Yu and Schultze: Using Software to Liberate U.S. Case Law

Harlan Yu of the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), and Stephen Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, have published Using software to liberate U.S. case law, in XRDS: Crossroads: The ACM Magazine for Students, December 2011.

[The article appears in a special issue of XRDS: Crossroads on the topic, "Computer Science in Service of Democracy", edited by Peter Kinnaird of Carnegie Mellon University. Click here for Mr. Kinnaird's preface to the special issue.]

In their article, Mr. Yu and Mr. Schultze describe their development of RECAP, a Firefox extension that “crowdsources the purchase of the [U.S. federal courts'] PACER repository [of court records] by helping users automatically share their purchases.”

The authors also describe how features of PACER limit public access to judicial information. The authors discuss their research — presented here and here — showing that PACER’s information management practices permit disclosure of sensitive personal information online. The authors also recommend reforms to U.S. federal court information technology that would protect citizens’ privacy while improving citizens’ access to court records of public interest.

For more information on RECAP and reform of PACER, please see Mr. Schultze’s VoxPopuLII post: PACER, RECAP, and the Movement to Free American Case Law.

Kinnaird, Romero, & Abowd on Connect 2 Congress: Visual Analytics for Civic Oversight

Peter Kinnaird, Mario Romero, and Professor Gregory Abowd, all of the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, have posted Connect 2 Congress: Visual Analytics for Civic Oversight, a paper presented at CHI 2010: The 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held 10-15 April 2010, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Here is the abstract:

Strong representative democracies rely on educated, informed, and active citizenry to provide oversight of the government. We present Connect 2 Congress (C2C), a novel, high temporal-resolution and interactive visualization of legislative behavior. We present the results of focus group and domain expert interviews that demonstrate how different stakeholders use C2C for a variety of investigative activities. The evaluation provided evidence that users are able to support or reject claims made by candidates and conduct freeform, low-cost, exploratory analysis into the legislative behavior of representatives across time periods.

Click here for more information on Connect 2 Congress.

New Free Access to Law Sites: Nomus & Connect 2 Congress

Two new free access to law services have made the news in recent weeks:

• Nomus, created by McGill University law student and software engineer Kent Mewhort, provides free access to the full text of Canadian federal cases as well as cases from courts of seven Canadian provinces. Click here for coverage information (HT @EJWalters);
• Connect 2 Congress, created by Georgia Tech human-computer interaction student Peter Kinnaird, uses legislative data from GovTrack and Poole-Rosenthal voting data to create interactive visualizations of legislative behavior of U.S. Senators and Representatives. Click here for background information from Georgia Tech.