Justice Wide Open Conference: Proceedings Available

Full text of proceedings have been published online for the Justice Wide Open Conference, held 29 February 2012, at City University London, London, England, UK.

Judith Townend of City University London is the editor of the proceedings.

The papers concern “the history and context of the flow of legal knowledge and open justice, as well as court reporting and the media.”

Legal Communication Papers at RSA 2012: Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference

The legal communication papers (that I’ve been able to identify) being presented at RSA 2012: The 15th Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference, being held 25-28 May 2012, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, are listed below.

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #rsa12.

The legal communication / legal rhetoric papers being presented at the conference include the following (if you know of other legal communication papers being presented at the conference, please feel free to list them in the comments):

• Jennifer Andrus, University of Utah, and Nathan Atkinson, Georgia State University: Photographs, Witnesses and Bodies: Toward a Visual Rhetoric of Law
• Joseph Bartolotta, University of Minnesota: Indulging John Marshall’s “Sympathies”: Identification, the Cherokee Nation, and the Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia
• Shelby Bell, University of Minnesota: The Presidency as a Tool for Foreign Policy: An Exploration of the Implications of United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp
• Jonathan Benda, Northeastern University: Formosa Betrayed and Its Fate(s): Rhetorical Ecologies and the Reframing of Human Rights Rhetoric
• Frank M. Bryan, University of Vermont: Face-to-face Democratic Deliberation: The Role of Rhetoric in Communal Assemblies
• Peter Odell Campbell, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: Queer Phronesis in Constitutional Argument
• Alan Chu, University of Arizona: Legislative New Racism and the Rhetoric of Ethnic Studies in Arizona
• Emily Cooney, Arizona State University: Keeping the Targets Out: Representation and Social Justice in the Arizona SB 1070 Debate
• Mark Davis, Texas Tech University: The U.S. Constitution and Human Rights: A Rhetorical Look at How the Constitution Is Used as a Weapon by Political and Corporate Interests to Deny Human Rights Concerns to Non-citizens Across the Globe
• Matthew deTar, Northwestern University: The Limits of Religious Rights Discourse: The EU in Domestic Turkish Politics
• Rasha Diab, University of Texas: Revisiting the Constitution of Medina: A Medieval, Arab-Islamic Articulation of Conciliation and Human Rights
• Adam Ellwanger, University of Houston-Downtown: Our “Big, Messy Tough Democracy”: Healthcare Reform and the Failure of Rhetoric
• Megan Foley, Mississippi State University: Logos and Aristotelian Justice: Dikē from Aporia to Analogy
• Michaela Frischherz, The University of Iowa: Not Gay Enough: Performing Identifications in U.S. Asylum Law
• John Gastil, Penn State University; Katherine Knobloch, University of Washington; Robert Richards, Penn State University: Vicarious Deliberation: How the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review Influences Deliberation in Mass Elections
• Mary Glavin, Carnegie Mellon University: Free Appropriate Public Education: Anxiety of Agency in Special Education Law
• Jeremiah Hickey, St. John’s University: In Defense of “Breathing Space:” The Structure of Political Debate in Snyder v. Phelps
• Van Hillard, Davidson College: Definitional Anxieties over Protecting Marriage: Kategoria as Civic Violence
• Karen S. Hoffman, Marquette University: Listening to the People: the Contribution of Online Comment Forums
• Jaclyn Howell, University of Kansas: When Communism and Jim Crow Collide: Harry Raymond and the Case of Willie McGee
• Kristen Hungerford, University of Memphis: Obama Doesn’t Like To ‘Tell’: A Rhetoric of Ambiguity in President Obama’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Signing Address
• James Jasinski, University of Puget Sound: Reconstituting a Prudential Middle Ground Regarding Racial Classifications: From Bakke to Parents United
• Helen Lee, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Rhetorical Construction of Gender in Marriage Cases
• Emiliano Marello, Universidad de Buenos Aires: The Rhetoric of the Possibility of Lesbian Love: Argumentative Aspects of the Legal Struggle of Lesbian Mothers in Argentina
• Jonathan Maricle, University of South Carolina: Accountable Deliberation: The Public’s Role in Healthcare Reform
• Sara McKinnon, University of Wisconsin, Madison: Dividing Definitions of Gender/Sexuality and the Implications for Lesbian Asylum Seekers in the United States
• Paul Minifee, San Diego State University : Rhetoric of Agitation: Rev. Jermain W. Loguen’s Speech in Defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
• William Morgan, New York University: Commodiousness, Concern, and the Uses of Repetitive Questioning in Human Rights Rhetoric
• Christa B. Teston, University of Idaho: Defining “clinical meaningfulness” in FDA cancer-care hearings
• Belinda Walzer, University of North Carolina-Greensboro: What Are The Alternatives? Human Rights, Subjectivity and the Potential of Narrative
• Maggie Werner, Hobart & William: Heroes v. Haters: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Masquerade of Justice
• Karen Wink, U.S. Coast Guard Academy: Deliberative Discourse Surrounding the Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

