10-14 June: ICAIL 2013: Links and Resources

ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, is being held 10-14 June 2013 in Rome, Italy.

Click here for the conference Website.

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for the list of tutorials and workshops.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #icail2013 and the conference Twitter account is @ICAIL2013

Applications invited for LEX Summer School 2013: Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web

Applications are invited for LEX Summer School 2013: Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web, to be held 2-7 September 2013 in Ravenna, Italy.

The summer school will be followed by the Akoma Ntoso Developers Workshop, 9-10 September 2013, in Ravenna.

Here is the description:

The school aims at providing knowledge of the most significant ICT standards emerging for legislation, judiciary, parliamentary and administrative documents. The course provides understanding of their impact in the different phases of the legislative and administrative process, awareness of the tools based on legal XML standards and of their constellations, and the ability to participate in the drafting and use of standard-compliant documents throughout law-making process. In particular we would like to create consciousness in the stakeholders in the legal domain about the benefits and the possibilities provided by the correct usage of Semantic Web technologies such as XML standards, ontologies, natural language processing techniques applied to legal texts, legal knowledge modelling and reasoning tools.

This edition of the LeX Summer School is organized in two courses:

• A Basic Course providing an introduction to XML web technologies and to basic technologies for drafting and managing standard-compliant legislative and legal documents;
• An Advanced Course providing in-depth analysis of the higher levels of Semantic Web technologies and of their application to the legal domain: modelling of modifications, procedures and legal knowledge;
• A workshop of two days for “Akoma Ntoso Tool Developers” focused on the technical issues.

LeX is an intensive 6-day, 8-hour-a-day program, that requires participants’ total dedication and intellectual commitment.

The program’s learning process assists participants to develop knowledge, skills and capabilities in using and managing shared and interoperable standards for legislative document enabling access, communication, processing, modelling, representing and integration of legislation through IT technologies, in an open and cooperative framework.

Teaching Objectives

Good management of legal documents involves at least six aspects:

• Drafting methods, to improve the language and structure of legislative texts;
• Legal XML standards, to improve the accessibility and interoperability of legal resources;
• Legal ontologies, to capture legal metadata and legal semantics;
• Legal Knowledge extraction using natural language techniques;
• Formal representation of legal contents, to support legal reasoning and argumentation;
• Workflow models, to cope with the lifecycle of legal documents.

The summer school will address all of these aspects, through multi- and interdisciplinary competences. It will provide and integrated approach to the management of legal documentation, as a core aspect of legislative and administrative innovation.

Target Group

We seek applicants who are interested in legal drafting and electronic management of legal resources and who plan to work in this area in the public administration, private sector or research fields.

LEX is designed primarily for officers of legislative bodies and other normative authorities (at international, national, regional and local levels), but it addresses also to drafters of normative texts in the private sector, editors, publishers, documentalists dealing with legal sources, experts in the electronic management of legal texts, students and researchers working in legal informatics and le’gislation studies.

For the technical people and for the tool developers the “Akoma Ntoso Tool Devs” workshop is a great occasion of networking.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

Call for Papers: JURIX 2013: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 2 September 2013 — has been posted for JURIX 2013: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 11-13 December 2013, at the University of Bologna.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information and eDiscovery;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web, including legal open data;
• XML standards for legal documents and rules, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more details, please see the call for papers.

HT Jurix

April 26: CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference: Tweets and Resources

The CodeX FutureLaw 2013 Conference is being held 26 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, Stanford, California, USA.

The conference focuses ‘on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the law more broadly. The conference will bring together leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, investors and technologists that are experimenting and actively working to re-architect the future of the law. If you’re of a similar mind, we’d love to have you there.’

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #futurelaw

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

The conference Chair was Tim Hwang.

The legal informatics-oriented panels at the conference include:

• Legal Disruption: Why Now? Why Here? What Next?
• Computational Law and Contracts
• Designing Legal Data
• Open Source Legal Practice

Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University and the ReInventLaw Lab will give the closing keynote address.

The conference is sponsored by CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

Please see the comments to this post for additional resources related to the conference.

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

Shay et al.: Do Robots Dream of Electric Laws? An Experiment in Law as Algorithm

Professor Dr. Lisa Shay of the West Point Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and colleagues, presented a paper entitled Do Robots Dream of Electric Laws? An Experiment in Law as Algorithm, at We Robot 2013 Conference, held 8-9 April 2013 at Stanford Law School.

Here is the abstract:

Due to recent advances in computerized analysis and robotics, automated law enforcement has become technically feasible. Unfortunately, laws were not created with automated enforcement in mind, and even seemingly simple laws have subtle features that require programmers to make assumptions about how to encode them. We demonstrate this ambiguity with an experiment where a group of 52 programmers was assigned the task of automating the enforcement of traffic speed limits. A late model vehicle was equipped with a sensor that collected actual vehicle speed over an hour long commute. The programmers (without collaboration) each wrote a program that computed the number of speed limit violations and issued mock traffic tickets. Despite quantitative data for both vehicle speed and the speed limit, the number of tickets issued varied from none to one per sensor sample above the speed limit. Our results from the experiment highlight the significant deviation in number and type of citations issued during the course of the commute, based on legal interpretations and assumptions made by programmers untrained in the law. These deviations were mitigated, but not eliminated, in one sub-group that was provided with a legally reviewed software design specification, providing insight into ways to automate the law in the future. Automation of legal reasoning is likely to be the most effective in contexts where legal conclusions are predictable because there is little room for choice in a given model; that is, they are determinable. Yet this experiment demonstrates that even relatively narrow and straightforward “rules” can be problematically indeterminate in practice.

