Katz: Perspectives on Law and Legal Institutions as Complex Adaptive Systems

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of the Michigan State University School of Law recently completed his Ph.D. dissertation entitled Perspectives on law and legal institutions as complex adaptive systems (University of Michigan, 2011).

Here is the abstract:

This dissertation employs various theoretical and methodological perspectives to consider the “evolution” of the law and “law as a complex adaptive system.” Chapter 2 addresses the strategic institutional conditions that produced Chief Justice Rehnquist’s majority opinion in Dickerson v. United States. In the wake of the Chief Justice’s ruling, legal scholars grappled to interpret this apparently anomalous decision. This process produced a litany of deeply unsatisfactory explanations for the Chief’s behavior. Chapter 2 rejects all of these existing explanations and instead outlines a game theoretic account for the Chief’s decision in this very important Miranda related case.

Applying network theory, Chapter 3 considers the social topology of the American federal judiciary. Scholars have long asserted that social structure is an important feature of a variety of societal institutions. However, to date, such social considerations have not been formally integrated in positive legal theory. Using the flow of law clerks as a proxy for social and professional linkages between jurists, Chapter 3 offers a variety of visualizations and analytics useful for considering the physical properties of the judicial social network.

Chapter 4 considers the ‘evolution’ of the law in the early jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court. Relevant dynamics include but are not limited to doctrinal importation, path dependence, cross-fertilization, mutation, fitness and selection. Chapter 4 explores a subset of these dynamics in the applied context of the early United States Supreme Court (1791-1835). Justices on the early United States Supreme Court relied upon a wide variety of sources as evidence in support of their arguments. Chapter 4 offers both descriptive data regarding the magnitude of references and identifies the extent to which those references imported ideas from foreign sources. Next, it applies the tools of network science to measure the structural importance of these foreign law infused decisions. While the empirical results are relevant to the ongoing debate regarding the Supreme Court’s reliance upon foreign sources, there is something far more fundamental at stake. Specifically, Chapter 4 introduces the “legal genome project” a new conceptual framework useful for understanding the “evolution” of the law.

Adrian on Law and Order in Virtual Worlds: Exploring Avatars, Their Ownership and Rights

Dr. Angela Adrian of the Bournemouth University Business School Department of Law has published her Ph.D. dissertation entitled Law and Order in Virtual Worlds: Exploring Avatars, Their Ownership and Rights (2010). Here is the abstract:

As virtual worlds increase in their depth and number, evolving into virtual communities with separate rules and expectations, they are often brought into conflict with the legal rules of the physical world. Law and Order in Virtual Worlds: Exploring Avatars, Their Ownership and Rights provides an understanding of the interface between the laws of the real world and the laws of the virtual worlds. Written for anyone who has ventured into a virtual reality and wondered what, if any, real world consequences would follow their actions, this book raises and answers compelling legal questions about such issues as owning virtual assets, intellectual property right infringements and virtual liabilities in the real world.

HT @AntoninPribetic.

Call for Papers: CIKM 2010: ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

Calls for workshop papers, tutorials, and demonstrations have been issued for CIKM 2010: The 19th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, to be held 26-30 October 2010, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The submission deadlines are:

• 24 June 2010: Demos;
• 30 June 2010: Workshop papers;
• 15 July 2010: Tutorials.

Proposals are invited in the following areas:

• Databases;
• Information retrieval;
• Knowledge management.

Click here for a detailed list of topics.

For more information, please see the calls for workshop papers, tutorials, and demonstrations.

Call for Papers: PIKM 2010: Workshop for Ph.D. Students in Information and Knowledge Management

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 30 June 2010 — has been issued for PIKM 2010: Workshop for Ph.D. Students in Information and Knowledge Management, to be held 30 October 2010, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The workshop is collocated with CIKM 2010: The 19th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.

Here are details from the call:

The goal of the PIKM 2010 workshop is to encourage Ph.D. students to present their dissertation research at a relatively early stage. The targeted students are those with a focus in any of the CIKM research tracks, i.e., databases, information retrieval or knowledge management. Interdisciplinary work across the three tracks is particularly encouraged.

This workshop will enable graduate students to present their dissertation proposals and/or ongoing research on their dissertation sub-problems. It will give them an opportunity to get feedback on their early work from researchers worldwide. The reviewers’ comments will help them assess and possibly revise their work. Selected papers will be published in the workshop proceedings and the respective authors will give a talk on their dissertation at the workshop. This will give considerable recognition to their work.

