Abstracts Available for CSMN Workshop 2012: The Pragmatics of Legal Language

Abstracts have been posted for the papers presented at CSMN Workshop 2012: The Pragmatics of Legal Language, held 28-29 May 2012 at Oslo University.

The workshop was sponsored by the Oslo University Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature.

Here is a description of the workshop:

This workshop focuses on the pragmatic (and semantic) issues that arise in the interpretation of legal language, the extent to which they are continuous with issues of linguistic interpretation generally and the extent to which they are specific to the legal context. A central question is the applicability of Gricean (neo-Gricean) maxims or the cognitive-communicative principles of Relevance Theory to legal language. More specific topics in linguistic pragmatics include ambiguity, reference fixing, vagueness, lexical meaning adjustment, loose and/or metaphorical language use, implicature, presupposition, and illocutionary force. We anticipate that a sizable subset of these topics will be discussed as well as the textualist/intentionalist debate (Neale 2008 [Textualism with intent]), the literalist/contextualist debate, and the distinction between the interpretation of a law and its application.

Program for LTC2: International Conference on Law, Translation and Culture 2012

The program has been posted for LTC2: International Conference on Law, Translation and Culture 2012, held 31 May-2 June 2012, at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.

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

Abstracts of Papers at LLPP 2012: International Conference on Law, Language and Professional Practice

Abstracts have been posted for papers presented at LLPP 2012: The 2nd International Conference on Law, Language, and Professional Practice, held 10-12 May 2012, in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Caserta, Italy.

Juliette Scott has posted reports on the conference here and here.

For full text of papers, please contact the authors.

Legal Informatics and Legal Communication Papers at ICLS 2012

Several papers on legal informatics or legal communication were presented at ICLS 2012: International Conference on Law and Society, held 5-8 June 2012 in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

Below are the titles, and links to abstracts, of the legal informatics or legal communication papers — that I’ve been able to identify — that were presented at the conference. If you know of others, please feel free to identify them in the comments.

