Legal Communication Papers at RSA 2012: Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference

The legal communication papers (that I’ve been able to identify) being presented at RSA 2012: The 15th Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference, being held 25-28 May 2012, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, are listed below.

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #rsa12.

The legal communication / legal rhetoric papers being presented at the conference include the following (if you know of other legal communication papers being presented at the conference, please feel free to list them in the comments):

• Jennifer Andrus, University of Utah, and Nathan Atkinson, Georgia State University: Photographs, Witnesses and Bodies: Toward a Visual Rhetoric of Law
• Joseph Bartolotta, University of Minnesota: Indulging John Marshall’s “Sympathies”: Identification, the Cherokee Nation, and the Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia
• Shelby Bell, University of Minnesota: The Presidency as a Tool for Foreign Policy: An Exploration of the Implications of United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp
• Jonathan Benda, Northeastern University: Formosa Betrayed and Its Fate(s): Rhetorical Ecologies and the Reframing of Human Rights Rhetoric
• Frank M. Bryan, University of Vermont: Face-to-face Democratic Deliberation: The Role of Rhetoric in Communal Assemblies
• Peter Odell Campbell, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: Queer Phronesis in Constitutional Argument
• Alan Chu, University of Arizona: Legislative New Racism and the Rhetoric of Ethnic Studies in Arizona
• Emily Cooney, Arizona State University: Keeping the Targets Out: Representation and Social Justice in the Arizona SB 1070 Debate
• Mark Davis, Texas Tech University: The U.S. Constitution and Human Rights: A Rhetorical Look at How the Constitution Is Used as a Weapon by Political and Corporate Interests to Deny Human Rights Concerns to Non-citizens Across the Globe
• Matthew deTar, Northwestern University: The Limits of Religious Rights Discourse: The EU in Domestic Turkish Politics
• Rasha Diab, University of Texas: Revisiting the Constitution of Medina: A Medieval, Arab-Islamic Articulation of Conciliation and Human Rights
• Adam Ellwanger, University of Houston-Downtown: Our “Big, Messy Tough Democracy”: Healthcare Reform and the Failure of Rhetoric
• Megan Foley, Mississippi State University: Logos and Aristotelian Justice: Dikē from Aporia to Analogy
• Michaela Frischherz, The University of Iowa: Not Gay Enough: Performing Identifications in U.S. Asylum Law
• John Gastil, Penn State University; Katherine Knobloch, University of Washington; Robert Richards, Penn State University: Vicarious Deliberation: How the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review Influences Deliberation in Mass Elections
• Mary Glavin, Carnegie Mellon University: Free Appropriate Public Education: Anxiety of Agency in Special Education Law
• Jeremiah Hickey, St. John’s University: In Defense of “Breathing Space:” The Structure of Political Debate in Snyder v. Phelps
• Van Hillard, Davidson College: Definitional Anxieties over Protecting Marriage: Kategoria as Civic Violence
• Karen S. Hoffman, Marquette University: Listening to the People: the Contribution of Online Comment Forums
• Jaclyn Howell, University of Kansas: When Communism and Jim Crow Collide: Harry Raymond and the Case of Willie McGee
• Kristen Hungerford, University of Memphis: Obama Doesn’t Like To ‘Tell’: A Rhetoric of Ambiguity in President Obama’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Signing Address
• James Jasinski, University of Puget Sound: Reconstituting a Prudential Middle Ground Regarding Racial Classifications: From Bakke to Parents United
• Helen Lee, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Rhetorical Construction of Gender in Marriage Cases
• Emiliano Marello, Universidad de Buenos Aires: The Rhetoric of the Possibility of Lesbian Love: Argumentative Aspects of the Legal Struggle of Lesbian Mothers in Argentina
• Jonathan Maricle, University of South Carolina: Accountable Deliberation: The Public’s Role in Healthcare Reform
• Sara McKinnon, University of Wisconsin, Madison: Dividing Definitions of Gender/Sexuality and the Implications for Lesbian Asylum Seekers in the United States
• Paul Minifee, San Diego State University : Rhetoric of Agitation: Rev. Jermain W. Loguen’s Speech in Defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
• William Morgan, New York University: Commodiousness, Concern, and the Uses of Repetitive Questioning in Human Rights Rhetoric
• Christa B. Teston, University of Idaho: Defining “clinical meaningfulness” in FDA cancer-care hearings
• Belinda Walzer, University of North Carolina-Greensboro: What Are The Alternatives? Human Rights, Subjectivity and the Potential of Narrative
• Maggie Werner, Hobart & William: Heroes v. Haters: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Masquerade of Justice
• Karen Wink, U.S. Coast Guard Academy: Deliberative Discourse Surrounding the Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

