Call for Papers: JURIX 2011

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 5 September 2011 — has been issued for JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 14-16 December 2011 at the University of Vienna, in Vienna, Austria.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web;
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Henry Prakken.

“Accessing Legal Information” Roundtable @ A2K Global Academy Workshop

A report on the roundtable on Accessing Legal Information, at the Access to Knowledge Global Academy Workshop, held 18-19 January 2011 at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa, has been posted by Jake Gardener at the Yale Information Society Project.

According to the report, the panelists were Mariya Badeva-Bright, Tom Bruce, Daniel Poulin, Ivan Mokanov, Isabelle Moncion, and Darrel Pink.

The panelists discussed topics including:

• The Free Access to Law Movement;
• LexUM‘s work with JuriBurkina and JuriNiger;
• The factors influencing the recent increase in access to legal information in West Africa;
• Measures for evaluating the effectiveness of free access to law initiatives;
• the African Legal Information Institute (African LII);
• the sustainability of free access to law initiatives;
• the relationship between access to legal information, and democracy and the rule of law; and
• “the public interest in making legal information easily accessible to everybody.”

For more information, please see the entire report.

Eiseman & Skalbeck on the Evaluation of Law School Websites

Jason Eiseman of the Yale Law School Library and Roger Skalbeck of Georgetown University Law Library have published Top 10 Law School Home Pages of 2010, in Ross E. Davies, Ed., Green Bag Almanac and Reader 2011. Washington, DC, Green Bag Press, pp. 339-366. Here is the abstract:

This ranking report attempts to identify the best law school home pages based exclusively on objective criteria. The goal is to assess elements that make websites easier to use for sighted as well as visually-impaired users. Most elements require no special design skills, sophisticated technology or significant expenses.

Ranking results in this report represent reasonably relevant elements. In this report, 200 ABA-accredited law school home pages are analyzed and ranked for twenty elements in three broad categories: Design Patters & Metadata; Accessibility and Validation; and Marketing and Communications. As was the case in 2009, there is still no objective way to account for good taste. For interpreting these results, we don’t try to decide if any whole is greater or less than the sum of its parts.

HT @lsolum.

Abel on Evidence-Based Access to Justice

Laura K. Abel, Esq., of The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, has posted Evidence-Based Access to Justice, forthcoming in The University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change. Here is the abstract:

An evidence-based approach is notably absent from the many efforts to expand access to the justice system for civil litigants, and there is no generally accepted metric for evaluating which access to justice tool works when. This article proposes the use of controlled, randomized experiments to evaluate whether a particular access to justice intervention leads to the same rate of wins and losses as full and competent attorney representation. It also describes a second metric for assessing the fairness of proceedings in which a particular access to justice intervention is used: whether the intervention provides litigants with the ability to adequately perform all tasks they would need to perform to enable the judge to reach a fair and accurate decision.

HT @aabibliographer.