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

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

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.

October 7-9: LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

LVI 2012: The 25th Law via the Internet Conference, is being held 7-9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School, in Ithaca, New York, USA.

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

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

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

Wilson: Against an eBook Model for Legal Publishing

Jason Wilson of Jones McClure Publishing has published Adopting an eBook Model Is a Terrible Idea for Legal Publishers, at rethinc.k.

In this post, Mr. Wilson reflects on the current role of eBooks in legal publishing. He presents several arguments against pursuing a digital legal publishing model focused on the eBook, one of which is that the attributes of an eBook publishing model — “including single issue, book pricing, lending, supplementation, etc.” — are inconsistent with “the direction [in which] the web has been headed.”

Instead of eBooks, Mr. Wilson argues:

What we need is a system that promotes access (law), answers (commentary), and annotations (community), and satisfies the perceived needs of eBook-desiring consumers (e.g., resource management tools and rational pricing plans).

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT @jasnwilsn.

Julie on SeyLII: The freeway to Seychelles Legal Information

Thelma Julie of the Judiciary of the Seychelles has posted SeyLII: The freeway to Seychelles Legal Information, at the AfricanLII Blog.

In this post, Ms. Julie describes the development of SeyLII: The Seychelles Legal Information Institute, a free-access-to-law service for The Seychelles, which launched in March 2012.

The post describes the need of Seychelles’ citizens and legal community for online access to Seychelles legal materials, the role of Kerry Anderson of AfricanLII and Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute in the planning of SeyLII, and some of the technology and principles underlying SeyLII, including the use of medium-neutral legal citations.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Fastcase Introduces e-Books, Beginning with Advance Sheets

Fastcase, the online legal research service, has begun publishing e-books in EPUB and .mobi formats, and the first set of Fastcase e-books consists of advance sheets of U.S. state and federal court decisions, according to Sean Doherty’s post, Fastcase’s Free E-Books May Disrupt Legal Book Publishing at Law Technology News, and the post, Fastcase eBooks: Advance Sheets are a Glimpse Into the Future, on Fastcase’s Legal Research Blog.

According to the Fastcase blog post, Fastcase advance sheets will be available “for each state, federal circuit, and U.S. Supreme Court”; will be free of charge and “licensed under [a] Creative Commons BY-SA license“; and will include summaries. Each e-Book Advance Sheet will contain “one month’s judicial opinions (designated as published and unpublished) for specific states or courts.”

According to Sean Doherty’s post, future Fastcase e-Books will include “e-book case reporters with official pagination and links” into the Fastcase database, as well as “topical reporters” on U.S. law, covering fields such as securities law and antitrust law.

According to the Fastcase blog post, Fastcase’s approach to e-Books is inspired in part by CALI‘s Free Law Reporter, which makes case law available as e-Books in EPUB format.

Fastcase’s adaptation of e-Book technology developed by CALI represents a notable example of knowledge-sharing between the nonprofit and for-profit sectors of the legal informatics community.

For more information, please see the Fastcase blog post, Sean Doherty’s post, Bob Ambrogi’s post, and Greg Lambert’s post.

For more information about Free Law Reporter, please see John Mayer’s post, The Free Law Reporter: Open Access to the Law and Beyond, at VoxPopuLII.

CALICon 2012: Conference for Law School Computing, 21-23 June 2012

CALICon 2012: The Conference for Law School Computing, is being held 21-23 June 2012 at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, California, USA.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #CALIcon12.

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for descriptions of accepted presentations.