For abstracts or full text of papers, please contact the authors.

Wyner on Workshop on FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling Projects

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship has posted Note on Workshop on FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling Projects, on his blog, Language Logic Law Software.

The EU-funded Project IMPACT : Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis, was featured at the Workshop. Click here for more information about Project IMPACT.

Here is introductory information about the post:

On January 27th, 2012, I attended a workshop in Sheffield, United Kingdom on current FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling projects. This was an opportunity to hear from and meet participants in other projects, largely based in the United Kingdom. The information (somewhat augmented) about the workshop is below. My colleagues in the IMPACT Project, Professor Ann Macintosh and Neil Benn, presented our side of the story.

Aims

• To close the gap between the availability of cutting edge R & D in eGovernance and Policy Modelling and its take-up in local and central government. It will bring the new governance projects and those about to exploit their results into a collaborative environment.
• To link the projects currently creating the best practice of the future with initiatives seeking to share current best practice, thus assisting with “exploitation” of the new initiatives.
• To briefly assess how these initiatives may be of global benefit by examining how China may be encouraged to take a short cut to sustainable development and looking at joint approaches to China.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Call for Papers: SPLeT 2012: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts

[NOTE: This post has been updated to reflect the extended deadline of 19 February 2012. HT Simonetta Montemagni.]

A call for papers — with extended submission deadline of 19 February 2012 — has been issued for SPLeT 2012: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, to be held 27 May 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.

SPLeT 2012 is being held in conjunction with LREC 2012: The Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.

Papers for SPLeT 2012 are invited on the following topics:

• Construction, extension, merging, customization of legal language resources, e.g. terminologies, ontologies
• Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts
• Semantic annotation of legal textual corpora
• Legal text processing
• Machine learning of legal texts
• Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing
• Legal thesauri mapping
• Automatic Classification of legal documents
• Logical analysis of legal language
• Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a logical formalism
• Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments
• Dialogue protocols for argumentation
• Legal argument ontology
• Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to natural language
• Controlled language systems for law

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

Extended to 11 November 2011: Call for Papers: JURIX Workshop on Fundamental Concepts and Systematization of Law

A call for papers — with extended submission deadline of 11 November 2011 — has been issued for the JURIX 2011 Workshop on Fundamental Concepts and Systematization of Law, to be held 14 December 2011, in Vienna, Austria.

The workshop is being held in connection with JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

Papers for the Workshop on Fundamental Concepts and Systematization of Law are invited on the following topics:

• [...] legal rules or norms,
• legal validity,
• formation of law,
• hierarchy in legal systems,
• the basic norm and rule of recognition,
• rights and duties,
• permissions, obligations and prohibitions, [...]
• states and legal persons[,]
• [d]eductive, abductive and inductive reasoning in law,
• multi-layered reasoning,
• systematization and/or axiomatization of law[,] and
• critical perspectives on fundamental legal concepts and systematization of law.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Anne Gardner.

Call for Papers: JURIX Workshop on Fundamental Concepts and Systematization of Law

A call for papers — with extended submission deadline of 11 November 2011 28 October 2011 — has been issued for the JURIX 2011 Workshop on Fundamental Concepts and Systematization of Law, to be held 14 December 2011, in Vienna, Austria.

