Colorado Enacts Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

Colorado has enacted the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA), according to a 27 April 2012 announcement by the Uniform Law Commission.

According to the announcement, Colorado is the first state to enact UELMA, which has also been introduced in California, Connecticut, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.

UELMA is a new, proposed, uniform, U.S. state statute requiring states that enact it to authenticate, preserve, and provide permanent public access to legal information that those states publish in electronic formats.

Professor Barbara A. Bintliff of the University of Texas School of Law is the reporter for UELMA.

For more information on UELMA, please see Professor Bintliff’s VoxPopuLII post, entitled The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act Is Ready for Legislative Action, and Alan S. Kowlowitz’s recent report, Opening Government’s Official Legal Materials: Authenticity and Integrity in the Digital World.

CTG Albany on Authenticity and Integrity in Official Legal Information

New from @CTG_UAlbany : Opening Government’s Official Legal Materials: Authenticity and Integrity in the Digital World (2012).  

Here is the abstract:

Increasingly, state governments are moving toward making primary legal materials available online via state government websites. The goal in these efforts, and also the challenge, is to provide users with more efficient access while ensuring that the electronic versions of primary legal materials are as “official” as their paper originals. The desire of state governments to make this a priority is strong. However, they currently lack the necessary policies and management practices necessary for success. State legislators and their staffs, legislative reference librarians, state archivists, and chief information officers all have important roles to play in laying the foundation for these efforts through the creation of new policy, management, and technology capabilities. This brief provides background to the recently approved Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA), explores the concepts behind authenticated electronic materials, defines what it will take to create, maintain, and make available official electronic legal material, and provides recommendations for states.

HT @tpardo

Video and Other Resources Available for House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference

Video is now available for the House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, held 2 February 2012, in Washington, DC. The conference was hosted by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on House Administration.

Click here for slides from some of the presentations (scroll down).

The Twitter hashtag for the conference was #ldtc.

Presentations concerned metadata and dissemination standards and practices for U.S. federal legislative data, including open government data standards, XML markup, integrating multimedia resources into legislative data, and standards for evaluating the transparency of U.S. federal legislative data.

Speakers included Daniel Bennett of the e-Citizen Foundation, Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute, Daniel Schuman and Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation, Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, Joshua Tauberer of POPVOX and GovTrack, and Derek Willis of the New York Times.

Here are links to selected posts about the conference:

• Jim Harper, Helping the House Advance Data Transparency
• Ari Hershowitz, Roundup: House Legislative Data and Transparency
• David Moore, Liberate OpenGovData Now
• Daniel Schuman, Benchmarks for Measuring Success for Legislative Transparency
• Joshua Tauberer, Data Impact and Understandability (click here for slides)
• Derek Willis, On Legislative Data Transparency
• John Wonderlich, Bulk Data at the House Legislative Data Conference

If you know of other posts or resources about the conference, please feel free to mention them in the comments.

{NOTE: Updated 11 February 2012 to add link to Joshua Tauberer’s presentation.]

Harper on a Legislative Process Data Model and XML Markup for Representing Legislative Data Types

Jim Harper, Esq., of the Cato Institute has posted a data model of the U.S. federal legislative process and XML markup for representing major types of U.S. federal legislative information, in his post entitled Helping the House Advance Data Transparency, at the Cato@Liberty blog.

The post appears to summarize Mr. Harper’s presentation at the House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, held 2 February 2012 in Washinton, DC.

Click here for video of the panel that includes Mr. Harper’s presentation.

Call for Participation: LegalRuleML Technical Committee

A call for participation — with deadline to join of 12 January 2012 — has been issued for the OASIS LegalRuleML Technical Committee, according to a message posted to the tc-announce@lists.oasis-open.org listserv.

The technical committee is being convened by Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche «Antonio Cicu» and CIRSFID.

The committee’s first meeting will be held 19 January 2012.

According to the proposed charter for the committee, “[t]he goal of the LegalRuleML [Technical Committee] is to extend RuleML …with features specific to the formalization of norms, guidelines, and legal reasoning.”

For background information on the LegalRuleML project, please see Professor Dr. Palmirani’s recent paper on LegalRuleML.

For more information on the charter or the technical committee, please see the committee’s Website or its proposed charter.

HT @JamieXML.

LegalRuleML: Proposed Charter for Technical Committee

A charter has been proposed for the LegalRuleML Technical Committee — convened by Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche «Antonio Cicu» and CIRSFID — of the OASIS open standards organization, according to a 28 November 2011 post to the tc-announce@lists.oasis-open.org listserv.

According to the proposed charter, “[t]he goal of the LegalRuleML [Technical Committee] is to extend RuleML …with features specific to the formalization of norms, guidelines, and legal reasoning.”

For background information on the LegalRuleML project, please see Professor Dr. Palmirani’s recent paper on LegalRuleML.

For more information on the charter or the technical committee, please see the proposed charter.