For abstracts or full text of papers, please contact the authors.

Legal Informatics / Legal Communication Papers @ ICA 2012

The following legal informatics or legal communication papers are being presented at ICA 2012: The Conference of the International Communication Association, being held 24-28 May 2012, in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. (Click here for the full conference program. The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #ica12. If you know of other legal communication or legal informatics papers presented at the conference, please feel free to mention them in the comments):

• Sanna Ala-Kortesmaa, U of Tampere: The Effects of Relational Tensions on Optimal Listening in Legal Communication Relationships
• Cheryl Ann Bishop, Quinnipiac U: Access to Information in the European Court of Human Rights
• Laura W. Black and Anna Marie Wiederhold, Ohio U: “I Agree With All of That, But…” Examining Expressions of Difference in Citizen Discussion Groups
• Emily A. Dolan, Syracuse U: Exploring Privacy on Online Social Networks in Civil Cases
• Dmitry Epstein, Cornell U; Rebecca B. Vernon, Cornell eRulemaking Initiative: Not by Technology Alone: The “Analog” Aspects of Online Public Engagement in Rulemaking
• Jessica Fridy and Karen Tracy, U of Colorado: Majority Rule or a Minority Right? Discursive Orientations Toward Democratic Ideals in a U.S. Public Hearing
• Howard Giles, Douglas Bonilla, Daniel Linz, and Michelle L. Gomez,U of California, Santa Barbara: Police Stops of and Interactions With Latino and White (Non-Latino) Drivers: Extensive Policing and Communication Accommodation
• Jeffrey A. Gottfried, U of Pennsylvania, Eran N. Ben-Porath, Social Science Research Solutions, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, U of Pennsylvania: Do Judges Perceive Value in Voter Guides for Judicial Elections?
• Karina Horsti, New York U; Saara Pellander, U of Helsinki: Family in Migration Debates: Polarised Discourses in Finnish Media and Parliament
• Robert Huesca, Trinity U; Roopali Mukherjee, CUNY – Queens College; Eren McGinnis, Dos Vatos Productions: Precious Knowledge: A Film and Discussion
• Shazia Iftkhar, U of Michigan: “The Republic is Lived With the Face Uncovered”: Framing the Legal Ban on the ‘Burqa’ in France
• Oyvind Ihlen and Kjersti Thorbjornsrud, U of Oslo: Tears vs. Rules and Regulations: Media Strategies and Framing of Immigration Issues
• Melissa A. Johnson, North Carolina State U: Battleground Arizona: Visual Fidelity in Network News Coverage of Arizona’s Immigration Law
• Michael K Park, U of Southern California: Juror Misconduct 2.0: The Right to an Impartial Jury in the Age of Social Networking
• Jennifer M. Proffitt and Margot A. Susca, Florida State U: Follow the Money: The Entertainment Software Association Attack on Video Game Regulation
• Ryan Rogers, U of North Carolina: The Violence of a Generation: Supreme Court Ruling on Regulating Violent Video Games for Minors
• Leah Sprain, Colorado State U: Speaking as “Experts” and “Citizens” in Public Meetings
• T.T. Sreekumar and Shobha Vadrevu, National U of Singapore: “If I Can, I Legislate. If I Can’t, I Gazette”: Political Twitterati and Democracy in Singapore
• Inger Lisbeth Stole, U of Illinois: The 1930s: Consumers Reactions to Advertising and Demands for Federal Regulation
• Chad Tew and Amy Jorgensen, U of Southern Indiana: Accused and Confused: An Analysis of YouTube Reaction Videos to Copyright Violations
• Mercedes Vigon, Florida International U: Not Business as Usual: Spanish–Language TV Coverage of Arizona’s Immigration Law, April-May 2010

For full text of papers, please contact the authors.

