Macfarlane: Empirical Study of the Needs of Self-Represented Litigants in Canada

Professor Dr. Julie Macfarlane of the University of Windsor has published The National Self-Represented Litigants Project: Identifying and Meeting the Needs of Self-Represented Litigants: Final Report (2013).

The report states the findings of an empirical study of the needs of pro se litigants in courts in Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario.

Findings are based on one-on-one or focus-group interviews with “259 self-represented litigants” (SRLs) and 107 legal service providers.

Although the sample is not a probability sample, “the characteristics of the SRL sample are broadly representative of the general Canadian population.”

The principal findings regarding information are as follows (I’ve added bulleted lists for ease of reading):

Regarding court forms:

The most common complaints include:

• difficulty knowing which form(s) to use;
• apparently inconsistent information from court staff/judges;
• difficulty with the language used on forms; and
• the consequences of mistakes including adjournments and more wasted time and stress.

Regarding online legal resources:

[SRLs] identified the following weaknesses:

• an emphasis on substantive legal information and an absence of information on practical tasks like:
• filing or serving,
• advice on negotiation or a strategy for talking to the other side,
• presentation techniques, or [...]
• legal procedure;
• [online legal resources] often directed them to other sites (sometimes with broken links) with inconsistent information; and
• multiplicity of sites with no means of differentiating which is the most “legitimate”.

Cynthia Eagan [a member of the research team] found many of the same problems when she audited a selection of on-line Court Guides [... as well as problems concerning:]

• the reading levels of some of this material (as high as 13.5), and
• the heavy use of jargon and unexplained legal terms.

Regarding legal information for SRLs:

• SRL’s in the study frequently described themselves as seeking “guidance” rather than “direction”.
• The most common source of legal information for SRL’s are court staff [...]
• [SRLs] complained about the restrictions on the time and scope of information that these staff can offer, because of:
• the limitation on their providing “legal advice”[...] or [...]
• the sheer volume of people they are dealing with.
• The distinction between legal information/legal advice which lies at the heart of the job descriptions of staff working on the court counters and in information services is consistently complained about by both SRL’s and staff, as at best unclear and at worst practically unworkable [...]

Regarding access to legal services:

[...] many SRL’s sought some type of “unbundled” legal services from legal counsel; for example:

• assistance with document review,
• writing a letter, or
• appearing in court [...]

For the recommendations and additional information, please see the complete report and the project’s Website.

Funding for the project was provided by the Law Foundation of Ontario, the Alberta Law Foundation, and the Law Foundation of British Columbia/Legal Services Society of British Columbia.

Please see the comments to this post for events and other information related to the report.

Call for Papers: LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference

The call for papers and presentation proposals has been issued for LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 26-27 September 2013 on the Channel Island of Jersey.

The conference Website does not seem to state the deadline for submitting papers or proposals. If you know the submission deadline, please feel free to tell us in the comments to this post.

[UPDATE 11 February 2013: The conference organizers now say the submission deadline is 31 March 2013.]

Papers are invited on the topics covered by any of the seven tracks in which the conference program is divided:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access
• Privacy v open government in legal publishing
• Emerging patterns of information access and usage
• Technological development and free access to law

The conference Twitter account is @JerseyLVI2013 and the conference hashtag is #lvi2013

For details about the tracks, please see the track Websites.

For more details about the conference, please see the conference Website.

Call for Papers: AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 28 February 2013 and full paper submission deadline of 15 May 2013 — has been issued for AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, to be held at a date to be determined, between 21 and 27 July 2013, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

The workshop is being collocated with XXVI. World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.

Papers for AICOL 2013 are invited on the following topics:

• Law and Science
• Knowledge Management
• Law and Cognitive Science
• Cognitive schemas
• Law and Complexity Theory
• Law and Robotics
• Complex Systems
• Law and Mathematics
• Legal Theory
• Legal Graphic Representation
• Legal Culture
• Game Theory
• Computer Ethics
• Formalization of Legal Systems and Norms
• Artificial Societies
• Rules and Standards
• Argumentative Frameworks
• Agreement technologies
• Legal Ontologies
• Electronic Institutions
• Governance
• Legal Concepts
• Legal Information Retrieval
• Legal Thesauri
• Online Dispute Resolution
• Taxonomies
• Trends in e-Discovery, e-Courts, e-Administration
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Legal Knowledge Acquisition
• Users’ studies
• Legal Knowledge Representation

For more details, please see the call.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

Epstein, Landes, and Posner: The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice

Professor Dr. Lee Epstein, Professor Dr. William M. Landes, and Senior Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner, have published The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice (Harvard University Press, 2013).

Here is the publisher’s description:

Judges play a central role in the American legal system, but their behavior as decision-makers is not well understood, even among themselves. The system permits judges to be quite secretive (and most of them are), so indirect methods are required to make sense of their behavior. Here, a political scientist, an economist, and a judge work together to construct a unified theory of judicial decision-making. Using statistical methods to test hypotheses, they dispel the mystery of how judicial decisions in district courts, circuit courts, and the Supreme Court are made.

