Legal Informatics and Legal Communication Papers @ LSA 2013

Here is a selected list of papers on legal informatics or legal communication presented at LSA 2013: Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, held 31 May-2 June 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. (Click here for the conference program.) (Click here for abstracts of the papers on deliberation.) (If you know of other legal informatics or legal communication papers presented at the conference but not listed here, please feel free to mention them in the comments):

• Janet Ainsworth (Seattle University): Contestation over Knowledge in Courtroom Discourse: The Expert Witness on the Stand
• Stephanie L. Albertson (Indiana University Southeast): The Influence of Jurors’ Race on Perceptions of Complex Scientific Evidence
• Benoit Aubert, Gilbert Babin, and Hamza Aqallal (HEC Montreal): Providing an Architecture Framework for Cyberjustice
• Susan A. Bandes (DePaul University): Victim Impact Evidence and Gruesome Photos: Reconsidering the Probative, the Prejudicial, and the Emotional
• Vanessa Beaton (University of Ottawa): A Missing Link in the Literature: Towards an Interdisciplinary Analysis of Justice Sector Technology
• Rubens Becak, and Joao Victor R Longhi (University of Sao Paulo): The Collaborative Legislative Procedure: Participativity Through the Internet during the Draft Bill Number 2.126/2011, Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet
• Alyse Bertenthal (University of California – Irvine): Law in Translation: The Construction of Legal Narratives
• Josh Blackman (South Texas College of Law, Houston): Robot, Esq.
• Jenny Temechko Braun (University of Virginia): Writing the Terms of Indian Country: Sherrill v. Oneida and Colonial Copyright Narratives
• Clara de Brauw (Athena Insitute, VU University): How Have Recent Changes in Dutch Public Law Affected Opposition Movements Against Policy Decisions? The Case of Public Participation in Land-Use Decision-Making
• Jacquelyn Burkell (University of Western Ontario) and Jane Bailey (University of Ottawa): Implementing Courtroom Technology: The Canadian Perspective
• Ellen S. Cohn, Rick J. Trinkner, and Lindsey Marie Cole (University of New Hampshire): Legitimacy and Normative Status as Mediators between Legal Reasoning and Adolescent Rule-Violating Behavior
• Lindsey Marie Cole and Ellen S. Cohn (University of New Hampshire): Jury Room Reasoning: The Use of Evidence, Counterfactual Thinking, and Emotion in Jury Deliberations
• Marie Comiskey (University of Michigan): A Transnational Approach to Juror Comprehension: Comparing Canadian and American Jury Instructions and Jury Aids
• Robin Conley (Marshall University): Agents of the State: Jurors’ Negotiations of Accountability in Death Penalty Decisions
• Richard Cornes (School of Law, Essex University): Darkness upon the Face of the Earth: The Communications Challenge Facing the United Kingdom’s New Supreme Court
• Yasmin Dawood (University of Toronto): Democracy, Deliberation, and Participation
• Anya Degenshein (Northwestern University): Shared Meaning, Shrouded Legitimacy, and Ruptured Alliances: The Creation of Prosecutorial Power in the Legislative Arena
• Clarissa Diniz Guedes (Law School Federal University of Juiz de Fora): Brazilian Civil Procedure in the Age of Visual Media: A Case-Law Review on Video Evidence
• Gregory Dolin (University of Baltimore): Speaking of Science: Introducing Notice-and-Comment into the Legislative Process
• Laurence Dumoulin (CNRS – ISP): What is “Justice at a Distance”? Spaces, Symbols and Routines in Remote Court Hearing
• Dana D. Dyson, and Kathryn Schellenberg, University of Michigan-Flint: Access to Justice: The Readability of Legal Aid Internet Services
• Neal Feigenson (Quinnipiac University): Opinions Gone Wild: Multimedia Links in Judicial Opinions
• Roberto Freitas Filho (Centro de Ensino Unificado de Brasilia), and Luciana Barbosa Musse (Centro Universitario de Brasilia – UniCEUB): Methodology of Analysis of Decision – MAD
• Masahiro Fujita (Kansai University), and Syugo Hotta (Meiji University): Trust in Legal System in Japan: An Internet Survey
• Nancy Gertner (Harvard law School): The Jury and Social Networking
• Julie Globokar (Kent State University): Narratives and Counter-Narratives Surrounding the Passage of the Federal Probation Act of 1925
• Catherine M. Grosso (Michigan State University): Information Seeking in Voir Dire: Could Modifying Juror Questioning Reduce Jury Selection Racial Disparities
• Branislav Hazucha, Hsiao-Chien Liu, and Toshihide Watabe (Hokkaido University): Copyright, Protection Measures and Their Acceptance by Consumers in Japan
