Bruce on the LII Legislative Metadata Model

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute has posted Our Legislative Metadata Model, at Making Metasausage.

Excerpt:

Some months ago, I and some of my colleagues at the LII began to release a series of white papers that were written as part of the construction of a (mostly) comprehensive metadata model for Federal legislation. They are appearing as a series of blog posts in this blog. One which seemed more appropriate for VoxPopuLII – it had to do with metadata quality concerns that are not limited to legislation — was posted there yesterday. We’ll continue to adapt the white papers as blog posts and release them as Metasausage posts, but we thought that it was high time that we released full documentation of the model. Many of you have known of its existence for a while; we’ve been slow to release it because, well, we’re just overwhelmed with work.

The model is Linked-Data-friendly and designed to be highly extensible. We think it could serve as a reference model (by which I think I really mean “extensible scaffolding”) for a much more comprehensive metadata model for Federal legislation. As you’ll see when you read the documentation, we made no attempt to model things where we lacked domain expertise (appropriations and reconciliation being two), nor did we try to deal with the finer points of House and Senate rules when modeling process.

We’ll be interested in your reactions to it, and very, very interested in taking it further. Over the next month or so, we’ll actually build out what we’ve already put in the Open Metadata Registry into a full Linked Data representation online. [...]

The model was primarily done by myself, Diane Hillmann, John Joergensen, and Jon Phipps. [...]

Disclosure: I made small contributions to the model.

Click here for the LII Legislative Metadata Model documentation (in many formats).

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @trbruce

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.

Joergensen Appointed Director of Rutgers Newark Law Library

John Joergensen, JD, MS, MA, has been appointed to be director of the Law Library at the Rutgers University Newark School of Law, according to a May 1, 2012 press release by the law school.

John is a pioneer in the development of digital law libraries, notably the New Jersey Court Web project, and the Rutgers Camden Law Library Digital Collections.

Please join me in congratulating John!

Joergensen Profiled as Web Pioneer

Digital law library developer John Joergensen of the Rutgers Camden Law Library was profiled last week as a “Web pioneer” by Kevin Riordan in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Rutgers law librarian a Web pioneer,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 1, 2011.

The article describes John’s innovative work developing the Rutgers Camden Law Digital Collections, which provide free Web access to the full text of U.S. federal and New Jersey court decisions, statutes, ethics decisions, and legislative history materials.

Congratulations to John!

July 25: UniversalCitation.org Organizational Meeting

An organizational meeting for UniversalCitation.org will be held 25 July 2011, at the Rutgers Camden Law School.

UniversalCitation.org is a new, U.S.-based effort to urge governments to adopt non-proprietary legal citation standards, and to create new technologies that process and output non-proprietary legal citation information.

According to the project’s Website, the organizers of this effort are Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School; John Joergensen of Rutgers Camden Law Library; Professor Bruce Kennedy of the University of Toledo College of Law; and Dean Peter W. Martin of Cornell University Law School.

In a position paper, Dean Martin proposes two principal goals for UniversalCitation.org:

• (1) seek to persuade U.S. jurisdictions that have not yet adopted a non-proprietary legal citation standard to do so; and
• (2) create an online citation server, that could receive a citation (proprietary or non-proprietary) for any U.S. court decision, and output a non-proprietary citation for the decision; hotlinks to non-proprietary and proprietary sources of full text of the decision; and hypertext code — linking to the citation server — for use by case management systems and drafters of legal documents.

The citation server would be modeled on a similar service that is currently offered by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School. (Click here to see how LII’s citation server generates multiple full-text access options for 397 U.S. 150.)

