JURIX 2012: 17-19 December

JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems is being held 17-19 December 2012, at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix2012

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

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for the list of workshops and tutorials.

HT @jurixfoundation

7 September: Extended CfP Deadline for JURIX 2012

The call for papers submission deadline for JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems has been extended to 7 September 2012.

Click here for the call for papers.

The conference will be held 17-19 December 2012 at the University of Amsterdam.

Papers are invited “on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications” concerning 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;
• 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;
• XML standards for legal documents, 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 information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Rinke Hoekstra.

Call for Papers: JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 1 September 2012 — has been issued for JURIX 2012: The 25th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 17-19 December 2012, at the University of Amsterdam, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Papers are invited “on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications” concerning 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;
• 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;
• XML standards for legal documents, 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 information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Burkhard Schafer.

Call for Papers: DEON 2012

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 27 February 2012 and full paper submission deadline of 5 March 2012 — has been issued for DEON 2012: The 11th International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, to be held 16-18 June 2012, at the University of Bergen, in Bergen, Norway.

Papers are invited on general topics, and on the “special theme” of “Deontic Logic and Social Choice.” The general topics are:

• the logical study of normative reasoning, including formal systems of deontic logic, defeasible normative reasoning, logics of action, logics of time, and other related areas of logic;
• the formal analysis of normative concepts and normative systems;
• the formal specification of aspects of norm-governed multi-agent systems and autonomous agents, including (but not limited to) the representation of rights, authorization, delegation, power, responsibility and liability;
• normative aspects of protocols for communication, negotiation and multi-agent decision making;
• the formal representation of legal knowledge;
• the formal specification of normative systems for the management of bureaucratic processes in public or private administration;
• applications of normative logic to the specification of database integrity constraints.

The special theme topics are:

• Normative system selection and optimization
• Merging and aggregation of norms
• Compliance and enforcement strategies for norms
• Game theoretic aspects of deontic reasoning
• Norms, culture and and shared values
• Violation detection and norm creation mechanisms
• Simulation of dynamics in normative systems
• Emergence of norms
• Norm change

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT IAAIL.

Legal Informatics Papers @ ECEG 2011

The following legal informatics papers were presented at ECEG 2011: The 11th European Conference on eGovernment, held 16-17 June 2011, at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Administration, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. (If you know of other legal informatics papers presented at the conference, please feel free to identify them in the comments; click here for the abstracts of most of the conference papers):

Mila Gascó and Carlos E Jiménez, Interoperability in the Justice Field: Variables That Affect Implementation. Abstract:

Several public institutions and agencies around the world have designed and implemented important electronic government strategies and plans. This has not been the case in the justice field. However, in the last very few years, the growing demand for efficient judicial systems has sped up the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) aimed at improving access to justice, increasing cooperation between legal authorities and strengthening the justice system itself. As in other areas, the new technologies are becoming a key tool in order to achieve these goals. That is so because information systems contribute to homogenize tasks and activities, to obtain management indicators and to make telematic connections with other public administrations and registers, with professionals and judicial institutions and with citizens. One of the more important aspects of this technological modernization has to do with interoperability since it guarantees the harmonic and cohesive functioning of different existing systems, processes, and applications that, in the justice field, are many as a result of the big variety of actors that are involved: judicial institutions but, also, different public administrations, such as those responsible of police forces, and law professionals. Taken this context into account, this paper is the result of an empirical research that was conducted during 2010 in the Generalitat de Catalunya (Autonomous Government of Catalonia) with regard to the e-government project “e-Justícia.cat”, an electronic justice initiative. In particular, the research was aimed at finding what factors conditioned the implementation of the interoperability modules of the project. In this respect, the paper presents the experience of GRP (management of police requests) and analyzes those variables that have been key in the implementation process in order to identify common patterns that may guide future interventions and projects in a field that is characterized by specific attributes that hinder technology adoption.