• Syugo Hotta (Meiji University): A Neuroscientific Analysis of Language Used in Japanese Mixed-Jury Trials: Preliminary Study
• Kathleen E. Hull and Penny Edgell (University of Minnesota): Cultural Schemas of Law in Talk about Social Controversies
• Scott Ingram (High Point University), and Jennifer Banks (UTS: Insearch): The Power of the Common Law: Judicial Language in Australia, the UK and the US
• Rafael M. Iorio Filho (Universidade Estcio de S), Fernanda Duarte (Universidade Federal Fluminense): Constitutional Law and Discourse: Representations of Brazilian Legal Culture
• Ross Kleinstuber (University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown), Heather V Zaykowski (University of Massachusetts Boston), and Caitlin McDonough (Umass Boston): Judicial Narratives of Ideal and Deviant Victims in Judges’ Capital Sentencing Decisions
• Janny Leung (University of Hong Kong): Justice According to the Powerless: The Case of Unrepresented Litigation in Hong Kong
• Karen Levy (Princeton University): The Automation of Compliance: Techno-Legal Regulation in the U.S. Trucking Industry
• Wenjie Liao (University of Minnesota): Why Chinese People Obey the Law: A Survey of Legal Compliance
• Mona Lynch (University of California, Irvine): Empathy, Anger and Death: Racialized Emotional Expressions in Mock Capital Jury Deliberations
• Giampiero Lupo (Research Institute on Judicial Systems (IRSIG-CNR) – National Research Council of Italy): Explaining Successes and Failures of E-Justice Services in Europe: The Cases of Money Claim on-Line, Trial Online, e-Barreaux and e-Codex
• David Marrani (University of Essex): Cameras in Courts: Between Voyeurism and Transparency
• Shelby A. McKinzey and Sara Steen (University of Colorado, Boulder): Understanding the Meaning of Evidence in the Use of “Evidence-Based Practices”: Drug Policy Reform in Colorado
• Jesse Merriam (Johns Hopkins University): The Rule of Law as a Language Game: A Wittgensteinian Look at Stare Decisis and Legal Consistency
• Susan Moffitt (Brown University): Making Policy Public: Developing Bureaucratic Administration through Advisory Committee Public Deliberation
• Mami Hiraike Okawara (Takasaki City University of Economics), and Kazuhiko Higuchi (Cosmos Law Firm): A Discourse Analysis of Sakurai’s Confession Statement of the Fukawa Case
• Gregory S. Parks (Wake Forest University): Predicting Racial Bias in Tort Jury Decision Making
• Liana Jean Pennington (Northeastern University): Legal Mobilization, Voice, and the Invocation of Justice Frames within the Juvenile Delinquency Court Process
• Usha Rao (Independent Scholar): Speaking from Somewhere: Locating the Judicial Voice in the Judgment
• Alexander E Reger (University of Connecticut): Discourse and the Law: The Case of Gerald Ford and the Vietnam Amnesty Debates
• Vicente Riccio (Law School Federal University of Juiz de Fora): Brazilian Criminal Procedure in the Age of Visual Media: A Case-Law Review on Video Evidence
• Tanina Rostain (Georgetown Law Center): What are Lawyers Good for?
• Jessica M. Salerno (Arizona State University): How Race, Gender, and Emotion Expression Affect Holdout Jurors’ Influence during Jury Deliberation
• Damien Scalia (University of Geneva): International Criminal Justice: Perception of Legitimacy by the Accused
• Samuel R. Sommers (Tufts University): On Juries, Deliberations, and Racial Diversity
• Simon Stern (University of Toronto): Fictional Origins of the Reasonable Person
• Lupita Svensson (Ersta Skndal University): Welfare and Law Interacting: Utilising a Socio-Legal Text Analysis Model
• Stella Szantova Giordano (Quinnipiac University School of Law): We Have to Get By: Court Interpreting and Its Impact on Access to Justice for Non-Native English Speakers
• Justine Tinkler (University of Georgia) and Sarah Becker (Louisiana State University): “It is Just a Part of Going to Bars”: College Students’ Attitudes about the Legal Regulation of Unwanted Sexual Contact in Public Drinking Settings
• Tom Tyler (Yale University): Values and Law-Related Behavior
• Margaret van Naerssen (Immaculata University): Convincing Judges of Validity Socio-Cultural Issues in Linguistic Analyses
• Elizabeth S. Vartkessian, and Christopher E. Kelly (University at Albany): Capital Improvements? Juror Decision-Making in Texas Death Penalty Trials before and after Penry v. Lynaugh
• Neil Vidmar (Duke University): The Growing Use of Biological Predisposition Evidence and Its Implications for the Jury System
• Richard Weisman (York University): Being and Doing: An Approach to the Social and Legal Regulation of Remorse
• John Zeleznikow (Victoria University), and Pompeu Casanovas (Autonomous University of Barcelona): Online Dispute Resolution and Models of Relational Law and Justice