Bromby on Using Live, Text-Based Communications from Court for Reporting

Dr. Michael Bromby of Glasgow Caledonian University has published Response to the consultation by the Judicial Office for England and Wales on the Use of Live, Text‐Based Forms of Communications from Court for the Purposes of Fair and Accurate Reporting, European Journal of Law and Technology, 3(1) (2012). Here is the abstract:

This is a collaborative submission from a group of academics based in the UK with expertise in information technology law and related areas. This response is broadly in favour of the use of live text-based communications being used from the courtroom, subject to existing safeguards and further guidance given to social media users. The preparation of this response has been funded by the Information Technology Think Tank, which is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by the SCRIPT/AHRC Centre for Research in Intellectual Property and Technology, University of Edinburgh. This response has been prepared by Michael Bromby. Important contributions to preparing the response were also made by James Chalmers, Burkhard Schafer and Michelle Hynes-McIlroy. In addition, this response is submitted by the following individuals: Dr Abbe Brown, SCRIPT, University of Edinburgh, Professor Philip Leith, Queen’s University, Belfast, Karen McCullagh, University of Salford, Dr Dinusha Mendis, University of Bournemouth, Professor Andrew A Adams, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan, Abhilash Nair, Sheffield Hallam University.

Rabb and Bhatti on a New Web Resource About Islamic Law: Islawmix

Professor Dr. Intisar A. Rabb of Boston College Law School, and Umbreen Bhatti, Esq., of Disability Rights Legal Center gave a presentation entitled Islawmix: Content and Context for Islamic Law in the News, on 3 October 2011, at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

islawmix is a project of The Berkman Center.

Here is the abstract of the presentation:

Recent years have seen an uptick in coverage of Islamic law (sharīʿa) in American news media, policy, and academic circles. What are the rules that dictate how Muslims in America conduct themselves? How do or should our legal institutions respond? When reporting on issues involving Muslims, how can journalists or academics distinguish individual preference or culture from Islamic law? What available, authoritative resources can best inform interested readers, from the casual to the scholarly? islawmix aims to fill the information gap in this important area. In this talk, Intisar A. Rabb — Berkman Fellow and faculty of Boston College Law School — and Umbreen Bhatti — co-founder of islawmix and a lawyer with experience in civil rights and constitutional law — walk through “why islawmix” and explore how islawmix aims to accomplish the rather ambitious task of providing accessible resources for parsing such complex information and developing resources for the aggregation and contextualization of significant trends in Islamic law.

islawmix is on Twitter: @islawmix.

Legal Blogging and Legal Journalism: Interesting Discussion on Without Prejudice

A very interesting discussion of legal blogging and legal journalism in the UK is available on this week’s Without Prejudice podcast (starting at 32:00), with legal blogger Charon QC, solicitor David Allen Green of The New Statesman and Jack of Kent, and Joshua Rozenberg of The Guardian (among several other media entities).

Legal Information / Communication Issues in the FCC Media Report, “Information Needs of Communities”

A number of legal information and legal communication issues are discussed in the U.S. Federal Communication Commission‘s (FCC’s) recent report on the state of U.S. media, entitled Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age (2011).

The report’s findings cover the following legal information / communication issues:

• In recent years, while media coverage of federal legal matters has improved, media coverage of state and local legal issues — including coverage of state and local legislatures, courts, regulatory agencies, and law enforcement — has declined, except for coverage of crime stories by local television news programs. The reason is that newspapers have recently reduced the numbers of professional journalists covering these institutions, and no other media have compensated. The report finds that for-profit news organizations are unlikely to fill this gap in coverage because returns on investment are too low.
• For example, “there are far fewer [state or local news organizations] covering Congressional delegations — especially their work on local issues. Twenty-seven states have no Washington reporters…[;] [t]he number of papers with bureaus in [Washington, DC] has dropped by about half since the mid-1980s; the number of reporters working for regional papers dropped from 200 in the mid-1990s to 73 at the end of 2008″; the number of statehouse reporters [nationwide] has dropped by one-third — from 524 in 2003 to 355 in 2009″; “newspapers send so few reporters [to courts] to do so much that [judicial] reporting has become more reactive and shallow, and less enterprising”; “[i]n Michigan, coverage of juvenile courts has” diminished substantially.
• Although public access to some U.S. legal information has increased substantially in recent years, according to the report, access to certain kinds of state and local legal information in some instances appears to have declined. The report describes instances in which access to local court records has declined, due to delays in posting digital court records online. The report finds that courts today more frequently reject freedom-of-information requests, and that newspapers and news associations today have fewer resources to challenge these denials of access in court.
• Although there are “39 local or regional cable news shows,” “only about 25–30 percent of the population can watch” them.
• State public affairs networks (SPANs) — the state-level equivalents of C-SPAN, which provide extended coverage of state legislative, judicial, and administrative proceedings — are available only in “23 states and the District of Columbia,” and these networks receive financial support from the cable industry “in only 4 states.” Only one of these networks is distributed on satellite TV. Although the new Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act of 2010 gives satellite TV providers an incentive “to provide retransmission of the SPANs,” experts “do not expect this flexibility to increase [satellite] carriage of SPANs.” “There is typically no statewide entity with whom a [SPAN] can contract for statewide carriage.” Only four SPANs, those “in Alaska, Florida, Ohio, and South Carolina[,] … are affiliated with a public broadcaster and none …directly receives [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] funding.”
• The report notes that one response to the decline of newspaper coverage of state government has been the creation in several states of “small news services [such as the Arizona Guardian] … reaching a small, intensely interested audience and charging high subscription prices.” The report observes that in other states, such as Ohio, “newspapers around the state joined together to help finance statehouse coverage.”
• The report notes that legal information makes up an important component of the coverage of “[n]ewspapers targeted specifically to Hispanic consumers.”
• Public television in Atlanta has created an e-participation platform as part of its “Lens on Atlanta” initiative.
• “Several PBS stations” use their “digital multicast channels” to broadcast legislative sessions, court proceedings, or public meetings.
• Although some public, educational, and government (PEG) channels on cable television cover local government, the number of, and funding for, these channels has recently declined substantially.
• On a low-power FM (LPFM) radio station in Spokane, Washington, law students and lawyers host a regular radio program — called Radio Law — about state and local legal issues.
• Respecting new media, the following findings concerning legal information and communication were made:
• Legislative information is made more accessible via the Sunlight Foundation‘s Congress app, Congrelate platform, and Fifty States Project (now called the Open States Project);
• Apps and platforms such as Filibusted, Legistalker, RealTimeCongress, and GovPulse improve citizens’ access to federal legislative and regulatory information and may foster public participation in lawmaking, while in Washington, DC, the DCCrimeFinder app identifies geographic locations where crimes have occurred;
• In Seattle and Washington, DC, crime statistics are among the most popular data sets made available online;
• Among the types of government data sets about which U.S. online journalists have recently expressed greatest interest are “Environmental datasets, which included data tracking violations and enforcement of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts,” and “Crime data”;
• Legal data made available online by U.S. states include “[e]nvironmental citations/violations” and “[d]isciplinary actions against attorneys”;
• The John Locke Foundation established the online news site Carolina Journal to cover North Carolina legislative matters.
• The report praises PACER, the U.S. federal courts’ information system, for making available online transcripts of federal district and bankruptcy court proceedings and “digital audio recordings of court proceedings”; but the report notes that “[t]ranscripts from the U.S. Courts of Appeals are not made available” on PACER.
• Respecting state court information, the report finds “uneven” public access: “Supreme Court and appellate court … briefs are less often accessible [than briefs filed in federal cases]. At the trial court level … full access to filed court documents is rare.” The report notes that “[t]ranscripts can often be obtained directly from [state courts], and many courts offer electronically viewable and searchable transcripts, though often there is a fee for transcription services.” The report further observes that seven states “charge for online access to court records.”
• The report characterizes access to state and local police records as “problematic”: “The laws governing public access to law enforcement records differ significantly from state to state. No studies have been found that compile these differences.” The report praises Illinois for recently modifying its freedom-of-information statute to increase access to police records, including by “enhancing the powers of public access counselors.”
• The report finds that current U.S. federal tax law does not adequately accommodate nonprofit news organizations. In particular, the report finds that many nonprofit news organizations may be ineligible for tax-exempt status because their distribution methods resemble those of for-profit news organizations; nonprofit news organizations that obtain tax-exempt status are often taxed on their advertising revenue; and such organizations risk losing their tax-exempt status if they publish commentary about proposed legislation.