There will be an award for the best paper presented at the workshop. In addition to the papers selected for oral presentation, there will be a few more papers selected for poster presentation at the workshop. All papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. [...]

The submissions should propose research ideas that can mature into a dissertation. The authors could be Ph.D. students or Masters students aspiring to get a Ph.D. having in mind a clear idea of a proposal. Students could also submit work on one or more sub-problems of their dissertation. The papers should address the research issues in their proposal focusing on the challenges in solving them. They could also include the proposed techniques to solve the given problems. Preliminary experimental evaluation should be included. However, it should be clear that the work is ongoing. A wide range of topics on any area in databases, information retrieval and knowledge management can be presented at this workshop. The areas of interest are similar to those at the CIKM 2010 main conference and can be found on the conference website CIKM 2010.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

ALISE 2010 Dissertation Award

Applications — with submission deadline of 30 June 2010 — are invited for the 2010 Doctoral Dissertation Award, given by the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE). The award is given in honor of Dr. Eugene Garfield.

According to the announcement:

Up to two outstanding dissertations completed between December 15, 2008 and June 30, 2010 will be selected. Each winner will receive $500, plus 2011 conference registration and personal membership in ALISE for 2011. [...] Dissertations [submitted for the award] must deal with substantive issues related to library and information science, but applicants may be from within or outside LIS programs.

For more information, please see the announcement.

Click here for other ALISE awards having upcoming application deadlines.

HT Professor Sam Hastings.

Van den Braak on Sensemaking Software for Crime Analysis

Dr. Susan van den Braak has published her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Sensemaking Software for Crime Analysis (2010).

Dr. van den Braak will defend this dissertation on 15 March 2010 at Senaatszaal van het Academiegebouw, Universiteit Utrecht, Domplein 29, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Here is the abstract:

Criminal investigation is a difficult and laborious process that is prone to error as teams of investigators may be subject to tunnel vision, groupthink, and confirmation bias. As a result, miscarriages of justice may ensue. To overcome these problems, in the Dutch law enforcement organization, crime analysts have been given a more important role. It is now their task to critically evaluate the investigation that is going on. They have to make sense of the vast amount of evidence available in a case by generating plausible scenarios about what might have happened. Subsequently, they have to assess the quality of their scenarios and choose the best alternative. Due to the difficulty of this process, a great need exists for software that supports crime analysts in their task. However, current support tools for crime analysis do not allow analysts to record scenarios and their relation to the evidence and as a result the most important part of the analysis process remains in the analysts’ minds. Therefore, they may benefit from so-called sensemaking systems that allow them to make their reasoning process explicit by visualizing scenarios and the reasons why these scenarios are supported by the evidence. Nevertheless, such sensemaking tools for crime analysis are relatively sparse and often do not incorporate a logical model of reasoning with evidence in the context of crime analysis. This thesis aims to fill this gap by proposing sensemaking software that has specifically been designed for crime analysis. Such a tool should be rationally well-founded, natural, useful, usable, and effective. To this aid, a proof-of-concept application called AVERs (Argument Visualization for Evidential Reasoning based on stories) was built that implements a rationally well-founded and natural model of the reasoning that takes place in crime analysis. In this way a standard of rational reasoning is encouraged and errors may be reduced. Using AVERs analysts are able to create visual representations of scenarios and evidential arguments. Scenarios are represented as causal networks of events, while evidential arguments are arguments based on the evidential data in the case. Such arguments are based on argumentation schemes that often come with critical questions. These questions make the analysts more aware of possible sources of doubt and encourage them to critically examine the evidence. Evidential arguments can be used to support or attack scenarios with the available evidence. In this way, this software allows the analysts to reason about scenarios and to critically evaluate them. Moreover, it provides features that can be used to compare alternative scenarios. A series of empirical studies has confirmed that the design and implementation of AVERs fulfills all five criteria to a certain degree. This means that it is useful to crime analysts and satisfies their desires, while it may improve their analysis of the case and the communication of their results to the investigators working on the case, and ensures that rational analyses are performed. Therefore, through this software in the future biases in the crime analysis process may be avoided.

Rescheduled to April 16: Judge Reiling on Technology for Justice, at World Bank

[NOTE: This event has been rescheduled to 16 April 2010, Judge Reiling has announced.]

