Articles on legal information or decision making in new issue of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

The new issue of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (10(2), June 2013) includes several articles on legal information or decision making:

• Doug Williams: Do Racial Preferences Affect Minority Learning in Law Schools?
• Andreas Glöckner and Christoph Engel: Can We Trust Intuitive Jurors? Standards of Proof and the Probative Value of Evidence in Coherence-Based Reasoning
• Christina L. Boyd, David A. Hoffman, Zoran Obradovic and Kosta Ristovski: Building a Taxonomy of Litigation: Clusters of Causes of Action in Federal Complaints
• Ryan C. Black and James F. Spriggs II: The Citation and Depreciation of U.S. Supreme Court Precedent
• William C. Thompson, Suzanne O. Kaasa and Tiamoyo Peterson: Do Jurors Give Appropriate Weight to Forensic Identification Evidence?

HT @aabibliographer

Lissner and Carver on CourtListener: Where we are and where we’d like to go

Michael Lissner and Professor Dr. Brian Carver of University of California, Berkeley, have posted CourtListener: Where we are and where we’d like to go, at VoxPopuLII.

Here is an excerpt:

At CourtListener, we are making a free database of court opinions with the ultimate goal of providing the entire U.S. case-law corpus to the world for free and combining it with cutting-edge search and research tools. We–like most readers of this blog–believe that for justice to truly prevail, the law must be open and equally accessible to everybody.

It is astonishing to think that the entire U.S. case-law corpus is not currently available to the world at no cost. Many have started down this path and stopped, so we know we’ve set a high goal for a humble open source project. From time to time it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on where we are and where we’d like to go in the coming years. [...]

The post discusses the development and current technology of CourtListener, which includes email alerts of new cases, automatic identification and cross-linking of citations, a set of scrapers called Juriscraper for gathering court decisions from court Websites, and bulk access to court decisions in XML.

The post also describes future plans for development, which include:

adding oral argument audio, case briefs, and data from PACER. Adding these new types of information to CourtListener is a must if we want to be more useful for research purposes, but doing so is a long-term goal, given the complexity of doing them well.

We also plan to build an opinion classifier that could automatically, and without human intervention, determine the subsequent treatment of opinions. Done right, this would allow our users to know at a glance if the opinion they’re reading was subsequently followed, criticized, or overruled, making our system even more valuable to our users. [...] You can see our plans on our feature tracker, our bugs in our bug tracker, and can get in touch in our forum.

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @caminick

Jondet on Using Zotero for Legal Research and Writing

Dr. Nicolas Jondet of University of Strathclyde School of Law has posted slides of his presentation entitled Entrepôts institutionnels et respect des références internationales de citation numérique, given last week at Journées européennes d’informatique 2012 = European Legal e-Access Conference.

The presentation describes the use of the open source citation management software Zotero for legal research and writing.

For more on Zotero and legal citation, please see Professor Frank Bennett’s site CitationStylist and the posts about Zotero at Legal Informatics Blog.

HT @nicolasjondet

Van Opijnen on The European Legal Semantic Web

Marc van Opijnen of the The Netherlands Council for the Judiciary (Raad Voor de Rechtspraak) has posted the full text of his paper entitled The European Legal Semantic Web: Completed Building Blocks and Future Work, given last week at Journées européennes d’informatique 2012 = European Legal e-Access Conference.

Here is the abstract:

If constructed properly the European legal semantic web will improve access to legal information, stimulate innovative applications and legal services, and reinforce judicial and legal cooperation within Europe.

In this paper we will discuss why we still we do not have one-click answers on very basic legal questions, what building blocks are already in place and what still has to be done to have the European Legal Semantic Web really functioning.

We will start with some illustrations from legal practice to demonstrate the blessings of the semantic web, and the definition of some terminology (§ 1). Next, we will review the state of play regarding the most important building blocks for identifying legal sources (§ 2). In § 3 we will summarize the most necessary steps that have to be taken in the near future, both at European and national level, to make substantial headway. One of these steps might be the development of a European Legal Doctrine Identifier.

Some concluding remarks are made in § 4.

