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.

Feteris: The role of the judge in legal proceedings: A Pragma-dialectical analysis

Professor Dr. Eveline T. Feteris of University of Amsterdam has published The role of the judge in legal proceedings: A Pragma-dialectical analysis, Journal of Argumentation in Context, 1(2), 234-252 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

In this contribution I characterize the role of the judge in the context of the argumentative activity of legal proceeding. I describe the role of the judge from a pragma-dialectical perspective and explain in which way this role promotes a rational resolution of the dispute. I specify how a critical discussion in accordance with the ideal model is implemented in legal procedure to accomplish the institutional point, a resolution of the dispute in accordance with the Rule of Law.

FuzzyLaw: Collection of lay citizens’ understandings of legal terminology

The Cardiff University Centre for Language and Communication has made available FuzzyLaw, an online collection of “lay-people’s explanations of legal terms.”

Here is the description from the project’s Website:

FuzzyLaw has gathered explanations of legal terms from members of the public in order to get a sense of what the ‘person on the street’ has in mind when they think of a legal term. By making lay-people’s explanations of legal terms available to interpreters, police and other legal professionals, we hope to stimulate debate and learning about word meaning, public understanding of law and the nature of explanation.

The explanations gathered in FuzzyLaw are unusual in that they are provided by members of the public. These people, all aged over 18, regard themselves as ‘native speakers’, ‘first language speakers’ and ‘mother tongue’ speakers of English and have lived in England and/or Wales for 10 years or more. We might therefore expect that they will understand English legal terminology as well as any member of the public might. No one who has contributed has ever worked in the criminal law system or as an interpreter or translator. They therefore bring no special expertise to the task of explanation, beyond whatever their daily life has provided.

We have gathered explanations for 37 words in total. You can see a sample of these explanations on FuzzyLaw. The sample of explanations is regularly updated. You can also read responses to the terms and the explanations from mainly interpreters, police officers and academics. You are warmly invited to add your own responses and join in the discussion of each and every word. Check back regularly to see how discussions develop and consider bookmarking the site for future visits. The site also contains commentaries on interesting phenomena which have emerged through the site. You can respond to the commentaries too on that page, contributing to the developing research project.

FuzzyLaw is based in Cardiff, Wales, and explores English words as they are used in the criminal legal system of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The examples and discussions that you will find here are, however, also relevant to languages other than English, legal jurisdictions around the world, and legal settings beyond only criminal law. This is because these examples and discussions concern meaning and explore words in a variety of contexts of use in the law. [...]

For more details please see the FuzzyLaw Website.

HT @SquareLaw

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

Sprain and Gastil: An Interpretative Account of Jurors’ Expressed Deliberative Rules and Premises

Professor Dr. Leah Sprain of Colorado State University and Professor Dr. John Gastil of Penn State University have published What Does It Mean to Deliberate? An Interpretative Account of Jurors’ Expressed Deliberative Rules and Premises, Communication Quarterly, 61(2), 151-171 (2013).

Here is the abstract:

To advance deliberative theory and practice, this study considers the experiences of trial jurors who engaged in deliberation. Conceptualized as a speech event, this article inductively explores the deliberative rules and premises articulated by jurors. Jurors believe deliberation should be rigorous and democratic, including speaking opportunities for all, open-minded consideration of different views, and respectful listening. Jurors actively consider information, but face-to-face deliberation is essential for thoroughly processing evidence. Although emotions should not influence the final verdict, participants report that emotions often reinforce deliberative norms. These results inform theory and deliberative experiences in and beyond the jury.

Professor Gastil describes the research in his recent post at Jury and Democracy Blog: New article shows how jurors decribe their service experience.

Gluck & Schultz Bressman: Statutory Interpretation from the Inside: An Empirical Study of Congressional Drafting

Professor Abbe R. Gluck of Yale Law School and Associate Dean Lisa Schultz Bressman of Vanderbilt Law School have posted Statutory Interpretation from the Inside — An Empirical Study of Congressional Drafting, Delegation and the Canons: Part I, forthcoming in Stanford Law Review.

Here is the abstract:

What role should the realities of the legislative drafting process play in the theories and doctrines of statutory interpretation and administrative law? The ongoing debates frequently turn on empirical assumptions about how Congress drafts and what interpretive rules Congress knows, but there has been almost no testing of whether any of these assumptions reflect legislative reality. We have attempted to fill that void. This is the first of two Articles reporting the results of the most extensive empirical study to date — a survey of 137 congressional counsels drawn from both parties, both chambers of Congress and spanning multiple committees — on topics ranging from drafters’ knowledge and use of the textual and substantive canons of interpretation, to legislative history, the administrative law deference doctrines, the legislative process and the Court-Congress relationship.

Our findings have implications for virtually every swath of the interpretive debates. We can report, for instance, that there are some canons that our drafters know and use — Chevron and the presumption against preemption, for example, but that there are other canons that our drafters know, but consciously reject in favor of political or other considerations, including the presumption in favor of consistent usage, the rule against superfluities, and dictionary use; and still other canons, like Mead and noscitur a sociis, that our drafters do not know as legal rules but that seem to be accurate judicial reflections of how Congress drafts. Our interviews also elicited a treasure trove of information about key influences on the drafting process that legal doctrine rarely considers, from the variety of audiences for legislative history, to the way in which the personal reputation of particular agency heads affects delegation decisions, to the fact that drafting conventions depend on the type of statute being drafted and its path through Congress.

