New on VoxPopuLII: Minick on Universal Citation for State Codes

Courtney Minick, Esq., of Justia has posted Universal Citation for State Codes, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Ms. Minick criticizes traditional U.S. legal citation standards for reinforcing major commercial publishers’ dominant positions in the U.S. legal publishing market, and inhibiting public access to the law.

Ms. Minick describes the American Association of Law Libraries’ (AALL’s) Universal Citation Guide — a vendor- and format-neutral legal citation standard — and its potential for fostering competition and innovation in legal publishing, as well as improving public access to legal resources. Ms. Minick also observes that a new organization — UniversalCitation.org — has launched an effort to increase usage of neutral legal citation standards in the U.S.

Ms. Minick demonstrates how Justia has begun to apply the AALL legal citation standard to U.S. state codes, and how the use of this standard has the potential to improve public access via the Web to the full text of U.S. state statutes.

This post will be of interest to the legal community, legal publishers, open government data advocates, and the free access to law community.

Meredith on OSCOLA: A UK Standard for Legal Citation

Sandra Meredith, M.A., of the Oxford University Faculty of Law, has published OSCOLA: A UK Standard for Legal Citation, Legal Information Management, 11, 111-114 (2011). Here is the abstract:

OSCOLA, the Oxford Standard for the Citation Of Legal Authorities, was first devised in 2000. The fourth edition, published in November 2010, includes for the first time guidelines for citing Scottish, Irish and Welsh cases and legislation, historical legal sources and new media such as blogs. It also provides more extensive general advice about using quotations, managing and cross-referencing footnotes and organising bibliographies and tables of cases and legislation. OSCOLA can be used in conjunction with bibliographic software such as Endnote and is becoming the UK national standard for legal citation.

JURIX 2010 Slides Available

Slides are now available for many papers given at JURIX 2010: The 23rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, held 16-17 December 2010 at the University of Liverpool Computer Science Department, in Liverpool, England, UK.

HT JURIX Blog.

JURIX 2010

The final program has been posted for JURIX 2010: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 15-17 December 2010, at the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, in Liverpool, England, UK.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix.

Click here for papers from the 15 December workshop: Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules 2010.

Click here for information about the invited speakers, who include John L. Sheridan of The National Archives (UK).

Click here for information for conference participants.

We wish our colleagues who are organizing, presenting at, or attending JURIX 2010 a very successful and rewarding conference.

JURIX 2010: Accepted Papers

Accepted papers have been announced for JURIX 2010: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 16-17 December 2010, at the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, in Liverpool, England, UK.

Invited speakers for the conference have also been announced.

Bruce on Technical Principles for Law.gov

Video and audio are available for Tom Bruce’s presentation on Technical Principles for Law.gov, given 18 June 2010 at the Harvard Law.gov Workshop at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

The video and audio are provided by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

The presentation focuses on five proposed technical principles for the Law.gov legal open government data project:

• Availability of legal materials via bulk access;
• Authentication of access methods and documents;
• Availability of historical archives;
• Development and use of interoperability standards;
• A vendor- and medium-neutral citation standard.

During the presentation, Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell University Law School, and Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org discuss these principles with workshop participants.

Click here for video and audio of the entire the Harvard Law.gov Workshop (scroll down).

Poulin on Illustrated Judgments

Professor Daniel Poulin of Université de Montréal Faculté de Droit, LexUM, and CanLII has published Illustrated Judgments on Slaw, the Canadian legal blog.

In his post, Professor Poulin gives several examples of images and videos contained in Canadian court decisions published by CanLII. He then offers the following assessment:

So it seems that “illustrated judgments” are here to stay and quite probably they will become even more frequent. Many issues can be identified here. First of all, judgments published in electronic databases must be complete; when images are used by the court they must be present or the means to obtain them must be mentioned. With non-textual elements that are not embedded in the documents, as news video clips, the stability of the element and its continuous availability over time must be ensured. The simple reference to the current URL of a clip is probably not enough to ensure its permanent availability. Thirdly, it could be useful to start elaborating a framework and standards for this new material. The Canadian Citation Committee began to work in that direction in 2002 when it proposed a naming convention for the multimedia material related to a judgment. Probably this work will have to be revisited and completed to follow suit with the judiciary.

Please click here to read the complete post.

HT @trbruce.

New on VoxPopuLII: Mokanov on the Canadian Vendor-Neutral Legal Citation Standard & the CanLII Citator

Canada’s pathbreaking vendor-neutral legal citation standard, and CanLII’s innovative RefLex citator, are the topics of Ivan Mokanov’s new post, entitled Environmentally-Friendly Citations, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

Mr. Mokanov is Deputy Director of LexUM, the publisher of CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute.

Mr. Mokanov’s post describes the origins of the neutral standard, its benefits, its implementation by CanLII, and its widespread adoption. The post also discusses the development of and workflow for CanLII’s RefLex online citator.

Because the post discusses technical, policy, and user issues, the post should be of interest to legal information systems administrators and developers, policy advocates, legal information professionals, and all users of CanLII.