis on gamification
• Court technology, under the rubric of Usable court systems
• Technology and innovation in access to justice

For more information, please see the Open Law Lab Website.

HT @margarethagan here and here

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

Jaquith: Version 0.6 of The State Decoded released

Waldo Jaquith has released version 0.6 of The State Decoded, his open legal data and e-participation platform for U.S. states, as explained in his new post entitled Version 0.6 Released at The State Decoded blog.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

Version 0.6 of The State Decoded is now available on GitHub. This release is a really exciting one—it establishes a public API for State Decoded sites and creates a standard XML format for importing laws! This is an important release of The State Decoded, one that stands to significant increase the accessibility of the project to developers, both within the software and without. A total of 23 issues were resolved, nearly all of which are towards those two goals. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @waldojaquith

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

Schultze on Open PACER

Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy has launched Open PACER, a site for crowdsourcing the drafting of The Open PACER Act of 2013.

The intent of the bill is to make the PACER federal judicial database accessible free of charge to the public.

The bill currently reads:

The federal courts shall charge no fee for public access to information or documents described in subsection (a) [i.e., the content of PACER], or for any services provided by the court to the public for searching or indexing such information or documents.

In his post about Open PACER, Steve writes that the Open PACER Act “is drafted in Legislative XML, allows you to comment, and the code is available on github.”

Click here for video of Steve’s presentation about Open PACER at the Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference.

Click here for the slides and transcript of the presentation.

Click here for other work by Steve on increasing public access to PACER.

Adreani: Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf

Guillaume Adreani of AHJUCAF has published Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf, la base de données de jurisprudence francophone, Revue générale du droit, January 2013.

The post describes the technology and functionality of Juricaf, the free and open database of francophone supreme court decisions, with particular emphasis on its use of open source software — including Apache Solr and CouchDB — its exposure of metadata in several formats including Dublin Core, its use of schema.org microdata, and the compatibility of its metadata with the Zotero open source citation management system.

Here are excerpts from the introduction:

Juricaf est une base de données de décisions de justice en français accessible gratuitement à l’adresse . Créée à l’initiative de l’AHJUCAF, l’association des cours de cassation francophones et réalisée par le Laboratoire Normologie, linguistique et informatique du Droit de l’Université de Paris I, elle publie à ce jour près de 800 000 documents issus de 42 pays et institutions francophones. Elle bénéficie également du soutien de l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. [...]

Quels sont les facteurs-clés pour la réussite d’un tel projet ?
Le moteur de recherche est au cœur d’un tel outil. Ses performances sont liées à l’utilisation d’outils en Open source. Trois autres critères sont déterminants pour que le projet soit crédible :

• Une alimentation en décisions de justice et une mise à jour automatisée,
• L’ajout d’innovations documentaires,
• Une exposition maximale des métadonnées. [...]

For more details, please see the complete article.

HT @adreagui

Morocco: Court of Cassation to begin digital projects

The Moroccan Court of Cassation has announced plans to undertake several digital projects, including implementing electronic document management and case management and virtual hearings, according to the article La Cour de cassation à l’heure du numérique: Vers l’utilisation des NTIC dans le traitement et la gestion des dossiers, Libération Maroc, 24 January 2013.

HT @GderoubaiX and @adreagui

Robinson on the Indian Supreme Court’s workload, data management, and publishing practices

Nick Robinson, JD, of the Centre for Policy Research, has posted a working paper entitled The Indian Supreme Court by the Numbers (2012).

Here is the abstract:

This working paper, which uses internal Indian Supreme Court data provided by the Court itself, examines the Indian Supreme Court’s docket in detail from 1993 to 2011. It also occasionally draws on available data to describe the workings of the Court before 1993. The paper points out how deficiencies in the way data is currently collected and categorized by the Court presents challenges in developing a full picture of its workload. Using the admittedly imperfect data set, it then analyzes the Supreme Court’s caseload by geographic region of appeal, subject-matter category, and petition type, as well as looks at trends in the overall workload of the Court.

The paper also discusses the Court’s publishing practices, and refers to Dr. Sushant Sinha‘s Indian Kanoon free-access-to-law service, among other resources.