Dean Martin’s proposal currently calls for the citation server to be limited to appellate court decisions. Yet in many areas of U.S. law (including civil procedure, evidence, corporate law, and bankruptcy law), trial-level decisions are frequently cited and serve as valuable precedent. Accordingly, I encourage UniversalCitation.org to include trial court decisions, as well as appellate decisions, in the citation server. (Respecting civil procedure and evidence, decisions of federal and state trial courts serve as persuasive authority. In the corporate context, consider the role played by decisions of the Delaware Chancery Court in many jurisdictions. Respecting U.S. bankruptcy law, federal district court decisions often serve as first-level appellate decisions respecting rulings of bankruptcy courts, and bankruptcy litigation papers and court decisions frequently cite decisions of bankruptcy courts as persuasive authority.)

A list of individuals attending the July 25 meeting, or expressing support for the project, appears on the project’s Website.

For more information, please see the UniversalCitation.org Website.

UniversalCitation.org: A New Non-Proprietary Legal Citation Project

UniversalCitation.org is a new, U.S.-based effort to urge governments to adopt non-proprietary legal citation standards, and to create new technologies that process and output non-proprietary legal citation information.

According to the project’s Website, the organizers of this effort are Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School; John Joergensen of Rutgers Camden Law Library; Professor Bruce Kennedy of the University of Toledo College of Law; and Dean Peter W. Martin of Cornell University Law School.

In a position paper posted this week, Dean Martin proposes two principal goals for UniversalCitation.org:

• (1) seek to persuade U.S. jurisdictions that have not yet adopted a non-proprietary legal citation standard to do so; and
• (2) create an online citation server, that could receive a citation (proprietary or non-proprietary) for any U.S. court decision, and output a non-proprietary citation for the decision; hotlinks to non-proprietary and proprietary sources of full text of the decision; and hypertext code — linking to the citation server — for use by case management systems and drafters of legal documents.

The citation server would be modeled on a similar service that is currently offered by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School. (Click here to see how LII’s citation server generates multiple full-text access options for 397 U.S. 150.)

Dean Martin’s proposal currently calls for the citation server to be limited to appellate court decisions. Yet in many areas of U.S. law (including civil procedure, evidence, corporate law, and bankruptcy law), trial-level decisions are frequently cited and serve as valuable precedent. Accordingly, I encourage UniversalCitation.org to include trial court decisions, as well as appellate decisions, in the citation server. (Respecting civil procedure and evidence, decisions of federal and state trial courts serve as persuasive authority. In the corporate context, consider the role played by decisions of the Delaware Chancery Court in many jurisdictions. Respecting U.S. bankruptcy law, federal district court decisions often serve as first-level appellate decisions respecting rulings of bankruptcy courts, and bankruptcy litigation papers and court decisions frequently cite decisions of bankruptcy courts as persuasive authority.)

An organizational meeting for UniversalCitation.org will be held 25 July 2011, at the Rutgers Camden Law School. A list of individuals attending the July 25 meeting, or expressing support for the project, appears on the project’s Website.

For more information, please see the UniversalCitation.org Website.

New on VoxPopuLII: Mayer on The Free Law Reporter

John Mayer of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), has posted The Free Law Reporter – Open Access to the Law and Beyond, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Mr. Mayer describes The Free Law Reporter, CALI’s new free and open database of decisions from U.S. federal and state courts, built using data from Public.Resource.Org‘s RECOP database. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement.

Mr. Mayer underscores the ebook functionality of Free Law Reporter: the system allows users to automatically transform their Free Law Reporter search results into ebooks in the open EPUB format. These ebooks can be used as casebooks for law school courses, as well as in other applications.

The Free Law Reporter‘s ebook functionality complements CALI’s other legal open educational resource services, the eLangdell free and open digital casebook/textbook service, and the Legal Education Commons, where law professors share their instructional resources online.

Mr. Mayer’s post also discusses the principles underlying The Free Law Reporter. The first of these is the idea that law professors and law librarians should have the freedom to customize databases and course materials to meet the particular needs of their students and the particular objectives of their courses; as Mr. Mayer writes, “Academic law libraries should have free and open access to the law, access that allows them to define and construct the educational environment for law students.”

