Hoekstra: Dataset: A Network Analysis of Dutch Regulations

Dr. Rinke Hoekstra of the Leibniz Center for Law has posted a dataset entitled A Network Analysis of Dutch Regulations.

Here is the description:

This fileset contains two networks (CSV files) of citations between Dutch regulations stored on the MetaLex Document Server, at the document level, and at the article level. We ran several network analysis measures over these networks (stored again in two CSV files) and provide two visualisations of the networks (size is PageRank, color is given by Module).

This is an accompaniment to a submission to the Network Analysis in Law workshop of ICAIL 2013.

Vergottini on Legal Reference Resolvers

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has posted Legal Reference Resolvers, at Legix.info.

The post addresses redirection, making references canonical, a repository service, and resolver routing.

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @grantcv1

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

Bennett on Jurisdictions, Abbreviation Lists, and Parallel Articles in Multilingual Zotero

Professor Frank Bennett of Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has posted Multilingual Zotero: jurisdictions, and much else, at CitationStylist.

Here are excerpts of the law-related news in the post:

Jurisdiction input helper. Legal styles in [Multilingual Zotero (MLZ)] rely on URN:LEX codes for jurisdictions and international organizations. This works fine once the data has been entered correctly, but there is many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip, and looking up these codes in a table is an awkwardness that we are here to avoid. A right-click over the Extra field will now open a context menu of the nations of the world, and selected international institutions, with sub-menus for federal jurisdictions. The jurisdiction lists are a first draft: the data is housed on GitHub, and I am very much open to revision proposals. This was prompted in large part by recent exchanges with user Isis on the Zotero forums, where the importance of better UI support for manual data entry became clear.

Abbreviation lists. The minimal abbreviation lists used for testing are now beginning to fill out. Many thanks to Julia Caldwell for getting the ball rolling on this front through her excellent work on the New Zealand Law style and its companion abbreviation list.

Parallel articles. As parallel support now appears to be working reliably for statutes and case reports, I have extended the behaviour to cover serialised journal articles. This does not work for all styles, but those for which it fails cannot be smoothly formatted as collapsed parallels in any case [...]

URN:LEX is an international standard for legal identifiers, in the form of Uniform Resource Names (URNs).

Multilingual Zotero is an unofficial “fork” of the Zotero open source citation management software.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Julie on SeyLII: The freeway to Seychelles Legal Information

Thelma Julie of the Judiciary of the Seychelles has posted SeyLII: The freeway to Seychelles Legal Information, at the AfricanLII Blog.

In this post, Ms. Julie describes the development of SeyLII: The Seychelles Legal Information Institute, a free-access-to-law service for The Seychelles, which launched in March 2012.

The post describes the need of Seychelles’ citizens and legal community for online access to Seychelles legal materials, the role of Kerry Anderson of AfricanLII and Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute in the planning of SeyLII, and some of the technology and principles underlying SeyLII, including the use of medium-neutral legal citations.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Shapiro and Pearse on The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time

Fred R. Shapiro of the Yale Law School Library and Michelle Pearse of the Harvard Law School Library have published The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time, Michigan Law Review, 110, 1483-1520 (2012). Here is the abstract:

This Essay updates two well-known earlier studies (dated 1985 and 1996) by the first coauthor, setting forth lists of the most-cited law review articles. New research tools from the HeinOnline and Web of Science databases now allow lists to be compiled that are more thorough and more accurate than anything previously possible. Tables printed here present the 100 most-cited legal articles of all time, the 100 most-cited articles of the last twenty years, and some additional rankings. Characteristics of the top-ranked publications, authors, and law schools are analyzed as are trends in schools of legal thought. Data from the all-time rankings shed light on contributions to legal scholarship made over a long historical span; the recent-article rankings speak more to the impact of scholarship produced in the current era. The authors discuss alternative tools and metrics for measuring the impact of legal scholarship, running selected articles from the rankings through these tools to serve as points of illustration. The authors then contemplate how these alternative tools and metrics intersect with traditional citation studies and how they might impact legal scholarship in the future.

Bennett on Zotero 4 Law and OpenCongress

Professor Frank Bennett of Nagoya University Graduate School of Law has posted @Zotero 4 Law and OpenCongress.org, at CitationStylist.

Here is a summary of the post:

I am very happy to announce the first operational end-to-end research and citation pipeline for MLZ [Multilingual Zotero] and its family of legal styles. The target site is OpenCongress.org, the excellent legislative tracking site sponsored by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation. A screencast covering installation, content download and document drafting (in the breathtakingly short interval of 12 minutes) is available.

Professor Bennett adds:

The screencast shows only the capture of US Code provisions affected by an amending Act. With a bit more effort, we should be able to extend the software to cover the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) and statutes referred to only by their popular names. It might be awhile before that happens, but it’s on the do-list. Contributions to that effort (of any sort) would of course be most welcome.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Mill: US Code Citation Extraction Library in JavaScript, with Node API

Eric Mill of Sunlight Labs has posted two new sets of software to GitHub:

• US Code Citation Extraction library in JavaScript
• Minimal Node.js API over US Code Citation Extraction library in JavaScript

According to Eric, posting this code constitutes “the tiny, humble foundation of a public project to extract legal citations from blocks of text large and small.”

For more information, contact Eric Mill.

HT @konklone.

Prebble and Caldwell: Zotero – A Manual for Electronic Legal Referencing

Professor Dr. John Prebble and Julia Caldwell of Victoria University Wellington Faculty of Law have published Zotero – A Manual for Electronic Legal Referencing (2012) (Victoria University Wellington Legal Research Paper no. 18/2012). Here is the abstract:

This manual explains how to operate Zotero.

Zotero is a free, open-source referencing tool that operates by “enter once, use many”. It captures references by one-click acquisition from databases of legal materials that cooperate with it. Users enter other references manually, with similar effort to typing a footnote.

Zotero’s chief strength is multi-style flexibility. Authors build libraries of references that are pasted into scholarly work with one click; authors can choose between legal referencing styles, with Zotero automatically formatting references according to the chosen style. Ability to format seamlessly across a potentially unlimited number of styles distinguishes Zotero from competing referencing tools. Zotero afficionados regularly add more styles.

The present manual is thought to be the only full manual for non-technical users of Zotero. It employs the New Zealand referencing style for examples, but its principles are the same for all styles.

The manual is licensed under a Modified Creative Commons Copyright Licence.

For more information on Zotero for law, please see Frank Bennett‘s Citation Stylist site, and his VoxPopuLII post: CSL, Metadata, and Legal Information that Just Works.

HT @freemoth.

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.