Priestley on Legal MOOCs

Ann Priestley, M.A., has posted #lawmoocs: law schools, law teachers and MOOCs, at Danegeld.

The post includes links to legal Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered on a variety of platforms.

Providers listed include Coursera, edX, Canvas, CourseSites, P2PU, LawMeets, The Sorbonne, and CALI.

Ms. Priestley says she welcomes news of additional MOOCs not yet listed in her post.

HT @annindk

LawWithoutWalls Conposium 2013: Tweets and Resources

The LawWithoutWalls Conposium 2013 was held 13-14 April 2013 at the University of Miami School of Law in Miami, Florida, USA.

Here is a description of LawWithoutWalls:

LawWithoutWalls is a part-virtual, educational collaboratory created by Michele DeStefano and Michael Bossone at the University of Miami School of Law. It brings together a transdisciplinary group of people and institutions from around the world to engage on the burning issues facing the legal profession, collaboratively solve legal problems, and develop the skillsets needed to thrive in the new, global legal marketplace.

The 2013 Conposium presentations — during which “teams present their Projects of Worth (and prototypes) to a panel of judges” — included a number on new legal information or communication systems.

Click here for the event schedule.

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #lwow2013

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

Legal Informatics Papers @ BILETA 2013

Several legal informatics papers are being presented at BILETA 2013: The 28th Annual Conference of the British and Irish Legal Educational Technology Association, being held 10-12 April 2013 in Liverpool, England, UK.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #bileta13

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the conference.

Here are the authors and titles of the legal informatics papers I was able to identify (click here for abstracts of these papers and other papers from the conference):

• A. Leveringhaus and T. de Greef: Autonomous Robotic Weapons Systems: Protecting legal and moral responsibility via sound design
• J. Lombard & L. O’Brien: The use of a legal ontology to support governance, risk and compliance in the financial services industry
• P. Cortés: Recommendations for the Design of the European Online Dispute Resolution Platform
• A. Alajaji: Electronic contracting: The EU and Saudi Arabia’s approaches
• K. Rogers: Consent in the online environment – principles before form?
• S. Woodhouse, M. Waite, J. Marshall: The development of pro-bono clinical legal assessment in response to intersecting agendas: legal aid, professionalisation, and evolving legal advice paradigms
• A. Muntjewerff: Learning and Instruction in the Digital Age
• F. Grealy, J. Bainbridge, P. Maharg, R. Mitchell, J. Mills, F. Grealy, R. O’Boyle & K. Counsell: iLEGALL (iPads and Legal Learning): mobile legal learning
• S. Dempsey & R. O’Shea: Promoting Legal Fairness Through Data Analysis
• C. Easton: MOOCs: Too Connected for Effective Interaction?
• J. Marshall: Revisiting podcasting in the age of MOOCS – understanding student engagement with self-running learning resources in different educational contexts

Proposals invited for talks at ReInventLaw London 2013

Proposals are now invited for talks at the ReInventLaw London 2013 Conference, to be held 14 June 2013, in London, England.

The proposal submission deadline is 5 April 2013.

The conference is organized by Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz and Professor Renee Newman Knake of the ReInventLaw Laboratory at Michigan State University College of Law.

Talks will be chosen by a crowdsourced voting process.

Here are the proposal guidelines:

Talks must relate to some aspect of law + technology + innovation + entrepreneurship.

This is about big ideas—no sales pitches or product pushing.

Submit a talk pitch of 300 words or a link to a 30 second YouTube video by midnight April 5, 2013.

Voting opens after submission window is complete at http://www.ReInventLawLondon.com

One person, one vote—but feel free to encourage colleagues, friends, family and more to vote for your pitch!

Winners will have up to 10 minutes to speak, and will then respond to dynamic, real-time, audience-driven Q&A. [...]

For more details, please see the conference Website.

HT @reneeknake

Several Articles on Legal Educational Technology (Papers from BILETA 2012) in New Issue of EJLT

The new issue of European Journal of Law and Technology (Volume 4, Number 1, 2013) is a special issue that contains several papers on legal educational technology, first presented at BILETA 2012: Conference of the British & Irish Legal Educational Technology Association, held 29-30 March 2012 in Newcastle, England, UK.

