Digitizing the Laws of Cameroon

Digitising Cameroon’s Laws: La numérisation des lois camerounaises is a recent free-access-to-law initiative. The project appears to administered by I-Vission International and to be funded in part by The Indigo Trust.

Here is the description of the project from the project’s Website:

Digitising Cameroon Laws is an initiative developed by I-Vission International to promote Cameroon laws and give citizens the possibility to appreciate and make suggestions to improve them through our web platform and as such we will be addressing the following needs:

• The demystification and vulgarization of laws in Cameroon
• Community involvement in developing promoting and enforcing laws in Cameroon

This platform could be used by:

• Government and stake holders to monitor the popularity or unpopularity of specific laws, get updates of the challenges faced in the implementation of laws on the field,
• Citizens to report any form of abuse or violations of their basic rights and consult lawyers online using the eConsultation module

Currently, the service provides audio recordings of a number of statutes.

HT @willperrin

Digital Legal Documents from Yale Law School and GovTrack Cited in Recent Historical Scholarship, New Study Shows

Digital legal documents published by Yale Law School’s Avalon Project and Dr. Joshua Tauberer‘s GovTrack open legislative data system are among the archival digital collections cited in recently published historical literature, according to Professor Dr. Donghee Sinn, Impact of digital archival collections on historical research, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 63, 1521–1537 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

A number of digital projects have been implemented for archival and special collections. The amount of funds and effort devoted to such projects is enormous, and now they are providing greater opportunities and convenience for researchers to view and make use of important, rare, and/or brittle historical materials. However, little attention has been paid in the information science field as to how much impact these projects to digitalize archival collections have had on actual historical research publications. Existing studies are largely devoted to system designs and the user/usability interface, as well as users’ search behaviors. Little has been done to determine the direct relationship between digital resources and historical research. This study surveyed research articles in the field of history to observe how frequently and widely digital collections were used, what kinds of digital collections were used more extensively and for what purposes, and what the current status of digital archival collections among other resources is in historical research. Citations and figures in articles of the American Historical Review for the period 2001–2010 were analyzed with a specific focus on digital archives collection. The usage patterns by material types and formats of references and the impacts of digital archival collections among other sources are identified from two perspectives of impact: intensity and extensity. Observation of the direct relationships with digital collections and historical studies suggest some practical guidelines for future digital projects with concrete data.

Yale Law School’s Avalon Project and GovTrack were the only sources of legal information identified in the study.

Greenleaf et al. on Digitising and Searching Australasian Colonial Legal History

Professor Dr. Graham Greenleaf of the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, and colleagues, have posted Digitising and Searching Australasian Colonial Legal History.

Here is the abstract:

Australasia has a rich and complex legal history since the first European settlement, and our knowledge of legal practice and precedent in the colonies of Australasia is still developing. The Australasian Colonial Legal History Library project is an ARC-funded project being carried out by the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) since January 2012 with input from 18 legal historians from Universities across Australia. Cooperation with other parties who have already built invaluable and pioneering online resources for Australasian colonial law is an essential part of the project.

AustLII is a free access online service which has operated since 1995 as a joint facility provided by UNSW and UTS Law Faculties, and now provides over 500 databases, with usage of over 700,000 page accesses per day. The Colonial Legal History Library project is therefore being built within a large and mature research infrastructure, and this presents challenges as well as advantages. In particular, many of the AustLII databases cover the whole period from the formation of a colony to the present, so the databases for this Library have to be ‘virtual’ databases extracted from this larger corpus.

The paper explains the construction, content and features of the first version of the Library, which as of July 2012 contains 12 databases including one case law database from each of the seven colonies (including New Zealand), some of which are ‘recovered’ cases from newspaper reports, the complete annual legislation to 1900 from three of the colonies, plus legal scholarship concerning the colonial era. These databases provide over 20,000 documents so far, and the Victorian Government Gazette 1851-1900 another 200,000. The Library also includes the LawCite citator, which allows the subsequent citation history of any colonial case to be tracked, including if cited by courts outside Australasia.

The medium term aim of this part of the ARC project (which extends to 1950 in its full scope) is to include all legislation, reported cases, and cases which can be ‘recovered’, from the inception of each colony to 1900. Scholarship (old and new) and key source materials are also being added, as budgets permit. We hope that the Library will be a leader in the creation of legal history resources from the colonial era.

To Be Published in May 2012: Rubin, ed.: Legal Education in the Digital Age

Professor Edward L. Rubin of Vanderbilt University Law School has edited Legal Education in the Digital Age (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in May 2012).

Here is the table of contents:

Part I. Creating Digital Teaching Materials:

1. The digital path of the law. Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover

2. Open source and the reinvention of legal education. Matthew T. Bodie

3. Copyright and innovation in legal course materials. R. Anthony Reese

Part II. Teaching with Digital Course Materials:

4. Digital evolution in law school course books: trade-offs, opportunities and vigilance. Lawrence A. Cunningham

5. Smarter law school casebooks. John Palfrey

6. Law games: the importance of virtual worlds and video games for the future of legal education. Gregory Silverman

7. Law students and the new law library: an old paradigm. Penny Hazelton

Part III. Reforming the Curriculum through Digital Course Materials:

8. Law school 2.0: course books in the digital age. David Vladeck

9. The new course book and the new law school curriculum. Edward Rubin

10. Casebooks, learning theory and the need to manage uncertainty. Peggy Cooper Davis.

Slides from 2011 ITTIG-CNR Workshop: From Information to Knowledge: On Line Access to Legal Information

Slides have been posted for presentations at From Information to Knowledge: On Line Access to Legal Information, a workshop organised by ITTIG-CNR in conjunction with Festival d’Europa 2011, on 6 May 2011, in Florence, Italy.