In addition, Mr. Mayer characterizes The Free Law Reporter as a generative resource, that can foster innovation, creativity, and collaborative effort among law professors, law librarians, and other members of the legal educational community.

Mr. Mayer’s post should be of interest to law professors, law librarians, legal information systems developers, continuing legal education providers, ebook technologists, and the open educational resources community.

Free Law Reporter: CALI’s New Free Law Resource, Built with RECOP Data

CALI, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, has launched The Free Law Reporter (FLR), a new, free, online source of full text U.S. federal and state court decisions, published from January 2011 to the present.

Click here for a list of the content.

FLR contains data from RECOP, The Weekly Report of Current Opinions, distributed by Carl Malamud‘s Public.Resource.Org. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement. FLR appears to be the second service to use RECOP data. The first appears to have been John Joergensen’s State and Federal Caselaw from the RECOP Project, at Rutgers-Camden Law.

The developers of FLR appear to be John Mayer and Elmer Masters of CALI.

FLR offers access to individual court decisions and to ebooks, in the open EPUB format, containing weekly compilations of court decisions from particular U.S. jurisdictions. Click here for 1FLRAlaska.epub, the first FLR ebook compilation from Alaska state courts. According to FLR’s technology page, FLR ebooks are available from the FLR Website and from CALI’s Legal Education Commons.

John Mayer also says: “you can do a search for cases [in FLR] and then download all of the results as an epub file.”

According to FLR’s technology page, FLR ebooks:

can be read on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs and laptops as well as iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. Amazon Kindle support is possible through third party conversion programs like Calibre while we research more direct paths to Kindle support.

FLR uses the Solr open source search engine. Click here for more details on the technology behind FLR.

Click here for Courtney Minick’s informative post about FLR at Justia’s Onward blog.

Click here for Bob Ambrogi’s informative post about FLR at his LawSites blog.

New Free Database of U.S. Court Decisions, Using RECOP Data, by John Joergensen

John Joergensen of the Rutgers Camden Law Library has created a new, free, full-text database of what appear to be all judicial decisions issued by U.S. state and federal courts from January 2011 to present: State and Federal Caselaw from the RECOP Project.

The database contains data from RECOP, The Weekly Report of Current Opinions, distributed by Carl Malamud‘s Public.Resource.Org. RECOP is a project of the Law.gov legal open government data movement.

The user interface of the Rutgers-Camden RECOP database — which appears to use the Swish-e open source search engine — enables Boolean search queries and filtering by state or federal judicial circuit.

The Rutgers-Camden database appears to be the first system on the free Web to make use of RECOP data.

The Rutgers-Camden database is part of the Rutgers-Camden Digital Law Library, which Joergensen has developed.

Click here for more information about RECOP, from Carl’s post at O’Reilly Radar.

HT @jjoerg42.

CALICon 2010 Unconference, 23 June 2010

An unconference / preconference / hackathon for law librarians, legal information providers, and legal IT personnel, on the topic of digital legal information in the law school context, will be held 23 June 2010 at The Rutgers-Camden School of Law, in Camden, New Jersey, USA. The event is being held in connection with CALICon 2010: The 20th Annual Conference on Law School Computing.

The unconference description reads:

Technological advancements in the past twenty years have radically changed the way librarians, IT departments and legal information providers create and accomplish their services. In adapting to an electronic environment, libraries and librarians have often been on the cutting edge in using electronic tools in the area of reference and public outreach. However, with respect to the acquisition, maintenance and distribution of electronic legal information, the library community has been reacting to the innovations of others.

This unconference is intended to be an exploration of how librarians can re-conceive and re-implement their role in world where legal content is being both created and distributed electronically. The legal information provider and IT communities are also invited. It is hoped that by getting the various pieces of the information distribution chain in one room, we can all figure out the best ways to work together in the future.

Click here to sign up.

Click here to submit proposed topics.

For more information, please see the unconference Website.

HT John Joergensen.