Here are the contents related to legal educational technology:

• Jonathan Bainbridge, Karen Counsell, Freda Grealy, Paul Maharg, Joel Mills, Rory O’Boyle: iPads in Legal Learning (iLEGALL): mobile devices in professional legal learning
• Wai Shun Chow & Firew Kebede Tiba: Professional Legal Education Reviews: Too Many “What”s, Too Few “How”s.
• Graeme Broadbent & Pamela Sellman: Images of Law and Legal Education: Law School websites and the provision of information
• Janice Ann Denoncourt: Using Film to Enhance Intellectual Property Law Education: Getting the Message Across
• Patricia McKellar & Steven Warburton: Developing an e-reader and e-publishing model for flexible and open learning on a distance learning LLB programme
• Antoinette Muntjewerff: CASE reading, structuring and analyzing decisions by judges
• Philip Leith & Cynthia Fellows: BAILII, Legal Education and Open Access to Law
• Emily Allbon: Too cool for (law) school? Using technology to engage students in legal skills
• Sandra Meredith: Critical review of referencing software when used with OSCOLA

HT @nzjudi

Hagan: Open Law Lab

Dr. Margaret Hagan of Stanford Law School has launched Open Law Lab, “an initiative to design law – to make it more accessible, more usable, and more engaging.”

Dr. Hagan says that the Lab currently is a nonprofit collaborative project among law students.

The Lab’s work currently addresses:

• Visualization of legal information
• Improvements in dispute resolution
• Legal educational technology with an emphasis on gamification
• Court technology, under the rubric of Usable court systems
• Technology and innovation in access to justice

For more information, please see the Open Law Lab Website.

HT @margarethagan here and here

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.

Donohue on using simulations in national security law education

Professor Dr. Laura Donohue of Georgetown University Law Center has published National Security Pedagogy: The Role of Simulations, forthcoming in Journal of National Security Law and Policy, volume 6(2).

Here is the abstract:

This article challenges the dominant pedagogical assumptions in the legal academy. It begins by briefly considering the state of the field of national security, noting the rapid expansion in employment and the breadth of related positions that have been created post-9/11. It considers, in the process, how the legal academy has, as an institutional matter, responded to the demand. [...]

The article thus proposes in Part V a new model for national security legal education, based on innovations currently underway at Georgetown Law. NSL Sim 2.0 adapts a doctrinal course to the special needs of national security. Course design is preceded by careful regulatory, statutory, and Constitutional analysis, paired with policy considerations. The course takes advantage of new and emerging technologies to immerse students in a multi-day, real-world exercise, which forces students to deal with an information-rich environment, rapidly changing facts, and abbreviated timelines. It points to a new model of legal education that advances students in the pedagogical goals identified above, while complementing, rather than supplanting, the critical intellectual discourse that underlies the value of higher legal education.

Masters on Hackthelaw: Piratebox meets Free Law

Elmer Masters, JD, MLS, of CALI, has posted Hackthelaw: Piratebox meets Free Law, at his blog, <CONTENT /> v.5.

Here is an excerpt:

The hackthelaw box is an open, anonymous network stocked with primary and secondary legal materials that are freely available for download. People can connect to the network and download any of the materials as well as chat with others connected to the network. All this is in a closed network space separate from the Internet. I can easily imagine setting this up in a library as a way for folks to access legal materials and even ask basic questions about the resources. Any device that has WiFi can connect to the network, so folks could download materials directly to their phones or tablets as well as laptops. Consider hackthelaw as another Free Law access point.

Beyond being a distribution node for Free Law, devices like hackthelaw have potential uses in legal education and practice. A closed private network could be used to distribute and receive law school exams. A professor could launch a network at the beginning of a class to provide students with that day’s material. In practice such a device could be used for gather initial client intake information. In conferences or negotiations a private network could handle the exchange of documents between parties. There are lots of possibilities here, and, as time becomes available, I hope to be looking into some of them in the not too distant future.

If you’re interested, I’ll be running some sort of hackthelaw device at the CALI booth in the AALS exhibit hall in New Orleans, January 4 -6, 2013.

HT @emasters

JURIX 2012: 17-19 December

JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems is being held 17-19 December 2012, at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix2012

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

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for the list of workshops and tutorials.

HT @jurixfoundation