Among the resources discussed in the paper are:

• European case law identifier (ECLI)
• European legislation identifier (ELI)
• European legal doctrine identifier (ELDI)
• EUR-Lex
• CELEX

New Lists of U.S. State Legal Resources Available on Web

Two new resources provide metadata describing U.S. state legal resources available on the Web:

• 2011-2012 Preliminary Analysis of AALL’s State Legal Inventories

[The American Association of Law Libraries' (AALL’s)] Digital Access to Legal Information Committee and Government Relations Office analyzed 6 primary online legal resources [Administrative Code, Administrative Register, Statutes, Session Laws, High Court Opinions and Appellate Court opinions] included in AALL’s state legal inventories to answer the following questions about each title:

• Is it official?
• Is it authenticated?
• It is preserved?
• Is permanent public access mandated by statute?
• Is there a copyright assertion or other use restriction?
• [...] whether the state is employing universal citation
• [whether the state has] introduced or enacted the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA)

• The Analysis and the data linked from it are not subject to copyright, according to Sarah Glassmeyer.

• State Regulations Online
• This table has been created by the Sunlight Foundation (click here for a description of the table). For each state, the table lists whether the regulations are readable in a Web browser; whether the regulations can be downloaded in bulk; and information about the laws governing online availability of regulations.

HT @sglassmeyer and Matt Rumsey

Leiter on A New Mode of Full-Text Case Retrieval: The Leading Case Service

Professor Richard Leiter of the University of Nebraska College of Law has posted a summary of his new research project, entitled A New Mode of Full-text Case Retrieval – a work in progress, on his blog, The Life of Books.

In this post, Professor Leiter explains his idea for a new information retrieval system for U.S. judicial decisions. The system would contain metadata (and possibly full text) for selected, authoritative cases — “leading cases” — identified by the frequency with which they are cited in law journal articles. The citation counts would be determined by text mining software, which would be run on large full-text law journal collections, such as the HeinOnline Law Journal Library.

An interesting discussion of the project has begun in the comments to the post.

Professor Leiter is conducting this research as a fellow at the Harvard Law School Library.

For more information, please see the post.

New on VoxPopuLII: Bennett on Citation Style Language, Metadata, and Legal Information that Just Works

Professor Frank Bennett of Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has posted CSL, Metadata, and Legal Information that Just Works, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Professor Bennett describes the legal citation management capabilities of the open source Citation Style Language (CSL) — “an XML vocabulary for accurately describing citation and bibliography formats” — which is used by Zotero and other open citation management systems. Professor Bennett then demonstrates how CSL operates to output legal citation data in particular legal citation formats. In addition, he refers to CitationStylist, his new Website that provides access to software, tools, and development news related to legal (and multilingual) citation styles supported by CSL.

In his post, Professor Bennett criticizes proprietary legal database vendors for failing to make metadata publicly available on the free Web. He describes the benefits of publicly exposing metadata for legal resources, and praises several members of the free-access-to-law community — including the Legal Information Institute, Google Scholar, the UK National Archives‘ Legislation.gov.uk system, Public.Resource.Org, and The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) — for publishing their legal metadata on the Internet in open formats. Professor Bennett shows how CSL and Zotero can foster the free circulation of legal metadata, and help users manage such metadata.

Using examples of code, Professor Bennett explains how CSL formats legal citations. He highlights a new CSL and Zotero capability: the ability to associate abbreviations lists — including lists of periodical title abbreviations required by many legal citation standards — with particular citation styles. Professor Bennett also describes a Firefox add-on that makes use of abbreviations lists.

This post will be of interest to legal publishers, legal scholars, developers of legal information systems, legal information professionals, the free-access-to-law community, and all those who regularly use legal information.

Bennett Launches Site on citeproc-js Legal Citation Features

Professor Frank Bennett of the Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has launched CitationStylist, a new Website that provides information and tools related to the legal citation “features of the citeproc-js citation formatter.”

CitationStylist also provides information and tools related to the multilingual citation features of citeproc-js.

citeproc-js is “a JavaScript implementation of the Citation Style Language (CSL) used by Zotero, Mendeley,” and other citation management applications, according to the citeproc-js Integrator’s Manual.

CitationStylist provides documentation for citeproc-js; the citeproc-js schema; information on validation with citeproc-js legal citation; several citeproc-js tools, including those for feedback, abbreviations, and navigation history; a style for The Bluebook legal citation standard; and announcements.

For more information, please see the CitationStylist site.

HT @fgbjr.

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.

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.