HT @JamieXML.

New: EDRM XML 2.0 Schema

A new version 2.0 of the EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) XML Schema, was posted on 29 September 2011.

EDRM is a major standard for ediscovery technology. ["ediscovery" is called "edisclosure" in some jurisdictions. Both terms refer to legal rules governing the disclosure of digital information sources that may contain evidence respecting a particular civil judicial proceeding. In the U.S. federal system, these rules appear primarily in Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 26, 34, and 37.]

Click here for more information on the EDRM XML Schema.

Click here for more information about EDRM.

Bintliff on the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

Professor Barbara A. Bintliff of the University of Texas School of Law has posted The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act Is Ready for Legislative Action, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Professor Bintliff — who is the Reporter for the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) — explains the provisions of UELMA — a new, proposed, uniform, U.S. state statute requiring states that enact it to authenticate, preserve, and provide permanent public access to legal information that those states publish in electronic formats. The statute is intended to “ensur[e] the trustworthiness of online legal resources and preserv[e] … electronic [legal] publications to provide for continuing accessibility.”

The post also examines the policy principles that inform the Act — especially the Act’s “outcomes-based” approach, intended to accommodate technological change and to afford states substantial flexibility in complying with the Act — as well as the origins of the Act in the American Association of Law Libraries’ 2007 National Summit on Authentication of Digital Legal Information.

Professor Bintliff explains that UELMA is scheduled to be introduced into a number of U.S. state legislatures in January 2012.

This post will be of interest to policy makers responsible for digital legal information resources, the government and legal technology communities, the legal community, legal information professionals, and advocates of improved public access to legal information.

Call for Papers: DESI IV: Workshop on Discovery of Electronically Stored Information

A call for papers — with submission deadlines of 1 April 2011 for research papers, and 22 April 2011 for position papers — has been issued for DESI IV: Workshop on Setting Standards for Searching Electronically Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings, to be held 6 June 2011, at The University of Pittsburgh, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. The workshop is being held in conjunction with ICAIL 2011: The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Papers for DESI IV are invited on the following topics:

• “How do key stakeholders in the e-discovery process conceptualize ‘search quality?’ To what extent are those conceptualizations consistent?”
• “What is within and what is beyond the scope of ‘search quality’ in the context of e-discovery?”
• “To what extent is search quality dependent on:
• Effective automation
• Effective processes for using those automated techniques
• The interaction between the two?”
• “To what extent are these issues new in the context of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and to what extent have they always been good practice even in earlier times?”
• “What processes are in use today for stakeholders to communicate about search quality in the context of e-discovery?”
• “What kinds of ‘standards’ are needed to help improve mutual understanding of what was actually done, and to actually help improve ‘search quality?’”
• “What can we learn from existing standards and standards setting processes?”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Van Engers & Winkels on The Leibniz Center for Law

Professor Dr. Tom van Engers and Professor Dr. Radboud Winkels, both of Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam, have published The Leibniz Center for Law, 7 SCRIPTed 402-405 (2010) (Issue No. 2). Here is a summary:

The Leibniz Center conducts research and provides education in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and law. In our research we focus on the development and application of techniques from AI to the field of law for the purposes of supporting legal practice and bringing new insights to legal theory. By building computational models of legal reasoning we work in the tradition of Leibniz, developing and using a formal “lingua universalis” and mechanic reasoning procedures providing us with reliable trustworthy results.

The Leibniz Center for Law has longstanding experience on legal ontologies, automatic legal reasoning, legal knowledge-based systems, (standard) languages for representing legal knowledge and information, user-friendly disclosure of legal data, and the application of ICT in education and legal practice. It plays an important role in the development of eGovernance on both national and international levels. The centre provides advice on change-management issues of knowledge-intensive legal processes and the improvement of knowledge-productivity in legal organisations.

The Leibniz Center for Law has participated in many national and international projects for applied research, in which companies, governments and universities cooperate (cf. CLIME, E-POWER, eCOURT, Legal Services Counter). It was the initiator of the CEN MetaLex initiative, an XML interchange-format and standard for legal documents. The Center was recently coordinating partner for two EU-financed projects: TRIAS and ESTRELLA. In TRIAS we developed modular electronic teaching material on e-government for civil servants using i.e. a semantic wiki. ESTRELLA was aimed at developing a formal legal knowledge interchange format (LKIF) for exchanging legal knowledge using semantic web technology. Currently we are running a national science foundation project called AGILE, targeted at the development of a design method, distributed service architecture, and support tools that enable organisations to better govern their legislation and regulation based information services within in a networked environment. Furthermore we are a partner in the FP7 project IMPACT on computational models of argumentation about policy issues. In this project we aim at applying natural language processing techniques (NLP) to multi-threaded dialogues about policies. We aim at (semi) automatic argument reconstruction, using both syntactic and semantic features of the participants’ natural language expressions. [footnotes omitted]

HT @radboud.