• Philip Adey (University of Sydney): Expert Psychiatric Evidence in Civil Litigation Involving Allegations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: The Australian Experience
• Afra Afsharipour (University of California, Davis): Deal Technology
• Seantel A. Anais (Carleton University): Commissioning Credibility: Texts, Testimony, and Truth in Commissions of Inquiry
• Maria Ines Bergoglio (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba): Legitimacy of the Judicial System and Lay Participation in Judicial Decision-Making Processes in Córdoba, Argentina
• Susan Berk-Seligson and Mitchell A. Seligson (Vanderbilt University): The Role of the Police in Crime-Prevention in Central America
• Susan L. Brooks (Drexel University) and David M. Boulding (Private Practice): Using Communication Models to Teach Relational Competencies in Law School
• Christopher Brown (University of Arkansas, Monticello): Death by Any Other Name: Definitionalism’s Impact on America’s Response to Genocide
• Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar (University of Hawaii, Manoa): Monumental Science in Hawaiʻi: U.S. Imperialism, Western Astronomy, and Kanaka Maoli Resistance to Telescopes atop Mauna a Wākea
• Marie Comiskey (University of Michigan): Testing the Comprehensibility of Canadian Jury Instructions and the Efficacy of 3 Comprehension Aids
• Shari S. Diamond, Chair (Northwestern U/American Bar Foundation); Participants: Mei-Tong Chen (Judicial Yuan, Taiwan), Edmundo S. Hendler (University of Buenos Aires), Jae-Hyup Lee (Seoul National University), Richard O. Lempert (University of Michigan), Kwangbai Park (Chungbuk National University), Christoph Rennig (Frankfurt High Court of Appeals): Roundtable–The Role of Professionals in Lay Tribunals
• Soren Frederiksen (York University): Has the Supreme Court’s Philosophy of Science Made It to Canada?
• Masahiro Fujita (Kansai University): Informational Justice in Jury Research: Reframing Prior Jury Researches
• Jeremy Gans (University of Melbourne): Verbal Equivalents to Likelihood Ratios: Limited Probative Value, Strong Prejudicial Effect, Inconclusive Admissibility, Immoderate Usage
• Claire M Germain (University of Florida): Recent Developments in the French Criminal Jury
• Toby S Goldbach (Cornell University): Lay Participation in the Criminal Trial: First Nations Sentencing Circles and Law Reform in Canada
• Jasmine B. Gonzales Rose (University of Pittsburgh): Juror Language Accommodation in Theory and Praxis
• Mel Greenlee (California Appellate Project): Faretta, Marsden, and the Pro-Se Motion: Legal Language on the Skids
• Miranda C. Hallett (Otterbein University) and Michael Jones-Correa (Cornell University): Borders of the Public: Framing the Inclusion and Exclusion of Undocumented Migrants
• Paula Hannaford-Agor (National Center for State Courts), Nicole L. Waters (National Center for State Courts): Juror and Jury Use of New Media: A Baseline Exploration
• Valerie P. Hans (Cornell University): The Jury in Russia: Research and Reform
• Emma M. Henderson (La Trobe University): The Empty Gesture: Jury Directions and the Meaning of Consent in Rape Trials in Victoria, Australia
• Livia Holden (Lahore University of Management Sciences): Non-State Law and Governance in South Asia: Changing Discourse
• Ruth Horowitz (New York University): Experts and Deliberative Democracy
• Syugo Hotta (Meiji University): Linguistic Justice: A Linguistic Analysis of Deliberation
• Takayuki Ii (Hirosaki University): A Gap Before and After Saiban-in Service
• John D Jackson (University College, Dublin) and Nikolai Kovalev (Wilfrid Laurier University): Lay Adjudication in Europe: New Developments
• Natália P Junior (IESP / UERJ): Participatory and Deliberative Democracy from Local to Global: The Example of Women’s Conferences as New Spaces for Mobilization and Proposed Public Policies on Gender in Brazil
• Shiro Kashimura (Kobe University): Telling a Code of Law: Interactive Grounds and Contingencies of Giving Legal Advice in Japan
• Zeynep U. Kasli (University of Washington, Seattle): Who Frames the Rights-Talk and how? Immigrant Associations and Undocumented Immigrants
• Richard Kemp and Kristy Martire (University of New South Wales): A Framework for Testing the Validity of Forensic Science Evidence
• Yumiko Kita (University of Sussex): Intentions and the Reality of the Lay Adjudication in Criminal Trials: Indications from the Introduction of the Japanese Citizen Judge System (Saiban-in Seido) in Terms of a Comparative Criminal Justice Study
• Takanori Kitamura (Tokai University): An Interactional Analysis of Legal Consultations between Lawyers and Clients in Japan
• Danfeng S.V. Koon (University of California, Berkeley): Metaphors and Meaning: The Role of Metaphors in Shaping Organizational Responses to Law
• Janny Leung (University of Hong Kong): The Judge as a Godfather, Scholar, Educator, and Scolding Parent: Judicial Discourse in Cantonese Courtrooms in Hong Kong
• Sean Mallin (University of California, Irvine): Finding Blight: Code Enforcement and “Responsible” Ownership in Post-Katrina New Orleans
• Kristy Martire, Richard Kemp, Ben R. Newell, and Ian Watkins (University of New South Wales): The Correspondence between Expert Intentions and Juror Interpretations: A Likely Story?
• Lisa McElroy (Drexel University): Cameras at the Supreme Court: A Rhetorical Analysis
• Giorgi Meladze (Free University of Tbilisi): Georgian Jury System
• Caren Morrison (Georgia State University): Jurors Under Scrutiny: The Rise of Online Intrusion
• Lisa Mortimer (University of Melbourne): Access to Justice in Timor-Leste: The Role of Local and Non-Local Languages in Timor-Leste’s Formal and Informal Justice Systems
• Margaret van Naerssen (Immaculata University): Miranda Rights: Selected Linguistic Correlates of “Knowingly” and “Intelligently”
• Evelyn Nava-Fischer (Cardiff University): The Role of Regulatory Framings in the Setting and Reception of Global Standards: The Discursive Constitution of International Standards Disputes and of Agri-Food Regulatory Models in India
• Takeshi Nishimura (Shimada & Nishimura Law Office): Transparency of Japanese Criminal Justice System after Saiban-in System Was Implemented
• Karen Petroski (Saint Louis University): Texts, Not Testimony: Rethinking the Legal Use of Non-Legal Expertise
• Anastasia Powell, Nicola Henry, Emma M Henderson, Kirsty Duncanson (La Trobe University) and Asher Flynn (Monash University): The Meanings of “Sex” and “Consent”: History, Discourse, and Impact of Rape Law Reform in Victoria (Australia)
• Richard Powell (Nihon University): Motivations For and Implications Of Changing the Language of the Law: Lessons from Malaysia
• Jeanne M. Powers (Arizona State University): Social Science Research and Judicial Decision Making in School Finance Litigation
• Ming Qi (Jilin University): The People’s Jurors in Chinese Judicial System: Mechanisms and Policies
• John N. Robinson (Northwestern University): Disputing Dispersal: Frames, Repertoires, and Support Structures in Anti-HOPE VI Legal Campaigns
• William Rose (Albion College): Occasional Legislators: Law, Politics, and the Discourse of Judging
• Meredith Rossner (University of Western Sydney): Common Narrative and Community Cohesion: Toward a Micro-Level Theory of Deliberative Dynamics
• Jenny Roth (Lakehead University) and Monica Flegel (Lakehead University): It’s Like Rape: Exploring Social Understandings of Copyright in Debates between Fans and Creative Producers
• Jessica Salerno (U of Illinois, Chicago/American Bar Foundation): Emotion and Jury Deliberation: Does Expressing Emotion Make Stereotyped Holdout Jurors More or Less Persuasive?
• Joseph Sanders (University of Houston): Milward v. Acuity Specialty Products Group: Constructing and Deconstructing Science in the Courtroom
• Tatsuya Sato (Ritsumeikan University): 3D Visualization System for Lay Judges to Understand Legal Disputes on Trial
• Michael J. Shapiro (University of Hawaii): War Crimes and the Justice Dispositif
• Brian G. Slocum (University of the Pacific): Linguistics and Authorial Intent
• Ciara Staunton (National University of Ireland, Galway): Ethics, Embryonic Stem Cell Research, and Democratic Deliberation
• David Tait (University of Western Sydney): Racial Coding of Railway Stations: Jury Deliberation about the Meaning of Place in a Mock Terrorism Trial
• Anthea Fay Vogl (University of Technology, Sydney): Telling Stories from Start to Finish: Exploring the Demand for Narrative in Refugee Testimony
• Kosuke Wakabayashi (Ritsumeikan University): The Effects of the Judicial Instruction which Includes Argument for Evidence Law Regarding Pre-Trial Publicity Information
• Natalie Wallace and Valerie P. Hans (Cornell University): Is There a Lawyer in the “House”? The Portrayal of Medical Negligence in “House, M.D.”
• Mark E. Walters (University of California, San Diego): Legal-Cultural Formations from High Literacy to Secondary Orality
• Zhuoyu Wang (Southwest University of Finance and Economics of China): An Empirical Research on China’s Recent Reforms of Its Mixed Tribunal System
• Matthew J. Wilson (University of Wyoming): Japan’s Evolving Lay Judge System: Room for Improvement or Even Expansion?
• Toru Yamada (Cornell University): A Conceptual Administrative Manual: Discursive Formations in Japan’s Heritage Nomination Process

