Legal Informatics Papers @ BILETA 2013

Several legal informatics papers are being presented at BILETA 2013: The 28th Annual Conference of the British and Irish Legal Educational Technology Association, being held 10-12 April 2013 in Liverpool, England, UK.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #bileta13

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the conference.

Here are the authors and titles of the legal informatics papers I was able to identify (click here for abstracts of these papers and other papers from the conference):

• A. Leveringhaus and T. de Greef: Autonomous Robotic Weapons Systems: Protecting legal and moral responsibility via sound design
• J. Lombard & L. O’Brien: The use of a legal ontology to support governance, risk and compliance in the financial services industry
• P. Cortés: Recommendations for the Design of the European Online Dispute Resolution Platform
• A. Alajaji: Electronic contracting: The EU and Saudi Arabia’s approaches
• K. Rogers: Consent in the online environment – principles before form?
• S. Woodhouse, M. Waite, J. Marshall: The development of pro-bono clinical legal assessment in response to intersecting agendas: legal aid, professionalisation, and evolving legal advice paradigms
• A. Muntjewerff: Learning and Instruction in the Digital Age
• F. Grealy, J. Bainbridge, P. Maharg, R. Mitchell, J. Mills, F. Grealy, R. O’Boyle & K. Counsell: iLEGALL (iPads and Legal Learning): mobile legal learning
• S. Dempsey & R. O’Shea: Promoting Legal Fairness Through Data Analysis
• C. Easton: MOOCs: Too Connected for Effective Interaction?
• J. Marshall: Revisiting podcasting in the age of MOOCS – understanding student engagement with self-running learning resources in different educational contexts

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.

CALI’s Free Online Course on Digital Law Practice

CALI, the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, is offering a free, online course on digital law practice, from 10 February – 6 April 2012.

The Twitter hashtag for the course is #tdlp.

The course will address topics including management of a virtual law office, electronic document automation and standardization, court technology, unauthorized practice of law, unbundling of legal service, and lawyers’ use of social media.

The instructors include Stephanie Kimbro, Marc Lauritsen, Richard Granat, Ronald Staudt, Kingsley Martin, Sarah Glassmeyer, William Hornsby, and Ernest Svenson.

For registration or more information, please see the course Website.

Le Métayer et al. on Liability Issues in Software Engineering: Case Study of eSignatures

Daniel Le Métayer of INRIA Grenoble – Rhône-Alpes, and colleagues, have published Liability Issues in Software Engineering: The Use of Formal Methods to Reduce Legal Uncertainties, Communications of the ACM, 54(4), 99-106 (April 2010). Here is the abstract:

This paper reports on the results of a multidisciplinary project involving lawyers and computer scientists with the aim to put forward a set of methods and tools to (1) define software liability in a precise and unambiguous way and (2) establish such liability in case of incident. The overall approach taken in the project is presented through an electronic signature case study. The case study illustrates a situation where, in order to reduce legal uncertainties, the parties wish to include in the contract specific clauses to define as precisely as possible the share of liabilities between them for the main types of failures of the system.

New on VoxPopuLII: Čyras on Legal Frameworks of Virtual Worlds

Professor Dr. Vytautas Čyras of the Vilnius University Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics has posted On a Legal Framework in a Virtual World: Lessons from the VirtualLife Project, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Professor Čyras describes the regulatory infrastructure of VirtualLife, the experimental European Union-funded virtual world. In this infrastructure, legal and technological constraints are used together in an attempt to provide effective but flexible regulation.

Professor Čyras emphasizes the decentralized, “federalist” governance structure of VirtualLife — which provides for uniform protection of core rights while permitting groups to form smaller communities and to customize the laws that govern them — the peer-to-peer architecture of VirtualLife, which complements the decentralized governance structure; the VirtualLife e-contracting environment, which offers a variety of standard contract terms while allowing parties to create their own customized terms; and “virtual laws,” which enable technological grants and enforcement of intellectual property and other rights.

This post should be of interest to all those who are interested in the legal dimension of virtual worlds, including developers, policy makers, legal professionals, information systems researchers, and information providers.

Calls for Papers: Workshops @ ICAIL 2011

Calls for papers, with diverse submission deadlines, have been issued for the workshops at ICAIL 2011: The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law; the workshops are scheduled to be held 6 and 10 June 2011, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

DESI IV: Workshop on Setting Standards for Searching Electronically Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings, 6 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 1 April 2011: Research papers;
• 22 April 2011: Position papers.