[NOTE: Updated on 6 February 2010 to correct the start time of the event to 12:30 p.m. and to add a contact for registration. Thanks to Judge Reiling for this information.]

Judge Dory Reiling, Ph.D., Vice President of the Amsterdam District Court, will discuss her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Technology for Justice: How Information Technology Can Support Judicial Reform (2009), on 16 April 2010 12 February 2010, at 12:30 p.m. 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time, at the World Bank, Washington, DC, USA.

If you would like to attend, please contact Jean-Jacques Dethier, Jdethier [at] worldbank [dot] org .

Here is the abstract of the dissertation:

“Technology for Justice examines impacts of information technology (IT) on the administration of justice. Court users all over the world complain mainly about long delays, lack of access to justice and court corruption. Drawing on a broad variety of sources – comparative studies, statistics, case law and jurisprudence, studies on IT use and on court usage – this study examines how IT can help to remedy these complaints. The study, contributing to knowledge about information use and IT in proceedings, analyzes how automated case registration systems have revolutionized thinking about case management and significantly reduced court disposition times. It also explores Internet technology’s potential for increasing access to legal information, predicted by Richard Susskind in 1996, as a means for selfhelp with settlement and support for court access. Providing the first systematic analysis of court corruption, it analyzes IT’s contribution to reducing corruption. It closes by providing insights into the Internet’s new challenges for judiciaries.”

Lundström on the Formal Modeling of Games of Language and Adversarial Argumentation

Dr. Jenny Eriksson Lundström of Uppsala Universitet Department of Informatics and Media has published her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled On the Formal Modeling of Games of Language and Adversarial Argumentation: A Logic-Based Artificial Intelligence Approach (2009). Legal argumentation is discussed in several sections. Here is the abstract:

“Argumentation is a highly dynamical and dialectical process drawing on human cognition. Successful argumentation is ubiquitous to human interaction. Comprehensive formal modeling and analysis of argumentation presupposes a dynamical approach to the following phenomena: the deductive logic notion, the dialectical notion and the cognitive notion of justified belief. For each step of an argumentation these phenomena form networks of rules which determine the propositions to be allowed to make sense as admissible, acceptable, and accepted.

“We present a formal logic framework for a computational account of formal modeling and systematical analysis of the dynamical, exhaustive and dialectical aspects of adversarial argumentation and dispute. Our approach addresses the mechanisms of admissibility, acceptability and acceptance of arguments in adversarial argumentation by use of metalogic representation and Artificial Intelligence-techniques for dynamical problem solving by exhaustive search.

“We elaborate on a common framework of board games and argumentation games for pursuing the alternatives facing the adversaries in the argumentation process conceived as a game. The analogy to chess is beneficial as it incorporates strategic and tactical operations just as argumentation. Drawing on an analogy to board games like chess, the state space representation, well researched in Artificial Intelligence, allows for a treatment of all possible arguments as paths in a directed state space graph. It will render a game leading to the most wins and fewest losses, identifying the most effective game strategy. As an alternate visualization, the traversal of the state space graph unravels and collates knowledge about the given situation/case under dispute. Including the private knowledge of the two parties, the traversal results in an increased knowledge of the case and the perspectives and arguments of the participants.

“As we adopt metalogic as formal basis, arguments used in the argumentation, expressed in a non-monotonic defeasible logic, are encoded as terms in the logical argumentation analysis system. The advantage of a logical formalization of argumentation is that it provides a symbolic knowledge representation with a formally well-formed semantics, making the represented knowledge as well as the behavior of knowledge representation systems reasoning comprehensible. Computational logic as represented in Horn Clauses allows for expression of substantive propositions in a logical structure. The non-monotonic nature of defeasible logic stresses the representational issues, i.e. what is possible to capture in non-monotonic reasoning, while from the (meta)logic program, the sound computation on what it is possible to compute, and how to regard the semantics of this computation, are established.”

HT defeasible.org.