For abstracts of papers, please search the conference program. For full text of papers, please contact the authors.

Call for Papers: JURIX 2013: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 2 September 2013 — has been posted for JURIX 2013: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 11-13 December 2013, at the University of Bologna.

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 and eDiscovery;
• 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, including legal open data;
• XML standards for legal documents and rules, 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 details, please see the call for papers.

HT Jurix

Mill on Scout, Free Access to Law, and Open Legal Data

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation has posted the text of his presentation on tracking government information and open legal data, given 26 April 2013 at the AzALL Congressional Information Symposium, in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

Here is the introduction to the presentation:

I recently got a chance to go speak to a group of Arizona law librarians about legal informatics [...]

They found me because of Scout, and asked me to talk about tracking government information. I decided to start with Scout as an example, to zoom out to similar projects [GovTrack and CourtListener] , and then to describe the conditions necessary to make projects like ours possible. Because the audience was law librarians, a sympathetic crowd inside an unsympathetic area of government, I emphasized the necessity of absolutely free access to data as a fundamental requirement and right. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @konklone

Legal informatics presentations at e-Government Konferenz 2013

Several legal informatics presentations are listed in the program for e-Government Konferenz 2013, to be held 11-12 June 2013, in Linz, Austria:

• Mag Michael Fuchs & Mag Markus Poplari: Aktuelles zum Zentralen Personenstandsregister
• Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Michael Glatz: Justiz 3.0
• Dipl.-Ing. Christian Habernig: ePartizipation in Wien
• ADir. Thomas Halwachs & Mag Gerhard Köhle: Durchgängiges e-Government zwischen Verwaltung, Wirtschaft und Bürger/innen am Beispiel des Zentralen Waffenregister (ZWR)
• Gerhard Hartmann: „Wien stellt ‚e‘ zu“ – Die elektronische Zustellung von behördlichen Dokumenten
• Dipl.-Ing. Herbert Hüttenbrenner: Plattformübergreifende Registereinbindung
• Dipl.-Ing. Robert Ortner & Martin Mitter: eFWP elektronischer Flächenwidmungsplan, Abwicklung von Umwidmungsverfahren
• Dr Arne Tauber: Elektronische Signatur – Quo Vadis: ein Rückblick und ein Ausblick
• Prof. Dr. Arthur Winter: Österreichische Registerlandschaft

Hagan: Open Law Lab

Dr. Margaret Hagan of Stanford Law School has launched Open Law Lab, “an initiative to design law – to make it more accessible, more usable, and more engaging.”

Dr. Hagan says that the Lab currently is a nonprofit collaborative project among law students.

The Lab’s work currently addresses:

• Visualization of legal information
• Improvements in dispute resolution
• Legal educational technology with an emphasis on gamification
• Court technology, under the rubric of Usable court systems
• Technology and innovation in access to justice

For more information, please see the Open Law Lab Website.