Workshop on Agent Model-Based Reasoning in Law, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 14 March 2011.

Computational Law: A Bridge Towards the Business Rules, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 20 April 2011.

AI & Evidential Inference, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• TBA

AHLTL 2011: Applying Human Language Technology to the Law, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• 31 March 2011.

Coherence 2011: Artificial Intelligence, Coherence, and Judicial Reasoning, 10 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 15 April 2011: Abstracts;
• 3 June 2011: Full papers.

HT JURIX.

DEON 2010 Proceedings Available

Proceedings are available for DEON 2010: The 10th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, held 7-9 July 2010 in Fiesole, Florence, Italy.

The proceedings were edited by Giovanni Sartor and Guido Governatori.

Abstracts of the law-related papers presented at the conference will be posted here shortly.

Click here for the conference Website.

Benlamri et al. on Secure Human Face Authentication for Mobile E-government Transactions

Professor Rachid Benlamri of the Lakehead University Department of Software Engineering, and colleagues, have published Secure Human Face Authentication for Mobile E-government Transactions, 8 International Journal of Mobile Communications 71 (2010). Here is the abstract:

This paper describes a joint biometric-cryptographic authentication system for mobile e-government transactions. The system can be used to verify, prove, and enforce ‘mobile contracts’. The proposed system offers a cryptographical mutually-authenticated image exchange and face identification scheme, as well as remote signing of documents by transferring an authenticated image for personal face and signature operation. The system integrates two physically secured entities, a mobile device camera and a smart-card, both certified by some authority to enable undeniable visualised ‘mobile signature’. The result is a secured, traceable e-government infeasible-to-clone virtual person in a form that can be seen as a trustable ‘e-officer’.

Fraunhofer SIT Develops Digital Signature for Internet Telephony

Digital signature technology for Internet telephony — called VoIPS — has been developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, according to a press release issued by the institute 27 January 2010.

The technology could be used to authenticate agreements entered into via Internet telephone conversations.

The announcement gives the following illustration of a possible application of the technology:

A banker talks to a customer. This talk leads to a contract that is to be recorded in order to provide evidence. The banker presses the record button on his or her telephone, and the customer is automatically asked for consent. If the customer confirms, recording begins in accordance with the VoIPS principle, which is based on digital signature technology. The software from SIT divides the telephone calls into intervals and signs the transmitted data packets with corresponding metadata. To keep the separate packages from being stored in the wrong order, each interval is given a distinctive encoded ‘stamp’. In this way, VoIPS combines all the important information on a stored call into an indivisible chain. Any changes to the calls will be noticed, no matter when the change is made.

Representatives of the institute plan to demonstrate the technology at The GSMA Mobile World Conference, to be held 15-18 February 2010 in Barcelona, Spain.

For more information, please see the announcement.

HT ACM Tech News.

Lampathaki et al. on Cross-Dimensional Modelling Patterns to Empower Pan-European Business to Government Services Interoperability

Fenareti Lampathaki and colleagues at National Technical University of Athens, have published Cross-Dimensional Modelling Patterns to Empower Pan-European Business to Government Services Interoperability, in Proceedings of the Confederated International Workshops and Posters on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: ADI, CAMS, EI2N, ISDE, IWSSA, MONET, OnToContent, ODIS, ORM, OTM Academy, SWWS, SEMELS, Beyond SAWSDL, and COMBEK 2009, at 152 (2009). Here is the abstract:

“Pan-European policies envisioning a single European market and reduction of administrative burden call for effective, interoperable implementation and transformation of cross-border business-to-government services. Despite the existence of dedicated tools and methodologies that enable modelling and execution of cross-organizational business processes, a service-driven approach, that implies associating legal and business rules on the workflow, binding reusable documents with specific information exchanges among the stakeholders and extracting all-inclusive executable flows, remains to be adopted. In this context, the present paper outlines cross-dimensional patterns for modelling and transforming pan-European Business to Government Services interconnecting processes, data and rules under a common, cross-country prism. Such model-driven patterns foster interoperability on a conceptual and platform-independent basis. Discussion on the results is targeting best practices that can be drawn at research level and is pointing out the key difficulties that have to be tackled due to lack of enterprises’ and public organizations’ readiness in various countries.”