Full text of revised versions of many of the papers has been published in: Maria Angela Biasiotti and Sebastiano Faro (Eds.), From Information to Knowledge – Online Access to Legal Information: Methodologies, Trends and Perspectives (IOS, 2011).

Here is a list of the papers presented, with links to slides, abstracts, and revised full text where available:

• Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute: Access to legislation in the semantic web (click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Cedric Chailloux, Publications Office of the European Union – EUR-Lex Unit: The new EUR-Lex: improvement and redesign (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text, by Els Breedstraet);
• Carol Tullo, The National Archives – Information Policy and Services – UK: Online access to UK legislation: strategy and structure (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Filippo Donati, University of Florence: Access to legal information in the European Union (Click here for abstract and revised full text);
• G. Boella, L. Humphreys, P. Rossi, and L. van der Torre: Eunomos, a legal document management system based on legislative XML and ontologies (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• K.E. Petersen: Experiences with “Lex Dania Live” (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• B. Bassi: Automatic classification of documents for the Library of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Melih Karakullukçu: Proper treatment of gaps in legal data and in electronic legal research (Click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Marc van Opijnen: European Case-law identifier: a short history and the broad outlook (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• G. Damele, M. Dogliani., A. Mastropaolo, F. Pallante and D.P. Radicioni: On legal argumentation tecniques: towards a systematic approach (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text.);
• D. Bourcier and M. Fernández-Barrera: Challenges regarding legal metadata. IP licensing and management of different cognitive levels in the Web 2.0 (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• G. Peruginelli, D. Tiscornia, G. Greenleaf, A. Mowbray and P. Chung: A comprehensive free access legal information system for Europe (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• R. Caso, P. Guarda and V. Moscon: Open Access to legal scholarship and Open Archives: towards a better future? (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text).

Leiter on A New Mode of Full-Text Case Retrieval: The Leading Case Service

Professor Richard Leiter of the University of Nebraska College of Law has posted a summary of his new research project, entitled A New Mode of Full-text Case Retrieval – a work in progress, on his blog, The Life of Books.

In this post, Professor Leiter explains his idea for a new information retrieval system for U.S. judicial decisions. The system would contain metadata (and possibly full text) for selected, authoritative cases — “leading cases” — identified by the frequency with which they are cited in law journal articles. The citation counts would be determined by text mining software, which would be run on large full-text law journal collections, such as the HeinOnline Law Journal Library.

An interesting discussion of the project has begun in the comments to the post.

Professor Leiter is conducting this research as a fellow at the Harvard Law School Library.

For more information, please see the post.

Relaunch of Juricaf: Database of Francophone Supreme Court Decisions

Guillaume Adreani of L’Association des cours suprêmes judiciaires francophones (AHJUCAF), has announced the re-launch of Juricaf, a database of francophone supreme court decisions, available on the Web, free of charge.

The database includes a total of more than 700,000 full text decisions, from 46 nations. Click here for dates of coverage and statistics on the number of decisions issued by each court. Whether any copyright restrictions apply to the decisions is unclear; the “rights” metadata tag for most decisions reads “public”.

Free, public Web access to these decisions appears to mark a change for Juricaf, which formerly restricted access to its content, according to a June 2011 post at precisement. The new version of Juricaf therefore seems to constitute a notable shift toward greater provision of legal open government data and free access to legal information.

In the new Juricaf system, decisions are output in HTML format. Dublin Core metadata is embedded in the text of most decisions, each of which is identified with a URN:LEX identifier. RSS feeds furnish notification of new decisions from each court and jurisdiction.

News about Juricaf is also available via the service’s Twitter feed ( @juricaf ) and Facebook page.

For more information, please see the Juricaf Website.

DPLLA: Digital Public Law Library of America

Interesting tweets about a proposed, free, and open Digital Public Law Library of America ( #DPLLA ) started/inspired by @emasters @johnpmayer @jpalfrey @kenhirsh . (Elmer’s #OccupytheLaw tweet immediately preceded this thread.) See especially Dean Palfrey’s chair lecture and article.

Joergensen Profiled as Web Pioneer

Digital law library developer John Joergensen of the Rutgers Camden Law Library was profiled last week as a “Web pioneer” by Kevin Riordan in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Rutgers law librarian a Web pioneer,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 1, 2011.

The article describes John’s innovative work developing the Rutgers Camden Law Digital Collections, which provide free Web access to the full text of U.S. federal and New Jersey court decisions, statutes, ethics decisions, and legislative history materials.

Congratulations to John!

AALL 2011

The program for AALL 2011: The American Association of Law Libraries’ Annual Meeting, held 23-26 July 2011 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, includes several legal informatics presentations and posters.

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for the list of posters.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the conference.

Twitter hashtags for the conference appear to be #AALL11 and #AALL2011.

Slides and videos for some presentations are available here.

Audio for most presentations is (or will be) available here for a fee.