Manzoli on Legal Taxonomies and Legal Folksonomies

Serena Manzoli, LL.M., has published Taxonomies Make the Law. Will Folksonomies Change It?, at VoxPopuLII.

Here are excerpts from the post:

[...] the problems with legal taxonomies occur when the creators and the users don’t share the same frame of mind. And this is most likely to happen when the creators of the taxonomy are lawyers and the users are not lawyers. [...]

Let’s come to folksonomies now. Here, the mismatch between creators (lawyers) and users’ way of reasoning is less likely to occur. The very same users decide which category to create and what to put into it. Moreover, more tags can overlap; that is, the same object can be tagged more than once. This allows the user to consider the same object from different perspectives. [...]‘

What legal folksonomies bring us is:

• User-centered categories
• Flexible categorization systems. Many items can be tagged more than once and so be put into different categories. Legal stuff can be retrieved through different routes but also considered under different lights.

Will this enhance findability? I think it will, especially if the users are non-lawyers. And services that target the low-end of the legal market usually target non-lawyers. [...]

Prediction #1: Folksonomies will provide the right information architecture for non-legal users. [...]

Prediction #2: legal folksonomies in legal teaching would keep lawyers’ minds flexible. [...]

Prediction #3 Legal folksonomies will make the law apply differently.

Let’s wait and see. Let the users tag. Where this tagging is going to take us is unpredictable, yes, but if you look at where taxonomies have taken us for all these years, you may find a clue.

I have a gut feeling that folksonomies are going to change the way we search, teach, and apply the law.

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @squarelaw

Articles on legal information or decision making in new issue of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

The new issue of Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (10(2), June 2013) includes several articles on legal information or decision making:

• Doug Williams: Do Racial Preferences Affect Minority Learning in Law Schools?
• Andreas Glöckner and Christoph Engel: Can We Trust Intuitive Jurors? Standards of Proof and the Probative Value of Evidence in Coherence-Based Reasoning
• Christina L. Boyd, David A. Hoffman, Zoran Obradovic and Kosta Ristovski: Building a Taxonomy of Litigation: Clusters of Causes of Action in Federal Complaints
• Ryan C. Black and James F. Spriggs II: The Citation and Depreciation of U.S. Supreme Court Precedent
• William C. Thompson, Suzanne O. Kaasa and Tiamoyo Peterson: Do Jurors Give Appropriate Weight to Forensic Identification Evidence?

HT @aabibliographer

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

Masters: CALI Legal Topics Expressed as a Hierarchical Drupal Taxonomy

Elmer Masters, JD, MLIS, of CALI has posted an image of the CALI legal topics subject list as a hierarchical Drupal taxonomy.

Click here for other resources on legal knowledge representation.

HT @emasters

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.

Call for Papers: AICOL 2011

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 16 May 2011 — has been issued for AICOL 2011: The Third Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Law, to be held 16 August 2011 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

The workshop is to be held in conjunction with IVR 2011: XXV. World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.

Papers for AICOL 2011 are invited on the following topics:

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

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani.

JURIX 2010 Slides Available

Slides are now available for many papers given at JURIX 2010: The 23rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, held 16-17 December 2010 at the University of Liverpool Computer Science Department, in Liverpool, England, UK.

HT JURIX Blog.

JURIX 2010

The final program has been posted for JURIX 2010: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 15-17 December 2010, at the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, in Liverpool, England, UK.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix.

Click here for papers from the 15 December workshop: Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules 2010.

Click here for information about the invited speakers, who include John L. Sheridan of The National Archives (UK).

Click here for information for conference participants.

We wish our colleagues who are organizing, presenting at, or attending JURIX 2010 a very successful and rewarding conference.

JURIX 2010: Accepted Papers

Accepted papers have been announced for JURIX 2010: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 16-17 December 2010, at the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, in Liverpool, England, UK.

Invited speakers for the conference have also been announced.

Call for Papers: ICKM 2010: International Conference on Knowledge Management

A call for papers — with submission deadlines of 1 August 2010 for full papers, and 1 September 2010 for practitioner presentations, research in progress, and posters — has been issued for ICKM 2010: The 7th International Conference on Knowledge Management, to be held 22-23 October 2010, at The Hilton Pittsburgh, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

The conference is collocated with ASIST 2010: The American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting.

Papers for ICKM 2010 are invited on the following topics:

• Indigenous Knowledge Management
• Communication, Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing
• Intellectual Capital & KM Measurements
• Knowledge Discovery (AI, Data Mining, Text & Web Mining)
• Knowledge Organization (Meta Data, Taxonomies & Ontology)
• Knowledge Retention, Policies and Practices
• Knowledge Management in Project Management
• Knowledge Management in Healthcare
• Knowledge Management in Public Sector and Not-For-Profit Organizations
• Knowledge Management Strategies and Implementations
• Knowledge Management Training and Certification
• Learning Organization & Organizational Learning
• Web 2.0 and Social Networking Technologies
• Information Architecture, Content & Digital Right Management
• Knowledge Management in Libraries and Information Centers
• Knowledge Loss and Brain Drain in Turbulent Economic Times
• Social and Ethical Issues
• The Challenges of Complexity

For more information, please see the call for papers.