April 26: CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference: Tweets and Resources

The CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference is being held 26 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

The conference focuses ‘on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly. The conference will bring together leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, investors and technologists that are experimenting and actively working to re-architect the future of the law. If you’re of a similar mind, we’d love to have you there.’

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #futurelaw

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

The conference Chair was Tim Hwang.

The legal informatics-oriented panels at the conference include:

• Legal Disruption: Why Now? Why Here? What Next?
• Computational Law and Contracts
• Designing Legal Data
• Open Source Legal Practice

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University and the ReInventLaw Lab will give the closing keynote address.

The conference is sponsored by CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

Please see the comments to this post for additional resources related to the conference.

Registration open: CodeX FutureLaw 2013: Conference on Technology & Legal Profession, 26 April

Tim Hwang tells us that registration is now open for CodeX FutureLaw 2013, “a conference focusing on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly,” to be held 26 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

Tim is Chair of the conference.

The legal informatics topics to be addressed during the conference sessions include:

• Legal Disruption: Why Now? Why Here? What Next?
• Computational Law and Contracts
• Designing Legal Data
• Open Source Legal Practice

Speakers include:

• Itai Gurari of Judicata
• Tony Lai of LawGives
• Daniel Lewis of Ravel Law
• Tim Stanley of Justia
• Ed Walters of Fastcase

For more details, please see the conference Website.

HT Tim Hwang

Schuman: U.S. House Convenes Second Public Meeting on Legislative Bulk Data

Daniel Schuman, Esq., of the Sunlight Foundation has posted House Convenes Second Public Meeting on Legislative Bulk Data, at the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

Here is an excerpt:

On January 30th, the House of Representatives held a public meeting on its efforts to release more legislative information to the public in ways that facilitate its reuse. This was the second meeting hosted by the Bulk Data Task Force where members of the public were included; it began privately meeting in September 2012. (Sunlight and others made a presentation at a meeting, in October, on providing bulk access to legislative data.) This public meeting, organized by the Clerk’s office, is a welcome manifestation of the consensus of political leaders of both parties in the House that now is the time to push Congress’ legislative information sharing technology into the 21st century. In other words, it’s time to open up Congress.

The meeting featured three presentations on ongoing initiatives, allowed for robust Q&A, and highlighted improvements expected to be rolled out of the next few months. In addition, the House recorded the presentations and has made the video available to the public. The ongoing initiatives are the release of bill text bulk data by GPO, the addition of committee information for docs.house.gov, and the release of floor summary bulk data. It’s expected that these public meetings will continue at least as frequently as once per quarter, or more often when prompted by new releases of information. [...]

The Bulk Data Task Force was formed in part in response to the #freeTHOMAS movement. That movement seeks free public bulk access to the contents of the THOMAS U.S. federal legislative database, which is gradually being superseded by a new database called Congress.gov.

For more details, please see Daniel’s complete post.

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.

Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants to further development of RECAP open law repository

On 3 February 2013 an additional $10,000 for the Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants — which fund the development of the RECAP project aimed at increasing public access to U.S. federal judicial information — were announced by Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Here is an excerpt from the announcement:

The generous folks over at Google’s Open Source Programs team have pledged to support two more RECAP-related project awards — at $5,000 each. These are open to anyone who wishes to submit a proposal for a significant improvement to the RECAP system. We will work with the proposers to scope the project and define what qualifies for the award.

There are several potential ideas. For instance, someone might propose add support to RECAP for displaying the user’s current balance and prompting the user to liberate up to their free quarterly $15 allocation as the end of the quarter approaches (inspired by Operation Asymptote). Someone might propose to improve the archive.recapthelaw.org interface, and to improve detection and removal of private information. Someone might propose some other idea that we haven’t thought of. You may wish to watch the discussion of a few of these initial ideas from our developer kickoff session.

Email info@recapthelaw.org if you are interested. Thanks again to the Think Computer Foundation and Google.

These grants are in addition to the original $5,000 in grants sponsored by Think Computer Foundation and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, where RECAP was developed.

Click here for Stephen Schultze’s VoxPopuLII post explaining RECAP.

HT @harlanyu and @sjschultze

Glassmeyer: Free Law Users Group

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI has launched Free Law Users Group, on the pbworks platform.

Here is the description:

This group is for sharing news and developments in the Free Law world. Primarily it will serve as a conduit for connecting librarians to the law tech and developer communities, in the hope that librarians will be able to increase involvement and share their skills and knowledge. It is also hoped that individuals in the Free Law, Open Law and Open Gov developer worlds will join in and see that librarians aren’t so scary and can be a valuable resource in their projects.

This website is a wiki. Please feel free to add anything of relevance. It will really only succeed if the community takes charge of it. This also means it is a constant work in progress so check back often!

HT @sglassmeyer

On a related note:

Tim Stanley of Justia has started a new Free Law discussion group on Google+.

Malamud on Aaron and freeing legal data

Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org has posted his eulogy for Aaron Swartz, entitled Aaron’s Army.

The eulogy describes several of Carl and Aaron’s efforts to make legal data publicly available, including U.S. copyright registration records and U.S. federal judicial documents from the fee-based PACER database.

Data made public as a result of those efforts are now used in a number of publicly available services.

HT @binarybits

Justia launches a Free Law discussion group on Google+

Tim Stanley of Justia has started a new Free Law discussion group on Google+.

Recent topics have included Courtney Minick’s post about the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to begin self-publishing its opinions online.

Occupy the Law

THIS —-> MT @emasters And we do need a digital public law library. Unencumbered access to legal materials is necessary. #OccupyTheLaw?