The report makes the following recommendations respecting legal information and communication:

• Government should encourage the growth and sustainability of nonprofit news organizations devoted to coverage of state and local public affairs;
• “[A] state public affairs network [SPAN] similar to C-SPAN” should be established in “every state”;
• Coverage of SPANs on public television — particularly on “multicast channels” — and cable television should be encouraged by the Corporate for Public Broadcasting’s offering incentives to public TV stations to carry SPANs, or by Congress’s “reducing the leased access requirements to cable operators that give carriage or financing to SPANs”;
• State governments should allow SPANs “to be part of the PEG [cable TV public, educational, and government channel] system,” a change that might make SPANs “eligible for fees from local [cable TV] franchising authorities”;
• Congress should encourage local cable news coverage “by reduc[ing] the leased access burdens for [cable companies] that carry local cable news efforts”;
• “Governments at all levels” should “collect and publish data” — especially data “related to: … legal compliance by regulated entities (e.g., fictitious business name registrations, environmental citations, disciplinary actions against attorneys and physicians)” — in “standardized, machine-readable, structured formats” “that make it easy for citizens, entrepreneurs, software developers, and reporters to access and analyze information.” “Data releases should include an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows the data to be shared easily with other computers and applications.” “[D]ata should be archived so that information, once posted, does not disappear over time”;
• “Government[s]” should “make proceedings and hearings available online, and … keep them in a publicly accessible archive”;
• State legislatures should improve access to public records by creating “Transparency Officer” and “Information Ombudsperson” positions; by ensuring that public records personnel have adequate training and understanding of applicable freedom-of-information laws; by changing public records laws to include “a presumption in favor of releasing documents whose disclosure would not undermine national security, public safety, compelling privacy interests, trade secrets, or law enforcement”; and by requiring state agencies to “post responses to information requests online to avoid duplication in requests and redundant compliance efforts”;
• Each government should “consider” creating a “single online portal to facilitate access to public documents” in multiple formats. “The portal could give access to webcasts …of all public meetings and hearings….” and “be used to post all nonemergency legislation for at least 72 hours prior to a final vote”;
• Federal tax law should be changed to permit nonprofit news organizations to publish commentary on proposed legislation without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status;
• A commission of experts on nonprofit journalism and experts on the law of taxation of nonprofit organizations should be convened to make recommendations about changes to federal tax law necessary to accommodate nonprofit news organizations that can cover state and local public affairs.

Summary of Feb. 18 ABA Conference on Public Understanding of the Courts in the Age of New Media

A summary of the ABA Conference on Public Understanding of the Courts in the Age of New Media, held 18 February 2011 at The University of Arizona School of Law’s Rehnquist Center, has been posted by Tim Eigo, Esq., of Arizona Attorney magazine.

The summary includes a selection of Twitter tweets about the conference, marked by hashtags #barmedia and #newmediaconf.

HT @christinemartin.

Knight Foundation’s Order in the Court 2.0 Project: An Overview

The Knight Foundation’s Order in the Court 2.0 Project, which will explore using Web 2.0 technology to improve public access to court information, is described in a new post by John Davidow at the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab blog.

Click here for more information about the project.

HT @knightfdn.

Legal News via New Media: Massachusetts Courts, Knight Foundation, & Boston Radio Station Develop Best Practices

The Knight Foundation has awarded a grant to Boston’s WBUR radio station — working with the Massachusetts state courts — to fund the creation of best practices in the use of new digital media for journalistic coverage of court proceedings.

The grant, entitled “Order in the Court 2.0,” was awarded as part of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge, a program to fund innovation in journalism.

According to the announcement:

To foster greater access to the judicial process, this project will create a laboratory in a Boston courtroom to help establish best practices for digital coverage that can be replicated and adopted throughout the nation. While the legislative and executive branches have incorporated new technologies and social media, the courts still operate under the video and audio recording standards established in the 1970s and 80s. The courtroom will have a designated area for live blogging via a wifi network and the ability to live-stream court proceedings to the public. Working in conjunction with the Massachusetts court system, the project will publish the daily docket on the web and build a knowledge wiki for the public with common legal terms.

Click here for a video describing the grant.

HT @StateCourts.