The workshop is being held in connection with JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

Papers for the Workshop on Fundamental Concepts and Systematization of Law are invited on the following topics:

• [...] legal rules or norms,
• legal validity,
• formation of law,
• hierarchy in legal systems,
• the basic norm and rule of recognition,
• rights and duties,
• permissions, obligations and prohibitions, [...]
• states and legal persons[,]
• [d]eductive, abductive and inductive reasoning in law,
• multi-layered reasoning,
• systematization and/or axiomatization of law[,] and
• critical perspectives on fundamental legal concepts and systematization of law.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Anne Gardner.

[Revised on 29 October 2011 to reflect extended deadline.]

Project IMPACT: Two New Reports

Two new reports were issued in June 2011 by the EU-funded Project IMPACT: Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis:

• A report on the Argument Analysis, Tracking and Visualisation tool (AVT) (specifically, a report “describ[ing] the requirements analysis and specification, as well as the construction plan” for this tool); and
• A report describing the Argument Reconstruction tool (specifically, a report “formulat[ing] the requirements, review[ing] the applicability of currently available computational linguistics techniques, discuss[ing] the functionality of comparable existing tools and provid[ing] a specification of the first version of the tool with a walk-through of an example”).

In addition, the Project IMPACT Website now includes pages listing the publications and presentations produced in connection with the project.

Calls for Papers: Workshops @ ICAIL 2011

Calls for papers, with diverse submission deadlines, have been issued for the workshops at ICAIL 2011: The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law; the workshops are scheduled to be held 6 and 10 June 2011, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

DESI IV: Workshop on Setting Standards for Searching Electronically Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings, 6 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 1 April 2011: Research papers;
• 22 April 2011: Position papers.

Workshop on Agent Model-Based Reasoning in Law, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 14 March 2011.

Computational Law: A Bridge Towards the Business Rules, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 20 April 2011.

AI & Evidential Inference, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• TBA

AHLTL 2011: Applying Human Language Technology to the Law, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• 31 March 2011.

Coherence 2011: Artificial Intelligence, Coherence, and Judicial Reasoning, 10 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 15 April 2011: Abstracts;
• 3 June 2011: Full papers.

HT JURIX.

Call for Papers: AICOL 2011

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 16 May 2011 — has been issued for AICOL 2011: The Third Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Law, to be held 16 August 2011 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

The workshop is to be held in conjunction with IVR 2011: XXV. World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.

Papers for AICOL 2011 are invited on the following topics:

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

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani.

Call for Papers: Workshop on Applying Human Language Technology to the Law

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 31 March 2011 — has been issued for AHLTL 2011: Applying Human Language Technology to the Law, a workshop to be held 10 June 2011, at ICAIL 2011: The Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

[If the call for papers or the workshop Website is down, click here for the cached version.]

Papers are invited on the following topics:

The workshop will focus on extraction of information from legal text, representations of legal language (ontologies and semantic translations), and dialogic aspects. While information extraction and retrieval are crucial areas, the workshop emphasises syntactic, semantic, and dialogic aspects of legal information processing.

Building legal resources: terminologies, ontologies, corpora.
Ontologies of legal texts, including subareas such as ontology acquisition, ontology customisation, ontology merging, ontology extension, ontology evolution, lexical information, etc.
Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts.
Semantic annotation of legal texts.
Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing.
Legal thesauri mapping.
Automatic Classification of legal documents.
Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a logical formalism.
Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments.
Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to natural language.
Controlled language systems for law.
Name matching and alias detection.
Dialogue protocols and systems for legal discussion.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

Bench-Capon & Prakken on Using Argument Schemes for Hypothetical Reasoning in Law

Professor Dr. Trevor Bench-Capon of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, and Professor Dr. Henry Prakken of the University of Groningen Faculty of Law have published Using Argument Schemes for Hypothetical Reasoning in Law, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

This paper studies the use of hypothetical and value-based reasoning in US Supreme-Court cases concerning the United States Fourth Amendment. Drawing upon formal AI & Law models of legal argument a semi-formal reconstruction is given of parts of the Carney case, which has been studied previously in AI & law research on case-based reasoning. As part of the reconstruction, a semi-formal proposal is made for extending the formal AI & Law models with forms of metalevel reasoning in several argument schemes. The result is compared with Rissland’s (1989) analysis in terms of dimensions and Ashley’s (2008) analysis in terms of his process model of legal argument with hypotheticals.