Several Articles on Legal Educational Technology (Papers from BILETA 2012) in New Issue of EJLT

The new issue of European Journal of Law and Technology (Volume 4, Number 1, 2013) is a special issue that contains several papers on legal educational technology, first presented at BILETA 2012: Conference of the British & Irish Legal Educational Technology Association, held 29-30 March 2012 in Newcastle, England, UK.

Here are the contents related to legal educational technology:

• Jonathan Bainbridge, Karen Counsell, Freda Grealy, Paul Maharg, Joel Mills, Rory O’Boyle: iPads in Legal Learning (iLEGALL): mobile devices in professional legal learning
• Wai Shun Chow & Firew Kebede Tiba: Professional Legal Education Reviews: Too Many “What”s, Too Few “How”s.
• Graeme Broadbent & Pamela Sellman: Images of Law and Legal Education: Law School websites and the provision of information
• Janice Ann Denoncourt: Using Film to Enhance Intellectual Property Law Education: Getting the Message Across
• Patricia McKellar & Steven Warburton: Developing an e-reader and e-publishing model for flexible and open learning on a distance learning LLB programme
• Antoinette Muntjewerff: CASE reading, structuring and analyzing decisions by judges
• Philip Leith & Cynthia Fellows: BAILII, Legal Education and Open Access to Law
• Emily Allbon: Too cool for (law) school? Using technology to engage students in legal skills
• Sandra Meredith: Critical review of referencing software when used with OSCOLA

HT @nzjudi

Call for Papers: LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference

The call for papers and presentation proposals has been issued for LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 26-27 September 2013 on the Channel Island of Jersey.

The conference Website does not seem to state the deadline for submitting papers or proposals. If you know the submission deadline, please feel free to tell us in the comments to this post.

[UPDATE 11 February 2013: The conference organizers now say the submission deadline is 31 March 2013.]

Papers are invited on the topics covered by any of the seven tracks in which the conference program is divided:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access
• Privacy v open government in legal publishing
• Emerging patterns of information access and usage
• Technological development and free access to law

The conference Twitter account is @JerseyLVI2013 and the conference hashtag is #lvi2013

For details about the tracks, please see the track Websites.

For more details about the conference, please see the conference Website.

Masters on Hackthelaw: Piratebox meets Free Law

Elmer Masters, JD, MLS, of CALI, has posted Hackthelaw: Piratebox meets Free Law, at his blog, <CONTENT /> v.5.

Here is an excerpt:

The hackthelaw box is an open, anonymous network stocked with primary and secondary legal materials that are freely available for download. People can connect to the network and download any of the materials as well as chat with others connected to the network. All this is in a closed network space separate from the Internet. I can easily imagine setting this up in a library as a way for folks to access legal materials and even ask basic questions about the resources. Any device that has WiFi can connect to the network, so folks could download materials directly to their phones or tablets as well as laptops. Consider hackthelaw as another Free Law access point.

Beyond being a distribution node for Free Law, devices like hackthelaw have potential uses in legal education and practice. A closed private network could be used to distribute and receive law school exams. A professor could launch a network at the beginning of a class to provide students with that day’s material. In practice such a device could be used for gather initial client intake information. In conferences or negotiations a private network could handle the exchange of documents between parties. There are lots of possibilities here, and, as time becomes available, I hope to be looking into some of them in the not too distant future.

If you’re interested, I’ll be running some sort of hackthelaw device at the CALI booth in the AALS exhibit hall in New Orleans, January 4 -6, 2013.

HT @emasters

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

Palmirani et al., eds.: AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems: Papers from AICOL III

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani, Professor Dr. Ugo Pagallo, Professor Dr. Pompeu Casanovas, and Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor, have edited a new book entitled AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems – Models and Ethical Challenges for Legal Systems, Legal Language and Legal Ontologies, Argumentation and Software Agents (Springer, 2012).

The book contains revised selected papers from International Workshop AICOL-III, Held as Part of the 25th IVR Congress, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, August 15-16, 2011.

HT Professor Palmirani

Bell on the Future of Legal Research

Professor Dr. John Bell of the University of Cambridge has published The Future of Legal Research, Legal Information Management, 12(4), 314-317 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

This article is based on a presentation given by John Bell at the annual conference of The Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) held in Bristol in September 2012. His talk reflects the immediate challenges facing law schools, academic lawyers and the legal publishing industry in the light of the recent Finch Report and the subsequent response by the Government whereby it has adopted an open access policy to publicly funded research.’

Ninth Circuit Begins In-house Publishing of Its Decisions, with Summaries Written by Court Staff

The U.S. federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has issued a press release entitled Court Moves to In-House Publishing of Opinions.

The press release reads in part:

[...] Since early November, the court has been processing opinions in-house rather than contracting for that service from West Publishing. The change is expected to produce a substantial cost savings for the court.