Larzi and Zarco-Tejada: JurWordNet and FrameNet Approaches to Meaning Representation: A Legal Case Study

Antonio Lazari of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and Dr. María Ángeles Zarco-Tejada of Universidad de Cádiz have published JurWordNet and FrameNet Approaches to Meaning Representation: A Legal Case Study, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 21-26.

Here is the abstract:

This paper describes JurWordNet, FrameNet and LOIS approaches towards meaning representation regarding the concept ‘State Liability’ from a cross-linguistic and comparative perspective. Our starting point has been the lexical and conceptual mismatching of legal terms that the process of harmonization in the European Union has manifested. Our study analyzes such concept in Italian, Spanish, French and English and shows how a deeper sub-language based representation of meaning is needed to account for such phenomena. We examine the most important computational-lexical models in an attempt to identify the most suitable and appropriate approach towards lexical-conceptual mismatching of the concept ‘State liability’ in the European legal tradition. Our proposal shows a formalization of the concept in the four systems mentioned and uses semantic features to represent lexical mismatching and cultural differences. With this study we show in a systematic way the differences in legal tradition and the reasons for divergence in the judicial use of related concepts.

Dell’Orletta et al. on The SPLeT–2012 Shared Task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts

Felice Dell’Orletta of l’Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR di Pisa (ILC-CNR), and colleagues, have published The SPLeT–2012 Shared Task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 42-51.

Here is the abstract:

The 4th Workshop on “Semantic Processing of Legal Texts” (SPLeT–2012) presents the first multilingual shared task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts. In this paper, we define the general task and its internal organization into sub–tasks, describe the datasets and the domain–specific linguistic peculiarities characterizing them. We finally report the results achieved by the participating systems, describe the underlying approaches and provide a first analysis of the final test results.