Hille Hinsberg, e-Participation Building Blocks in Estonia. Summary:

• Discusses “ID cards [...] enabling both electronic authentication and digital signing; [...] government online registers…; Estonia’s internet voting infrastructure,” and www.osale.ee, “[t]he Estonian Government’s central participation portal”:

www.osale.ee (‘osale’ means ‘participate’ in Estonian) was launched in 2007, allowing interest groups and individuals to comment on draft policy documents, launch their own ideas and initiatives for new legislation and amendments, and submit petitions. Other users can vote and comment on these proposals. Then the proposal is forwarded to the relevant government department, which in turn posts an answer, explaining what action was or was not taken and why. Currently, e-participation is about to be embedded in the policy-making framework to fulfill its potential for empowering citizens. Osale.ee consultations have been integrated with government’s policy preparation portal, where the full cycle of legal acts and policies becomes accessible for wider audience. Assisted by the new tool EIS, all interested groups and individuals can follow the policy-making process and provide comments throughout the stages, until the act is presented to the government session.

Bernhard Horn, Gerald Fischer, Roman Trabitsch and Thomas Grechenig, An Outline of the Technical Requirements on Governmental Electronic Record Systems Derived from the European Legal Environment. Abstract:

In modern e-government administrations, regulatory documents are not only drafted using computer tools but are increasingly managed using Electronic Record Systems (ERS). Such tools mean that coordination and administrative procedures do not only have to occur via e-mail or similar technologies. To execute the next administrational step using traditional methods, each officer has to know the inner organisational workflow and therefore those clerks responsible for performing the next administrational step to be able to forward the record to the correct person. Though till now this way of working has been quite common in many official organisations, there are a considerable number of software products available, which implement ERS, to assist performing administrative procedures electronically. When an officer has finished his respective process step, such a system automatically forwards the documents to the next responsible person. Moreover if several clerks have to perform a step in parallel, it is not necessary to copy the whole file several times but only to grant appropriate access permissions to the documents. Thus at any moment, everyone has the record in its latest version. Furthermore the whole administrative act can be tracked and monitored. It is important to remember however that within the European Union a couple of regulatory rules have to be obeyed when implementing and using such ERS. The providers of such systems as well as the authority using them are responsible for ensuring legal conformity. The aim of this paper is to give a brief overview of the applicable European regulations concerning ERS for responsible stakeholders, such as IT-system designers and providers, administration chiefs, or researchers in the field of e-government.

Marijn Plomp and Jan Grijpink, Combating Identity Fraud in the Public Domain: Information Strategies for Healthcare and Criminal Justice. Abstract:

[...] We introduce the theoretical framework of Chaincomputerisation that explains large-scale chain co-operation as an answer to a dominant chain problem. Identity fraud proves to be the dominant chain problem in many chain co-operation situations. Therefore, our main research question is: what is a successful information strategy to combat identity fraud in the large-scale processes that constitute the public domain? Next, we demonstrate the problem of identity fraud using the example of the Dutch criminal justice chain, showing that a certain chain communication system enables to stop identity fraud using forensic biometrics. The second example is about healthcare. In the Netherlands, the government is introducing a national system of medical information exchange based on the national personal number as the sole identifier for recognition and linking. We show that people sometimes have interest in using somebody else’s number, to be treated in cases (s)he is not insured. [...] The examples are taken from our chain analysis programme that has an exploratory, empirical character. A chain analysis tests empirical findings against the theoretical framework of Chaincomputerisation, to derive a suitable chain-specific information strategy. We use this novel approach which is specifically tailored to the peculiarities of large-scale situations, as opposed to the small-scale approach usually employed in these cases. The traditional authentication procedures do not take into account ‘wrong person’ identity fraud that causes fraud surreptitiously spreading from chain to chain. Therefore, in both cases, the problem of identity fraud presents a threat to the chain co-operation that has to be tackled with a large-scale approach and with person-oriented security procedures and instruments that are indeed able to prevent identity fraud from happening undetected. It is precisely this approach and this type of procedures and instruments that are explained here. [...] Finally, we argue that an information strategy using basic, but chain-specific information systems, combined with random identity verification procedures enable combating identity fraud.

Call for Papers: JURIX 2011

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 5 September 2011 — has been issued for JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 14-16 December 2011 at the University of Vienna, in Vienna, Austria.

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;
• 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;
• XML standards for legal documents, 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 information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Henry Prakken.