The authors derive their hypotheses from a labor-market model, which allows them to consider judges as they would any other economic actors: as self-interested individuals motivated by both the pecuniary and non-pecuniary aspects of their work. In the authors’ view, this model describes judicial behavior better than either the traditional “legalist” theory, which sees judges as automatons who mechanically apply the law to the facts, or the current dominant theory in political science, which exaggerates the ideological component in judicial behavior. Ideology does figure into decision-making at all levels of the federal judiciary, the authors find, but its influence is not uniform. It diminishes as one moves down the judicial hierarchy from the Supreme Court to the courts of appeals to the district courts. As The Behavior of Federal Judges demonstrates, the good news is that ideology does not extinguish the influence of other components in judicial decision-making.

HT @law_book

Archived Tweets and Resources from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

Click here for archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format, from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012 at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.

Click here for the conference Website.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

For blog posts and other resources related to the conference, please see the comments to this post.

October 7-9: LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

LVI 2012: The 25th Law via the Internet Conference, is being held 7-9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School, in Ithaca, New York, USA.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format, from the conference.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

Nalumaga on Information Access and Use by Legislators in the Ugandan Parliament

Dr. Ruth Nalumaga of Makerere University presented a paper entitled Information access and use by legislators in the Ugandan Parliament, at ISIC 2012: The Information Behavior Conference, 4-7 September, in Tokyo.

Dr. Nalumaga says that the paper will be published “in the January [2013] issue of Information Research.”

Here is the abstract:

Introduction. This article arises out of previous research (Nalumaga, 2009) on information challenges and possibilities encountered by legislators in the Ugandan Parliament. This paper explored information practices at Parliamentary level and the main objective is highlighting the influences of the context of legislative activities on the information behavior of legislators. Female members of Parliament were a major point of analysis due to their prior status as a previously under-represented social group in mainstream politics. Levels of access to and use of information were scrutinised across genders.

Methods. In-depth interviews with a thematic incremental guide were adopted and a total of thirty five (35) Legislators participated. The guide featured questions on information acquisition and use through formal structures, for example the Parliamentary and other libraries; the Parliamentary research unit; access to and use of electronic information; personal initiatives, like own subscriptions. Intermediaries/Library staff were interviewed as well as direct observations.

Analysis. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analyzed at two levels, the primary and secondary. At primary level, categories of different information sources were highlighted and corresponding information behaviour. The secondary level analyzed the Parliamentary context and its influences across gender.

Results. Information behavior exhibited included both active solicitation and passive provision. Evenness in access tied closely with instances of ‘passive’ provision. Information needs that required active seeking exhibited a gendered divide.

Conclusion. Male legislators, possibly as political insiders, appeared more adaptive to inconsistencies in the Information provision. Women legislators could take leaf from some low cost investments for effectiveness.

For full text of the paper please contact the author.

Thanks to Dr. Nalumaga for allowing me to post the abstract.

Anderson on Empirical Studies of Law Student Information Seeking Behavior

Jennifer Anderson of the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science recently posted a working paper entitled Empirical Studies of Law Student Information Seeking Behavior and a Call for the Return of the Law Library as a ‘Laboratory’ for Legal Education (2011).

Here is the abstract:

The legal education literature is replete with complaints that law students have poor legal research skills. This is despite the fact that no one disputes the importance of legal research to the practice of law. Indeed, one highly-cited professor and law librarian described legal research as “one of [the] most essential functions” of an attorney. Now more than ever, graduating law students must have strong information seeking skills to be competitive in the job market, as more law firms expect new hires to be able to conduct timely, cost-effective legal research without the need for extensive training by the firm. Newly graduated law students often fail to live up to these expectations, however.

Despite universal agreement about the importance of this “essential” lawyering function, little empirical work on the information seeking behavior of law students appears in either the legal education literature or the library and information science (LIS) literature. This paper begins by defining “information seeking” in the context of law students. It then reviews and synthesizes the few studies that have been performed. Finally, it discusses the implications of this research for the law school curriculum and calls for a return to one of the first innovations of pioneering legal educator and former Harvard law school dean Christopher Columbus Langdell—that of re-establishing the law school library as the “laboratory” for the study of the law.

Click here for other studies of legal information behavior.

Accepted Presentations for LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

The accepted presentations and their abstracts have been posted for LVI 2012: The 25th Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 7-9 October 2012, at Cornell University Law School in Ithaca, New York, USA.

Jaquith on Answering Legal Questions with Google

Waldo Jaquith of The State Decoded has posted Answering Legal Questions with Google, at The State Decoded.

In this post, Mr. Jaquith describes the search engine traffic of Virginia Decoded, the first implementation of The State Decoded open legislative data platform.

Key findings include:

• The distribution of search queries is “very flat,” with more than 95% of queries having been “used just 1 time”
• “Many of these search terms are extremely specific”
• Problem solving appears to motivate many queries
• “Some of these search terms return results that would not otherwise yield useful results from the official Code of Virginia website,” in part because Virginia Decoded returns court decisions that interpret a statute, along with the text of the statute (and he offers an interesting example involving a statute that has been subject to constitutional challenge)
• Visit duration is approximately 90 seconds
• Visitors view an average of “2.68 pages”

Mr. Jaquith concludes:

The plan [of The State Decoded] was to turn entire state codes into enormous targets for search traffic to help people solve problems and better understand the laws that govern them. Traffic records bear out that at least the former half of that plan is being fulfilled. That accomplished, I can concentrate more on the latter, which was always going to be the real work.

For more information, please see the complete post.