Court staff now manage the process of converting opinions from the original word processing documents into Adobe PDF files, which are then uploaded onto the website, where they can be viewed and/or downloaded by the public. The opinions are formatted for optimal viewing on a tablet computing device. On a regular desktop or laptop computer screen, opinion text will initially appear oversized but can easily be redisplayed in normal size using the options available in the Adobe Reader software.

A more important change involves the addition of case summaries prepared by court staff. The summaries save time by allowing readers to quickly get the gist of a decision without having to search through the opinion itself. West previously produced the summaries, but for copyright reasons they could not be included with opinions made available online. [...]

For more information please see the complete press release.

HT Gary Price at InfoDocket and Tim Hull at Courthouse News

Bruce Reports on LVI 2012 Workshop on Open Scientific Publishing and Communication on Law and ICT

A Workshop on Open Scientific Publishing and Communication on Law and ICT was held 10 October 2012 in Ithaca, New York, immediately following LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute (LII), Cornell Law School, Ithaca, New York, USA. The workshop had the informal title of “Steve the Librarian.” Tom Bruce of the LII sends the following report on the workshop. Thanks to Tom for allowing me to repost his report:

Since I ended up acting as the informal “chair” of the meeting, I suppose I should be the one to fill everyone in. It was, in fact, a meeting of 8 or 10 people around a breakfast table at the Holiday Inn, and not a workshop in any ordinary sense. But it was the latest event in a chain of discussions around this subject that began at LVI in Florence, and continued through the LVI meetings in Durban and Hong Kong, sometimes in conference sessions, sometimes in the FALM business meetings, and sometimes in airport lounges. It is fair to say that this is a recurring topic and an important one.

We outlined three major needs in the field.

One (which I’ve pushed to the point of being a broken record on the subject) is the need for low-threshold, internal communication among the various subdisciplines that touch open access to law. We’ve taken on some of that in VoxPopulii, first under your capable leadership and now with Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger at the helm. It’s vitally necessary that legal informatics researchers learn about the needs of publishers, publishers about librarians, librarians about informatics, and social scientists about all of them (not a complete census but you see what I mean) and that the resulting literature be accessible to non-specialists in the field that is talking about itself. There is room for much more than VoxPopuLii here.

A second is for a publishing venue for people who are working on open access to legal information as researchers in various fields, particularly younger scholars. If you can agree for a moment that we might describe their fields as, for the most part, “law and…” fields, then the journals they now have available to them are all in the fields that are on the other side of the three dots. This has a distorting effect. The availability of very good open-journal software for electronic publication makes good alternatives possible. There is general agreement that because there are so many fields bordering what we all do there is a potentially difficult problem of defining boundaries for such a journal. Initial forays will thus focus pretty tightly on open access to law. Even that is potentially tricky, given that government information of many kinds might be eligible and useful, so firm editorial leadership is called for.

A third is for a comprehensive archive and index to existing work in the field, to be maintained as new stuff is added. One might describe its boundaries as being “all the stuff Rob Richards posts about” , with substantial work on mapping it having been done by you both in formal bibliographies and in blog posts and Twitter. We think there is the possibility of working either with an existing apparatus such as the physics arXiv, or with a purpose-built DSpace installation or some other repository.

Participants in the discussion included Pompeu Casanovas, Graham Greenleaf, Enrico Francesconi, Ginevra Peruginelli, James Lambert, John Heywood, Cicely Wilson, John Joergensen, Amy Taylor, and others whose names I apologize for not retrieving from my faulty memory.

Various individuals have been tasked with pursuing initial steps toward these objectives with the aim of having all or part in place by the time of the next LVI conference (tentatively believed to be in September 2013). We’ll post news as things become concrete.

Archived Tweets and Resources from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

Click here for archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format, from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012 at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.

Click here for the conference Website.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

For blog posts and other resources related to the conference, please see the comments to this post.

New Lists of U.S. State Legal Resources Available on Web

Two new resources provide metadata describing U.S. state legal resources available on the Web:

• 2011-2012 Preliminary Analysis of AALL’s State Legal Inventories

[The American Association of Law Libraries' (AALL’s)] Digital Access to Legal Information Committee and Government Relations Office analyzed 6 primary online legal resources [Administrative Code, Administrative Register, Statutes, Session Laws, High Court Opinions and Appellate Court opinions] included in AALL’s state legal inventories to answer the following questions about each title:

• Is it official?
• Is it authenticated?
• It is preserved?
• Is permanent public access mandated by statute?
• Is there a copyright assertion or other use restriction?
• [...] whether the state is employing universal citation
• [whether the state has] introduced or enacted the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA)

• The Analysis and the data linked from it are not subject to copyright, according to Sarah Glassmeyer.

• State Regulations Online
• This table has been created by the Sunlight Foundation (click here for a description of the table). For each state, the table lists whether the regulations are readable in a Web browser; whether the regulations can be downloaded in bulk; and information about the laws governing online availability of regulations.

HT @sglassmeyer and Matt Rumsey