Vallbé on Judicial Decision Making

Dr. Joan-Josep Vallbé, a researcher at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Institute of Law & Technology, has published his Ph.D. dissertation entitled Models of Decision Making: Facing Uncertainty in Spanish Judicial Settings (2009). Here is a summary:

“The work of the thesis that follows began because of a problem: a group of professionals (Spanish junior judges) needed to improve the conditions under which they had to make their decisions. So far a great deal of research effort … has been devoted to show and test that a solution to this problem might come through the design and application of an artificial intelligent device that helped in their decision-making process. However, the aim of the present work is not to focus upon the process of building a system designed to support decision-making, but to explore whether and why such a decisional, organizational problem existed, and how it could be detected and represented. In other words, our objective is to explore what makes specially problematic this decision-making process by Spanish junior judges, and eventually why should an intelligent device may help them. This way we expect to better understand the role of organizations in making decisions. …

One of the main organizational principles governing the Spanish legal and judicial system is the on-call period. Regularly courts remain on call for full eight-days periods, though the regular recurrence of on-call periods depends on the number of courts within a given judicial district. Should there only be one court in a judicial district—which is not a rarity in Spanish less populated areas—that judge and the court office would be almost always on call. While on call, the court office is responsible for handling all incoming cases reported by the police, the public prosecution or by citizens at large. For instance, if an offense takes place in a specific judicial district, the judge who is on call will be in charge of supervising all enquiries related to the facts of the case. Since the Spanish criminal procedure, like in any other civil law system, is based on the ‘inquisitorial’ principle (as opposed to the ‘adversarial’ or ‘accusatorial’ principle of the common law system), judges on call are to lead the judicial police in all criminal enquiries …. The different activities the judge has to endure while on call may entail paying attention over a number of parallel issues (raised by the police, lawyers, prosecutors, etc.). Usually, the need for quick decisions seriously handicaps (or impedes) reviewing jurisprudence or precedents. Therefore at the best of times inexperienced judges have to rely on uncertain consultation with peers or senior judges (if available, which is not always possible). Thus when on-call, their decision-making process is very likely to take place in a context of special ambiguity, in sharp contrast with other routine and rule-based decisions that bind most legal proceedings in ordinary judicial decision-making. …

“Part I of this work sets forth the theoretical background of the thesis. In Chapter 1 we present a review of how decision-making problems within organizations have been dealt with in political science, paying attention to the differences between rational choice theories and behavioral organization decision analysis. In Chapter 2, the implications of bounded rationality for organizational decision analysis will be outlined, including a full discussion on the separation between the inner and outer environments of decisions.

“Once the general framework has been put forth, Part II contains the work done with junior judges. Chapter 3 will be dedicated to present all the information relevant to contextualize our case. First we will offer a description of the essential features of the Spanish judicial system, focusing our attention on Courts of First Instance and Magistrate and, in particular, on the main features of its on-call service. Second, a description of the source of our data will be outlined, highlighting different kinds of data obtained and their role in the thesis. In particular, responses to closed questions in the questionnaire will be used in this chapter to attempt a profile of the Spanish junior judges which will emphasize their perception of their professional environment and some indicators of their quality of life. The main conclusions arrived at in this chapter, in addition to those gathered from the few previous studies on the matter, will lead us to our final chapter. In Chapter 4 responses to open-ended questions in textual form will be used to test our main hypotheses. In a few words, we will explore the kind of uncertainty that surrounds judges’ decision making, and the kind of knowledge they use to overcome these situations, through the use of distinct textual analysis techniques, including text mining and textual (multivariate) statistics. Finally, some conclusions are dispensed in Chapter 5.”

Dr. Vallbé discusses some aspects of his dissertation in his new post, entitled Managing practical memories of legal organizations: Beyond document and case management, at VoxPopuLII.

Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP) 2010

Applications, with deadline of February 22, 2010, are invited for the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP) 2010.

Applications are invited “from advanced doctoral students in any discipline whose work in the field of Internet research engages with the OII’s research priorities of Everyday life, Governance and democracy, Science and Learning and Shaping the Internet. Reflecting the disciplinary base of the OII, most of the seminars will draw on Internet-related research in the social sciences, but some may also cover aspects of the department’s projects in the humanities and computer science.”

“Up to 27 places are available and will be awarded on a competitive basis. Preference will be given to students at an advanced stage of their doctorate who have embarked on writing their thesis. All teaching will be in English, so all applicants should be able to demonstrate their competence in this language.

“All student applications must be supported by one or more of the students’ current doctoral programme advisors or dissertation supervisors. References will be requested for all students who are offered a place on the programme. Similarly, students should be able to clearly explain how their doctoral studies will benefit from the programme.”

For more information, please see the announcement.