Bruce on Practical Principles of Free Access to Law

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute has posted Practical Principles, the text of his presentation at AfricanLII’s Conference on Access to African Supranational and Regional Law, held earlier this week in Johannesburg.

The post gives an overview of several different sets of broad principles underlying the free access to law movement, and then presents Tom’s version of such principles, which covers the topics:

• Open Access
• Replication
• Open Standards
• International Cooperation

For more details please see the complete post.

HT @trbruce

Hendler on Organizing and Accessing Code-like Legal Materials

Alex M. Hendler, Esq., of ontolawgy LLC, has posted How to eat legislative sausage, on the ontolawgy Blog.

In this post, Mr. Hendler describes methods for organizing digital versions of codified statutes or regulations, citing Tom Bruce’s recent post on legislative identifiers and Grant Vergottini’s response to Tom’s post. Mr. Hendler explains how his cloud-based legal analysis and knowledge management system, called ontolawgy, which uses Semantic Web technology, addresses the issues raised in those posts.

In the second part of his post, Mr. Hendler argues that digital full-text versions of U.S. federal statutes and regulations currently available from the U.S. Government are flawed, particularly respecting indentation. He writes:

If anyone has some insight about how to get the government to bring useful and accurate indentation to its official publications, please get in touch, I would be thrilled to work with you to help make this happen.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Malmgren on Legal Information in the Cloud: A Basis for New Services

Staffan Malmgren of the Swedish Courts Administration and the free access to law service of Sweden, lagen.nu, has posted slides from his presentation entitled Legal Information in the Cloud: A Basis for New Services [Rättsinformation i molnet – en grund för nya tjänster?], given 15 November 2011, at Juridiska tjänster via webben - drivkrafter och överväganden, in Stockholm, Sweden.

Here is the abstract:

The presentation outlines the architecture of the official Swedish legal information system and explains choices made in its construction. As proponents of Open data, we want to to enable the construction of a large variety of legal information services using the official information system. We specify a number of features of an information system, and explains how each of these enables a new class of service upon the data.

These features are: Clear rules for reuse, facilities for bulk downloading of data, stable and predictable identifiers for documents and other entities in the system, retrieval of individual documents, standardized document formats, update/notification mechanisms for when data is changed, basic metadata about documents and entities, relational metadata that connect documents and entities, and finally API’s for creating result list of documents and entities matching a set of criteria (including free text search of document text).

These features are ranked in order of how essential they are to implement, and for each new feature we explain the new class of services that the feature enable. E.g. stable and predictable identifiers allow document retrieval by identity, but also value-added information from third parties (e.g. legal commentary for a statute) when everyone agrees on the identifier for a particular information resource.

At the far end, these features enable the construction of legal information services that do not by themselves store any data or implement e.g. free text search or relevance ranking. Data can be retrieved on demand by other services, enabling a legal information cloud service.

For more information, please contact Mr. Malmgren.

Thanks to Mr. Malmgren for sending the abstract.

New Discussion: Should Legal Informatics Technologies Be Open Source?

A new discussion of the question: Should Legal Informatics Technologies Be Open Source? is currently underway. The conversation was begun by Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group, with a new post at the Legix.info blog entitled To Go Open Source or Not? In that post, Mr. Vergottini poses two questions:

1. Which data models should be used in legal informatics systems?
2. Which aspects of these models should be open source?

Ari Hershowitz of Tabulaw has responded with his new post at the Tabulaw blog, entitled Legislative Model: How Much to Open Source?

This topic has been much discussed in the past in the free-access-to-law community. On this blog, I’ve discussed several aspects of this topic. What are your views on this topic today?

McGrath: Towards a Bill Status Data Model

Sean McGrath of Proplyon has posted Towards a Bill Status Data Model, in The NIEM EDemocracy Initiative (NEI) Google Group.