Papers Available for SPLeT 2012: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts

Full text papers have been posted for SPLeT 2012: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, being held 27 May 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Here is the list of papers:

• Giulia Venturi: Design and Development of TEMIS: a Syntactically and Semantically Annotated Corpus of Italian Legislative Texts
• Guido Boella, Luigi Di Caro, Llio Humphreys, Livio Robaldo: Using Legal Ontology to Improve Classification in the Eunomos Legal Document and Knowledge Management System
• Antonio Lazari, Mª Ángeles Zarco-Tejada: JurWordNet and FrameNet Approaches to Meaning Representation: a Legal Case Study
• Lorenzo Bacci, Enrico Francesconi, Maria Teresa Sagri: A Rule-based Parsing Approach for Detecting Case Law References in Italian Court Decisions
• Adam Wyner, Wim Peters: Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware
• Paulo Quaresma: Legal Information Extraction ← Machine Learning Algorithms + Linguistic Information
• Adam Wyner: Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts
• Felice Dell’Orletta, Simone Marchi, Simonetta Montemagni, Barbara Plank, Giulia Venturi: The SPLeT–2012 Shared Task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts
• Giuseppe Attardi, Daniele Sartiano and Maria Simi: Active Learning for Domain Adaptation of Dependency Parsing on Legal Texts
• Alessandro Mazzei, Cristina Bosco: Simple Parser Combination
• Niklas Nisbeth, Anders Søgaard: Parser combination under sample bias

Abstracts and Archived Tweets for CLARITY 2012: Conference on Plain Language and Law

Abstracts, archived tweets (in .csv format), and the program are available, for CLARITY 2012: Conference on Plain Language and Law, which was held 21-23 May 2012, in Washington, DC.

The conference hashtag was #clarity2012.

The conference was co-hosted by Clarity, the international plain-legal language association; Scribes —- The American Society of Legal Writers; and the Center for Plain Language.

DGT-TM-2011, Parallel Corpus of All EU Legislation in Translation, Expanded to Include Data from 2004-2010

The DGT Multilingual Translation Memory of the Acquis Communautaire: DGT-TM — a parallel corpus of all European Union legislation, called the Acquis Communautaire, translated into all 22 languages of the EU nations — has been expanded to include EU legislation from 2004-2010, according to an April 2012 announcement on the DGT-TM Website. The updated corpus is called DGT-TM-2011.

The new content comes from the EU Official Journal Series L, 2004-2010.

According to the announcement, DGT-TM-2011 is the largest parallel corpus in the world, and is intended to be used for the following purposes:

• training automatic systems for statistical machine translation (SMT);
• producing monolingual or multilingual lexical and semantic resources such as dictionaries and ontologies;
• training and testing multilingual information extraction software;
• checking translation consistency automatically;
• testing and benchmarking alignment software (for sentences, words, etc.).

The DGT-TM-2011 should be a valuable resource for legal informatics and legal linguistics research and development.

For more information, please see:

• The official announcement;
• A new paper about DGT-TM-2011: Steinberger, R., et al. (2012). DGT-TM: A freely Available Translation Memory in 22 Languages, to be presented at LREC 2012;
• A new post about the DGT-TM-2011: Super-European language translation corpus, at Corpus Linguistics.

HT @moximer.

Mouritsen on Assessing Corpus Linguistics as an Empirical Path to Plain Meaning

Stephen C. Mouritsen, M.A., Esq., of Cravath, Swaine and Moore LLP, has published Hard Cases and Hard Data: Assessing Corpus Linguistics as an Empirical Path to Plain Meaning, Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, 13, 156-205 (2011). Here is the abstract:

The Plain Meaning Rule is often assailed on the grounds that it is unprincipled — that it substitutes for careful analysis an interpreter’s ad hoc and impressionistic intuition about the meaning of legal texts. But what if judges and lawyers had the means to test their intuitions about plain meaning systematically? Then initial linguistic impressions about the meaning of a legal text might be viewed as hypotheses to be tested, rather than determinative criteria upon which to base important decisions.

There exists very little legal scholarship on corpus linguistics — the study of language function and use through large, electronic linguistic databases called corpora — and the role that corpus methods might play in legal interpretation. This omission becomes more and more striking as scholars and jurists (and even the United States Supreme Court) have found themselves persuaded by corpus-based arguments.

This Article argues that the plain or ordinary meaning of a given term in a given context is an empirical matter that may be quantified through corpus-based methods. These methods, when applied to questions of legal ambiguity, present significant advantages over existing empirical approaches to plain meaning and over the prevailing intuition-based interpretive approach of many courts. Because large, sophisticated linguistic corpora are widely available and easy to use, and because corpus methods offer a more principled and systematic alternative to the impressionistic interpretation of legal texts, corpus linguistics may one day revolutionize the process of legal interpretation.

HT @aabibliographer.