HT @margarethagan here and here

Legal Informatics Projects Featured at Open Data Day DC 2013

The program for Open Data Day DC 2013, also called Open Data Day 2013 Hackathon – DC Metro — to be held 23 February 2013 in Washington, DC, USA — includes at least four legal informatics projects:

• Contract/Procurement Visualization Sprint (Visualizing.org) [...]
• Open DC Zoning Data (@andrewsalzberg) [...]
• Parse dates and legal citations from RECAP documents [...]
• Discover Bill Pedigree

The Twitter hashtags for the event appear to be #opendataday #dc

Updates about the Open Data Day DC 2013 activities are available on the event’s hackpad.

If you know of other legal informatics projects to be discussed at Open Data Day DC 2013, please mention them in the comments.

Information about other legal hacking events appears here and here.

HT @JoshData

Jaquith: Version 0.6 of The State Decoded released

Waldo Jaquith has released version 0.6 of The State Decoded, his open legal data and e-participation platform for U.S. states, as explained in his new post entitled Version 0.6 Released at The State Decoded blog.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

Version 0.6 of The State Decoded is now available on GitHub. This release is a really exciting one—it establishes a public API for State Decoded sites and creates a standard XML format for importing laws! This is an important release of The State Decoded, one that stands to significant increase the accessibility of the project to developers, both within the software and without. A total of 23 issues were resolved, nearly all of which are towards those two goals. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @waldojaquith

Call for Papers: AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 28 February 2013 and full paper submission deadline of 15 May 2013 — has been issued for AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, to be held at a date to be determined, between 21 and 27 July 2013, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

The workshop is being collocated with XXVI. World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.

Papers for AICOL 2013 are invited on the following topics:

• Law and Science
• Knowledge Management
• Law and Cognitive Science
• Cognitive schemas
• Law and Complexity Theory
• Law and Robotics
• Complex Systems
• Law and Mathematics
• Legal Theory
• Legal Graphic Representation
• Legal Culture
• Game Theory
• Computer Ethics
• Formalization of Legal Systems and Norms
• Artificial Societies
• Rules and Standards
• Argumentative Frameworks
• Agreement technologies
• Legal Ontologies
• Electronic Institutions
• Governance
• Legal Concepts
• Legal Information Retrieval
• Legal Thesauri
• Online Dispute Resolution
• Taxonomies
• Trends in e-Discovery, e-Courts, e-Administration
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Legal Knowledge Acquisition
• Users’ studies
• Legal Knowledge Representation

For more details, please see the call.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

Schultze on Open PACER

Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy has launched Open PACER, a site for crowdsourcing the drafting of The Open PACER Act of 2013.

The intent of the bill is to make the PACER federal judicial database accessible free of charge to the public.

The bill currently reads:

The federal courts shall charge no fee for public access to information or documents described in subsection (a) [i.e., the content of PACER], or for any services provided by the court to the public for searching or indexing such information or documents.

In his post about Open PACER, Steve writes that the Open PACER Act “is drafted in Legislative XML, allows you to comment, and the code is available on github.”

Click here for video of Steve’s presentation about Open PACER at the Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference.

Click here for the slides and transcript of the presentation.

Click here for other work by Steve on increasing public access to PACER.

Adreani: Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf

Guillaume Adreani of AHJUCAF has published Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf, la base de données de jurisprudence francophone, Revue générale du droit, January 2013.

The post describes the technology and functionality of Juricaf, the free and open database of francophone supreme court decisions, with particular emphasis on its use of open source software — including Apache Solr and CouchDB — its exposure of metadata in several formats including Dublin Core, its use of schema.org microdata, and the compatibility of its metadata with the Zotero open source citation management system.

Here are excerpts from the introduction:

Juricaf est une base de données de décisions de justice en français accessible gratuitement à l’adresse . Créée à l’initiative de l’AHJUCAF, l’association des cours de cassation francophones et réalisée par le Laboratoire Normologie, linguistique et informatique du Droit de l’Université de Paris I, elle publie à ce jour près de 800 000 documents issus de 42 pays et institutions francophones. Elle bénéficie également du soutien de l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. [...]

Quels sont les facteurs-clés pour la réussite d’un tel projet ?
Le moteur de recherche est au cœur d’un tel outil. Ses performances sont liées à l’utilisation d’outils en Open source. Trois autres critères sont déterminants pour que le projet soit crédible :

• Une alimentation en décisions de justice et une mise à jour automatisée,
• L’ajout d’innovations documentaires,
• Une exposition maximale des métadonnées. [...]

For more details, please see the complete article.

HT @adreagui