All of these findings, and many others, allow us to press for a more precise answer to one of the field’s foundational questions: that is, what should be the purpose of these canons of interpretation? Judges, often using the unhelpful generalization that they are Congress’s “faithful agents,” have legitimized these doctrines using a variety of conflicting justifications, some of which turn on empirical reality, some of which do not, and most of which aim to justify many different types of canons that seem to be doing very different types of work. Do the canons reflect how Congress actually drafts, and so effectuate legislative supremacy? Or do judges use the canons for more dialogical reasons, such as to encourage Congress to draft more precisely — and does Congress listen? Might the canons, despite how “neutral” some appear, instead be understood to effectuate judicial values that are external to the legislative process — such as advancing constitutional norms or imposing coherence on the U.S. Code? Our study illuminates this variety across the normative bases for the canons also reveals that each set of justifications rests on a very different vision of the judicial power and the Court-Congress relationship.

HT @rickhasen

Call for papers: Hidden Meanings in Legal Discourse: Special issue of the journal Semiotica

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 31 August 2013 — has been issued for a special issue of the journal Semiotica on the topic, “Hidden Meanings in Legal Discourse.”

Papers of “7,500 – 10,000 words” are invited on “how metaform, implication and socio-semiotic meanings can be demonstrated in and extracted from legal discourse.”

For more details, please see the call.

HT Dr. Le Cheng

Peña Gangadharan: Toward a Deliberative Standard: Rethinking Participation in Rulemaking

Dr. Seeta Peña Gangadharan of the New America Foundation has published Toward a Deliberative Standard: Rethinking Participation in Policymaking, Communication, Culture, and Critique, 6, 1-19 (2013).

Here is the abstract:

In contrast to communitarian and pluralist approaches to participation, the following article develops a deliberative model of participation in rulemaking at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This deliberative model is distinguished by its concern for the emergence of publics and for the speaking and listening capacities of policymakers and publics alike. The model focuses both on spaces for collective discussion as well as translation between sites of discussion. Embracing a complex view of civil society, and stressing the principle of inclusion, a deliberative model corresponds to a form of legitimacy that extends beyond the boundaries of conventional administrative procedure.

Gastil et al.: The Impact of Jury Service on Attitudes Toward Legal Institutions and the Implications for International Jury Reform

Professor Dr. John Gastil, Professor Dr. Hiroshi Fukurai, Vice Chancellor Kent Anderson, and Dr. Mark Nolan have published Seeing Is Believing: The Impact of Jury Service on Attitudes Toward Legal Institutions and the Implications for International Jury Reform, Court Review, 48(4), pp. 124-130 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

The United States jury system is unique in the world in the frequency of its use and its symbolic significance as a democratic institution. [...] It is ironic that so little is known about what impact the jury system as a democratic institution has on the citizenry who serve as jurors. Improving our understanding of the jury’s impact is vital, as many nations may choose to adopt or reject the jury based partly on beliefs about how jury service shapes the civic beliefs and actions of citizen-jurors. In particular, legal scholars Kent Anderson and Mark Nolan point out that the proponents of Japan’s new “quasi-jury” system marshaled two arguments in favor of greater public participation in the Japanese legal system — better and equitable legal outcomes and “the belief that it promotes a more democratic society.”

Do juries, in fact, have such impacts? One theoretical justification for believing juries can help to sustain democracy comes from the work of small-group-communication scholar Ernest Bormann. His Symbolic Convergence Theory has helped to demonstrate that repeated, salient cultural practices can establish habitual ways of communicating in groups. As Bormann explains, successions of otherwise unremarkable public and educational group meetings, along with instruction about effective group behavior, over the course of decades gradually built the “public-discussion model” that emerged in the United States in the 20th century (and persists to this day).

For nearly a century, that cultural model has shaped how people talk and think about group problem solving in the U.S. In a similar way, the cultural-institutional legacy of jury service may be public confidence in jury deliberation itself, as well as in the judges who oversee the process. Thus, we theorize that jury service promotes public support for the larger legal process in which citizens participate as jurors. If true, this finding would have tremendous significance for other nations — including Japan, Taiwan, and Mexico — that are considering implementing the all-citizen jury system, because the reforms they implement could be expected to bolster public faith and confidence in the legal system itself.

Fornaciari and Poesio on Automatic deception detection in Italian court cases

Tommaso Fornaciari of the University of Trento, and Professor Dr. Massimo Poesio of the University of Essex, have published Automatic deception detection in Italian court cases, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

Effective methods for evaluating the reliability of statements issued by witnesses and defendants in hearings would be an extremely valuable support to decision-making in court and other legal settings. In recent years, methods relying on stylometric techniques have proven most successful for this task; but few such methods have been tested with language collected in real-life situations of high-stakes deception, and therefore their usefulness outside lab conditions still has to be properly assessed. In this study we report the results obtained by using stylometric techniques to identify deceptive statements in a corpus of hearings collected in Italian courts. The defendants at these hearings were condemned for calumny or false testimony, so the falsity of (some of) their statements is fairly certain. In our experiments we replicated the methods used in previous studies but never before applied to high-stakes data, and tested new methods. We also considered the effect of a number of variables including in particular the homogeneity of the dataset. Our results suggest that accuracy at deception detection clearly above chance level can be obtained with real-life data as well.