HT @lawyertechrvw

Ferrara and Gaglioti: Law as a System of Proportions and Symmetries

Professor Dr. Massimiliano Ferrara of Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria – Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, and Angelo, Roberto Gaglioti of MEDAlics, have published Law as a System of Proportions and Symmetries, in Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Mathematics and Computers in Business and Economics (MCBE ’12), World Scientific Engineering Academy and Society, 13th-15th June, 2012 Enescu Academy, Iasi, Romania (pp. 136-140).

Here is the abstract:

This paper aims at describing the mathematical proportions and symmetries characterizing the notion of legal Order. Starting from a Middle-Age definition of jus, we try to analyze the real and personal components of a legal proportion within any legal inter-individual relation. Then we deal with legal causality link in any legal rule, introducing a symmetric model of causation, instead of the more traditional interpretation of legal causation as consecutio temporum. Proportion and Symmetry make order inside a legal System.

Click here for other papers describing Professor Ferrara and colleagues’ Mathematical Model of Law.

Ferrara and Gaglioti: Legal Values and Legal Entropy: A Suggested Mathematical Model

Professor Dr. Massimiliano Ferrara of Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria – Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, and Angelo, Roberto Gaglioti of MEDAlics, have published Legal Values and Legal Entropy: a suggested Mathematical Model, International Journal of Mathematical Models and Methods in Applied Sciences, 6(3), 490-498 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

We will describe the fundamentals of a mathematical model for the quantitative analysis of the legal phenomena, intended to provide with a framework of legal general theory, allegedly applicable to every legal situation. In particular, the model can identify any legally material event using a logical hypothetical tool (the Model Situation) and associating to any Situation a certain axiological potential, what makes possible to determine even the amount of axiological potential, at disposal for the discretionary policies of the legal operator. Legal conflicts among axiological potentials may be easily and property rights objectively entitled and adjudicated amongst many challengers. We will try and apply the model to one legal rule of universal applicability (art. 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, attributing the right to life) and put some seminal considerations regarding the concept of Legal Entropy as related to the welfare level within the legal system.

Click here for other papers describing Professor Ferrara and colleagues’ Mathematical Model of Law.

Ferrara and Gaglioti: A Mathematical Model for the Quantitative Analysis of Law

Professor Dr. Massimiliano Ferrara of Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria – Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, and Angelo, Roberto Gaglioti of MEDAlics, have published A Mathematical Model for the Quantitative Analysis of Law. Putting Legal Values into Numbers, in Applied Mathematics in Electrical and Computer Engineering: Proceedings of the American Conference on Applied Mathematics (AMERICAN-MATH ’12′) (pp. 201-206) (Edited by Manoj K. Jha et al.) (WSEAS Press, 2012).

Here is the abstract:

This paper outlines the fundamentals of a mathematical model for the quantitative analysis of the legal phenomena. This model is not intended to be confined to a certain area of law, nor to a specific legal system, instead it is meant to provide with a framework of legal general theory, applicable to every legal situation. The model works conditionally upon the fact that any legally material event is described using a logical hypothetical tool (the Model Situation). This model associates any Situation with a certain axiological potential, what makes possible to determine even the discretionary amount of axiological potential, at disposal for the tactics of the legal operator. Legal conflicts among axiological potentials could be easily and objectively adjudicated.

Click here for other papers describing Professor Ferrara and colleagues’ Mathematical Model of Law.

Legal informatics papers at We Robot 2013 Conference

Some legal informatics papers or panels are included in the program for the 2013 We Robot Conference, to be held 8-9 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, in Stanford, California, USA:

Panel: Law as Algorithm
Speakers: Peter Asaro, Lisa Shay, Woodrow Hartzog
Moderator: Harry Surden
Related Papers:
On Implicit and Explicit Legal Requirements for Human Judgment
Do Robots Dream of Electric Laws? An Experiment in Law as Algorithm
[...]

Panel: Designing Values
Speakers: Ergun Calisgan, AJung Moon, Aneta Podsiadla
Moderator: Ian Kerr
Related Papers:
Open Roboethics Pilot: Accelerating Policy Design, Implementation and Demonstration of Socially Acceptable Robot Behaviors
What Robotics Can Learn from the Contemporary Problems of Information Technologies Sector- Compliance and Enforcement of Privacy by Design
[...]

Paper: Programming Robotic Decisions with Potentially Lethal Outcomes: Comparing Self-Driving Cars and Autonomous Weapon Systems, and How They Should Be Regulated as Their Autonomous Capabilities Evolve
Authors: Kenneth Anderson, Matthew Waxman
Commentator: Dan Siciliano (Stanford University Rock Center)

HT @LawandLit