In this post, Mr. McGrath sets out “5 possible approaches to a 50-state bill
status data model” for U.S. states. The post also contains descriptions of typical attributes of U.S. state legislative information systems relating to bill status. Mr. McGrath hopes this post will begin a conversation about a bill status data model.

Click here for background information on the NIEM EDemocracy Initiative.

New Legal Technology Project: NIEM EDemocracy Initiative

Sean McGrath of Proplyon has launched a new legal technology project: The NIEM EDemocracy Initiative (NEI).

The goal of NEI appears to be to develop “technological standards based on the” U.S. National Information Exchange Model (NIEM), as applied particularly to law-related e-government functions.

Mr. McGrath’s post entitled Bill Status – a low hanging fruit for NEIM eDemocracy? is now available.

Those interested in the project may join the NEI Google Group or visit the NEI Website.

McMillan on URN:LEX

James E. McMillan of the National Center for State Courts has posted How to Verify a Court Document?, Court Technology Bulletin, 18 February 2011.

In this post, Mr. McMillan describes the URN:LEX legal identifier standard, developed by Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi and Pierluigi Spinosa, both of ITTIG/CNR, and Caterina Lupo of CNIPA.

Mr. McMillan also presents a sample pretrial memorandum designated by a URN:LEX URN.

This post is the third installment of Mr. McMillan’s series entitled, The Future Is Not Paper:

• Click here for Part 1, on Microsoft’s Pivot technology;
• Click here for Part 2, on dynamically updated court document systems.

Call for Papers: LVI 2011: Law via the Internet Conference

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 15 February 2011 — has been issued for LVI 2011: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 8-10 June 2011, at the University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong, China.

The conference will be hosted by the Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII).

LVI is the conference of the Free Access to Law Movement and the legal information institutes.

For LVI 2011, papers are invited on the following topics:

• Challenges and barriers in free access to law in Asia and elsewhere
• Multi-lingual legal databases and searching
• Legal issues in the provision of free legal information
• Governance and funding models for sustainability of free legal databases
• Making historical legal materials accessible online
• Social networking technologies and their implications for free access to law?
• Keeping track of legislative evolution online
• Quality control and timeliness of online legal services
• Standards for legal information on the web?
• Free access to law as community services
• International law on the web: Treaties, International Courts etc
• Finding law across the web – indexing and searching
• Litigation support on the web
• Innovative uses of online legal data
• Court registries and electronic filing / transactions
• Interactive and ‘intelligent’ legal services on the web
• Teaching law using internet resources
• Automation of large-scale legal data on the web
• Legal publishing via the web

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Steven C. Perkins.

April 9-11, Citability Codeathon, Chevy Chase, Maryland

A codeathon to create applications in connection with Citability, a project to create a new standard for permanent URIs for government information resources, including legal resources, will be held 9-11 April 2010, at Microsoft Corporation, 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Suite 700, Chevy Chase, Maryland, USA.

Among the applications to be written at the codeathon are resolvers for converting legal resource URNs conforming to the URN:LEX standard, to URIs conforming to the Citability standard.

Click here for the full text of the URN:LEX standard.

Click here for the full text of the Citability standard, entitled Citable Documents Specification.

For more information, please see the codeathon announcement.

New on VoxPopuLII: Mokanov on the Canadian Vendor-Neutral Legal Citation Standard & the CanLII Citator

Canada’s pathbreaking vendor-neutral legal citation standard, and CanLII’s innovative RefLex citator, are the topics of Ivan Mokanov’s new post, entitled Environmentally-Friendly Citations, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

Mr. Mokanov is Deputy Director of LexUM, the publisher of CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute.

Mr. Mokanov’s post describes the origins of the neutral standard, its benefits, its implementation by CanLII, and its widespread adoption. The post also discusses the development of and workflow for CanLII’s RefLex online citator.

Because the post discusses technical, policy, and user issues, the post should be of interest to legal information systems administrators and developers, policy advocates, legal information professionals, and all users of CanLII.